But neither Isinglass nor I wanted to change the subject: Joe Lovelady was who we wanted to talk about, and we talked on and on, not merely about his death but about the great ride that led to his death: for the cowboy and the African had raced one another halfway across the West—up the Pecos, across the Jicarilla country, around the great Shiprock butte, north of the Navaho canyon, south from the desert of monuments: days of hiding, nights of racing, until the cowhorse at last drew up lame and the camel was shot with Joe Lovelady’s last bullet as the race finally ended, somewhere on the Mogollon Rim. Then the two men rode back on Navaho ponies, Mesty-Woolah’s feet trailing the ground, both men too exhausted to fight or even talk.

We had no idea then, Isinglass and I, how far the two riders had gone; but we knew that it must have been far, and that a song would soon arise about it from the prairies and the rimrocks that both of us would hear for the rest of our lives.

“It was his bad luck that he drew Mesty,” Isinglass said, “for Mesty was the one man in the West who could have kept up with him.”

“You mean you couldn’t have caught him yourself, Willie?” Cecily inquired in her tart tone.

“I’m shocked,” she went on. “Around here we’ve all become accustomed to the notion that you can do anything you set your mind to. Couldn’t you have caught that impertinent cowboy, really?”

“Nope,” Isinglass said simply. “I couldn’t have tracked him—I ain’t got the eyesight no more. Besides, I don’t own a horse that could have matched that sorrel of his. Now I don’t own a camel that could match it, either.”

“I won’t miss the camel,” Cecily said. “Nasty beast.”

“I don’t know but what that run finished Mesty,” Isinglass said. “He looks finished to me. He’s done nothing all day but sit on the porch singing those wild nigger songs that I ain’t heard him sing in fifteen years.

“He’s taken to the shade,” he added somberly. “And Mesty was never one to seek shade.”

“So you think he’ll just die, the nigger?” Cecily asked coolly.

“He might just die,” Isinglass said.

“Delightful prospect,” Cecily said. “If he dies I’ll plant a rose on that cowpoke’s grave.”

Both Isinglass and I looked at her with distaste but Cecily kept on eating.

A great thing had happened; also a tragic thing. Isinglass had ordered the tragedy, and yet he seemed as saddened by it as I was—perhaps more saddened, even. I believe he felt he had come to a moment of turning that day, and that the turn he made had not been upward. He ate only two bites of his beefsteak and never touched his chili.