“There’s men like that with dogs.”

“Ah yes, you’re the boy with the dogs. And some way you’re right. But allow this: Horses and dogs are different animals. It is the nature of a dog to bend to a man. It is not that way with a horse. A horse is a fragment more wild than a dog. There is always something in a horse’s eye we cannot see. Some place they look beyond us.”

“Dogs can be the same way. Good ones.”

“It’s the rare dog can kill you if you misstep.”

“All right.”

Mebane took up his whiskey and without pause drank it down. He said, “What happened to Peter was nothing of my doing. I didn’t even know about it until afterward. I was in bed at the time, insensible. I don’t remember any of it. All I know is what I learned later. But I will not lie to you. When I was awake enough to hear of it I was not unhappy. Not then. At that time it felt right to me. But I was not there. It was not me who called out for it, not me who stood by and watched. If I’d been able, would I have watched? Yes, I believe I would have. But it was not Peter I would have been watching. It was everything else. Things I would not have even known I was seeing then, the same as the men who did it. Most of them I guess. But I was not there. I was laid up in the bed.”

“Because she brained you with a flatiron is what I heard.”

Mebane lifted up the bottle and drank straight from it. He did not look at Foster. He tipped his head, the bad flowered ear toward Foster. His eyes still out in the dim reach of the room. The place, Foster guessed, where his eyes rested most of the time. “I was a boy. Younger than you. With my arm gone just three-four months. She stove in my head. And me already wounded. There was no one to look after me. No one that would tend to me. I was left to myself. I was alone. I still have dreams that soak the sheets and I wake from in a panic, right back there.”

“So who was it killed that old man Peter. And why him?”

“It was some few around. I was not among them.”

Foster nodded. “All right. But why?”

“Because it was him that helped her get away after she attacked me.”

Foster drank a little of his whiskey. Feeling now that he was firm-footed, following a way laid before him. He said, “How did they know that? That he helped her?”