Their hearts turned to stone--those which
did not break--and they became beasts, the men on Dead Horse Trail.
"It was there I met a man with the heart of a Christ and the patience.
And he was honest. When he rested at midday he took the packs from the
horses so that they, too, might rest. He paid $50 a hundred-weight for
their fodder, and more. He used his own bed to blanket their backs when
they rubbed raw. Other men let the saddles eat holes the size of water-
buckets. Other men, when the shoes gave out, let them wear their hoofs
down to the bleeding stumps. He spent his last dollar for horseshoe
nails. I know this because we slept in the one bed and ate from the one
pot, and became blood brothers where men lost their grip of things and
died blaspheming God. He was never too tired to ease a strap or tighten
a cinch, and often there were tears in his eyes when he looked on all
that waste of misery. At a passage in the rocks, where the brutes
upreared hindlegged and stretched their forelegs upward like cats to
clear the wall, the way was piled with carcasses where they had toppled
back. And here he stood, in the stench of hell, with a cheery word and a
hand on the rump at the right time, till the string passed by.
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