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By Root 4556 0

and the railway's and the insurance company's and the oil baron's private detectives-pursued the four of them-the crippled horse and the English groom and the old Negro and the twelve-year-old child who rode it-up and down and back and forth through the section of the Mississippi watershed between Illinois and the Gulf of Mex-ico and Kansas and Alabama, where on three legs the horse had been running in remote back-country quarter-races and winning most of them, the old Negro telling it, grave and tranquil, serenely and peacefully inconsequential, like listening to a dream, until presently the runner five years afterward was seeing what the Federal deputy marshal had five years ago while in the middle of it: not a theft, but a passion, an immolation, an apotheosis-no gang of opportunists fleeing with a crippled horse whose value, even whole, had ceased weeks back to equal the sum spent on its pursuit, but the immortal pageant-piece of the tender legend which was the crowning glory of man's own legend beginning when his first paired children lost well the world and from which paired prototypes they still challenged paradise, still paired and still immortal against the chronicle's grimed and bloodstained pages: Adam and Lilith and Paris and Helen and Pyramus and Thisbe and all the other recordless Romeos and their Juliets, the world's oldest and most shining tale limning in his brief turn the warp-legged foul-mouthed English horse-groom as ever Paris or Lochinvar or any else of earth's splendid rapers: the doomed glorious frenzy of a love-story, pursued not by an unclosed office file nor even the raging frustration of the millionaire owner, but by its own inherent doom, since, being immortal, the story, the legend, was not to be owned by any one of the pairs who added to its shining and tragic increment, but only to be used, passed through, by each in their doomed and homeless turn.

He didn't tell how they did it: only that they did do it: as if, once it was done, how no longer mattered; that if something must be done, it is done, and then hardship or anguish or even impos-sibility no longer signify:--got the frantic and injured horse out of the demolished car and into the bayou where it could swim while they held its head above water-'He found a boat,' the old Negro said. 'If you could call it a boat. Whittled out of a log and done already turned over before you even put your foot in it. They called them pirogues. They talked gobble talk there, like they do here,'-then out of the bayou too, into such complete invisibility that when the railroad detectives reached the scene the next morning, it was as if the flood itself had washed the three of them away. It was a hummock, a small island in the swamp not a mile from the collapsed trestle, where a work-train and crew had arrived the next morning to rebuild the bridge and the track, and from which (They got the horse as far up out of the water as they could the first night, and the old Negro was left to attend it. I just give it water and kept a mud pack on the hip and tried to keep the gnats and flies and mosquitoes away,' the old Negro said.) the groom returned at dawn on the third day, with a block-and-tackle bearing the railroad company's stencil in the pirogue, and food for themselves and the horse and canvas for the sling and cradle and plaster of Paris for the splint--('I know what you're going to ask now,' the old Negro said. 'Where we got the money for all that. He got it like he done the boat,' telling that too: the cockney horse groom who had never been farther from London than Epsom or Doncaster yet who in two years of America had become a Mason and a Baptist, who in only two weeks in the fore-Tuesday castle of the American freighter up from Buenos Aires had discovered or anyway revealed to himself that rapport with and affinity for dice, who on the first return to the scene of the wreck had picked up the block-and-tackle simply because he happened to pass it, since his true destination had been the bunk-car where the Negro work-gang slept, waking them, the white