His companion was about the same age, an educated man, a “lunger,” forced to spend the rest of his life in these dry plains. I had seen him before at the county convention, where there had been talk of nominating him for county clerk—a much-desired political job. He might have been nominated but for his own actions. He stood straight up in the convention and said:
“Gentlemen, I refuse to let my name go before this convention. I have been approached by certain people who would compromise my manhood, and now I would not accept your nomination, even if you offered it.”
“Made a fool of himself. Had a cinch and threw it away!”
That was the way they talked in the street afterwards; but I remember going home that night with this thought dancing through my brain:
“I wish _I_ could get up and do such things.”
He would have ranked as a poor man, or at best one of modest competence, yet in his enforced exile from home and friends he was sustained and comforted by a mighty host of men and women who came trooping out of history at his call.
There they sat in the dimly lighted room—the cattle king and the scholar, a slave of disease. Their chosen companions were about them, and these had turned the king into a slave, the slave into a monarch. For one there were only the spirits of hopeless gloom, grinning, snarling as though they knew that fate disdains money in exchange for the things which alone can bring comfort and courage into the shadow of years. For the other man the dim room was crowded with a goodly company—the great spirits who live forever in song and story, who gladly come back from the unknown country at the call of those who have learned to know them.
I saw all this, and then I seemed to see myself in the years that were coming, in the shadow of the impending affliction, a resident of the silent world. It was evidently to be a choice of masters. I remember now as though it were yesterday how on that howling night in that dim sod house I made a desperate vow that I would, if need be, go through fire and acid before I would end my days or sit alone in the silence as mentally hopeless and impotent as that “cattle king.” And I had been ready to say “me, too,” only a short time before to the cowboy who said: