Note 38 — Chapter Twenty-three

... one of these rides in particular stands out in my memory. We were six hands short on the farm, all of the second winter of the War. With the cry going out everywhere for conservation, forty head of my heifers were eating their heads off waiting for market, to say nothing of hoof-and-mouth disease, and shipping at a standstill, owing to quarantine.

Dave and I drove these forty in as far as Ivorydale one clear November night.

I can see him as plainly as if that night were before me now, astride his paste-board-looking filly (one that usually did sister work at the plow beside a heavier chestnut), loping through the milk-and-pearl fore-glow of a dawn about to break. Head back, the wind before the dawn lifted his bangs to reveal squareness of brow, and his shabby heels dug into the patient old horseflesh with the fervor of the vision he could not get said.