"It'll turn out to be one," Fred declared. "I wish I could think up a verse or two so I could leave it on Hal Nearing's grave."
"Time enough to think of that when he's dead, old feller."
"He's as good as dead, if he ain't dead already. No man never gits over it when he's shot through the silo that way."
"I was shot through the lung," Barrett reminded him, an inflection of censure in his voice for the poet's gloomy view.
"Yes, but there ain't so much to leak out of a man up there, Ed. You take and shoot a man through the di-gestion that way, and he'd just as well send 'em out to dig his grave. Hal Nearing was a dead man the minute that bullet got him in the waistband of his britches."
They talked of Nearing's chances as they rode up to the mesa out of the canyon, their shadows grotesquely long before them. Unconsciously they passed into speaking of him as a man who had been and was no more.
"And I don't believe I've got erry piece of funeral poertry in that sack," Fred regretted.
"I guess the other poets have written enough of it to last a while," Barrett suggested. "I never could see where a verse on a man's tombstone comforted him very much, anyhow."
"No. I always thought the wind up here on these peraries could sing a man's requisition better 'n me. But it was a disgraceful way for a man to go."
