 
old horse just wouldn"t let go. 
he kept chewing at the rope and snarling every once in a while through his 
teeth. 
gilly and i laughed at him. 
old horse, he didn"t know when to quit. 
finally we got tired of watching him getting at the rope, and then we went 
to tell tony that his dog was going nuts. 
tony was nailing a horse stall together for his truck, and he just said 
that old horse was a dumb dog. 
gilly said he sure was a stupid dog. 
he used to talk like that when he was a kid, just like tony talked. 
i did too, but i didn"t so much as gilly, although he was younger than me. 
we went on down to the creek to cool off, and we forgot about old horse, 
because we figured he"d quit after a while. 
anyway, we didn"t expect that anything unusual would happen that day. 
nothing ever did in the summer. 
once in a while we had the grabbing day on the saints" days, and that was 
pretty exciting, but nothing else practically. 
sometimes my father would come home with a funny story, or a story about 
something that happened to somebody, but most of them we didn"t hear, because 
when my father got into telling it good, my mother would say something in 
order to change the subject. 
that's when the story was about something we weren"t supposed to hear. 
it was probably nothing and we would learn about it anyway, but that's the 
way my mother was. 
anyway, gilly and i didn"t know something was going to happen. 
