would get him. “It was like a thirst for drink,”
the Judge says, “and I told him that when he
felt it he must come to me. Once or twice when
I saw that the call of the road was too strong
to be resisted, I let him take a ride as far as Colo-
rado Springs and back.” But that didn’t always
satisfy him, and he would throw up his job and
“skip.” It hurt him to do this; it was regarded
as disloyalty to the Judge, and that was awful.
“One Sunday evening,” the Judge relates, “word reached me that Lee was going to ‘fly out.’ This worried me so much that I started for his home. I found his mother in tears. The Eel was gone.
“‘He just couldn’t stand it any longer, Jedge,’ she apologized. ‘He lay on the floor there and sobbed just like he was in a high fever. “What’ll the Judge think ? What’ll the Judge think ?” he kept saying, an’,’ the woman added, ‘he told me to tell you he’d write.’
“I went home much troubled, but the promised letters reached me, one from Albuquerque, then another from El Paso, a rapid succession of them. They were like wails from a lost soul. He im- plored me not to think he had ‘thrown me down.’ That was the burden of them all. He was coming back, he said; he just had to get on the move for a while, but he hadn’t thrown me down. I
