projecting six inches wider than any car on the train. He saw Tim see
it coming. He saw Tim steel himself to meet the abrupt subtraction of
half a foot from the narrow space wherein he balanced. He saw Tim
slowly and deliberately sway out, sway out to the extremest limit, and
yet not sway out far enough. The thing was physically inevitable. An
inch more, and Tim would have escaped the car. An inch more and he
would have fallen without impact from the car. It caught him, in that
margin of an inch, and hurled him backward and side-twisting. Twice he
whirled sidewise, and two and a half times he turned over, ere he
struck on his head and neck on the rocks.

He never moved after he struck. The seventy-foot fall broke his neck
and crushed his skull. And right there Young Dick learned death--not
the ordered, decent death of civilization, wherein doctors and nurses
and hypodermics ease the stricken one into the darkness, and ceremony
and function and flowers and undertaking institutions conspire to give
a happy leave-taking and send-off to the departing shade, but sudden
death, primitive death, ugly and ungarnished, like the death of a
steer in the shambles or a fat swine stuck in the jugular.

And right there Young Dick learned more--the mischance of life and
fate; the universe hostile to man; the need to perceive and to act, to
see and know, to be sure and quick, to adjust instantly to all instant
shiftage of the balance of forces that bear upon the living. And right
there, beside the strangely crumpled and shrunken remnant of what had
been his comrade the moment before, Young Dick learned that illusion
must be discounted, and that reality never lied.

In New Mexico, Young Dick drifted into the Jingle-bob Ranch, north of
Roswell, in the Pecos Valley. He was not yet fourteen, and he was