Peter infects Phil with anthrax and kills him

Peter Gordon kills Phil Burbank through a chain of knowledge and action rather than an open confrontation. He learns from his father’s medical books that anthrax can pass from a diseased animal hide into a person through breaks in the skin. He then offers Phil rawhide for the rope Phil is braiding, and Phil’s later illness and death give the concealed plan its outcome. The final explanation reframes Phil’s confidence in Peter as the opening through which Peter could protect his mother.

Background and Medical Knowledge

Peter’s understanding of disease grows from the medical world his father, Johnny Gordon, left behind. At the inn, Peter has made a shed into a private workspace. Shelves there sag beneath Johnny’s medical books, alongside stuffed gophers and rabbits, beakers, retorts, and other chemical equipment. The room offers an inward refuge from the taunts Peter faces at school, but it is also where he studies and develops practical knowledge.

Johnny had possessed an exceptional gift for diagnosis. When he examined Alma, he recognized that her illness was not consumption, attending to her eyes, complexion, and state of mind. The narrative says that this diagnostic ability passed to Peter. The inheritance is not simply a matter of temperament: Johnny’s books give Peter a body of medical information he can consult and apply, even after his father is gone.

One August afternoon, Peter finds in those books that anthrax—called blackleg locally—is an animal disease that can also infect people. The account explains the relevant route of transmission: handling the hide of a diseased animal can introduce the disease into the bloodstream through a cut or other break in the skin. This knowledge joins Peter’s scientific study to the material world of the ranch. A hide is not merely an animal product; under the conditions Peter identifies, it can carry a danger that is invisible until illness follows.

The Rope and Phil’s Trust

Phil’s habits make the method possible. Unlike the ranch hands who generally wear gloves to protect themselves from rope burns, splinters, cuts, and blisters, Phil scorns such protection. His hands are described as powerful and lean, and his refusal to guard them is part of his ideal of ranch competence. It also creates a vulnerability that Peter’s medical knowledge allows him to recognize.

Peter’s offer of rawhide arrives as Phil is making a rope and has begun to draw the boy closer. Earlier, Phil watches Peter handle a rabbit with a calm, controlled touch, then kill it deftly. The moment impresses Phil; he has not seen Peter’s particular combination of gentleness and skill before. When Phil himself has been cut, Peter notices the blood and remarks that the cut is deep. Their contact shifts from observation toward an intimacy Phil welcomes.

Peter then touches Phil’s arm and says he has rawhide to finish the rope. He explains that he cut it up because he wanted to learn to braid as Phil does, and asks Phil to take what he has prepared. Peter also tells him that Phil has been good to him. The gesture and its explanation appeal directly to Phil’s desire to be admired and emulated. Phil reads the offered material as evidence that Peter wants to become like him; his response is shaped by the hope of a closeness he has rarely experienced. The scene’s dramatic force lies in that difference: Phil receives the rawhide as a sign of attachment, while Peter’s knowledge gives the offer a lethal consequence.

Illness and Uncertainty

Phil’s illness is not immediately understood by the people around him. After taking blood samples when Phil is admitted to hospital, the doctor cultures them and sends the culture to the State Hospital, where specialists know more about such cases. Phil suffers a final convulsion, but the doctor remains mystified and expects that the test may explain what has gone wrong in a day or two. Medical investigation is under way, yet it comes too late to prevent the death.

This uncertainty contrasts with the explanation the narrative eventually gives. The physician has samples and a developing culture but does not yet know the cause; Peter, by contrast, has already connected a disease of animals with the danger of handling infected hide through damaged skin. The difference is not that Peter has a broader medical practice than the doctor. Rather, Peter possesses the particular information needed to understand the exposure he has arranged, while the doctor’s diagnosis remains pending.

Revelation and Consequence

The causal account is disclosed after Phil’s death, through Peter’s reflection on what to do with a passage in the Book of Common Prayer. Peter considers whether to cut it out and paste it into his scrapbook, where it would make a better final entry than the rose leaves that have lost their scent. He thinks that his mother is now delivered, and attributes this to his father’s sacrifice and to the sacrifice he himself has been able to make using knowledge from his father’s large black books. The dog is dead: the closing statement gives the result a stark finality.

Peter’s recollection then supplies the medical link. Anthrax can pass from a diseased animal’s hide into the bloodstream through a cut or break in the skin; the account makes the braiding of a rope from such a hide its telling example. The passage turns the earlier rawhide offer into evidence of design. What Phil understood as Peter’s wish to imitate him had placed infected material in his hands, while Phil’s unprotected, damaged hands supplied the route of infection. The narrative presents the outcome as Peter’s deliberate protection of his mother, not as an accidental consequence of the rope-making.

The method remains concealed from Phil and is not recognized in time by his doctor. Peter’s action therefore joins scientific knowledge to secrecy: information first encountered in a study becomes an instrument of intervention in the ranch household. The book does not present that knowledge as abstract learning alone. Its consequence is the death that ends Phil’s power over Peter’s mother, while the delayed explanation makes the reader revisit the trust and admiration that had seemed to draw Phil and Peter together.