have you two been up to,"
Johnny demanded as they attacked the food-laden dishes.

Between mouthfuls, the two older people gave him a rundown on the
morning's mishaps. The more Johnny heard, the wilder it sounded. Johnny
had been a part of the Circle T since he was ten years old. That was
the year Hetty jerked him out of the hands of a Carson City policeman
who had been in the process of hauling the ragged and dirty youngster
to the station house for swiping a box of cookies from a grocery store.
Johnny's mother was dead and his father, once the town's best mechanic,
had turned into the town's best drunk.

During the times his father slept one off, either in the shack the man
and boy occupied at the edge of town, or in the local lockup, Johnny
ran wild.

Hetty took the boy to the ranch for two reasons. Mainly it was the
empty ache in her heart since the death of Big Jim Thompson a year
earlier following a ranch tractor accident that had crushed his chest.
The other was her well-hidden disappointment that she had been
childless. Hetty's bluff, weathered features would never admit to
loneliness or heartache. Beneath the surface, all the warmth and love
she had went out to the scared but belligerent youngster. But she never
let much affection show through until Johnny had become part of her
life. Johnny's father died the following winter after pneumonia brought
on by a night of lying drunk in the cold shack during a blizzard. It
was accepted without legal formality around the county that Johnny
automatically became Hetty's boy.

She cuffed and comforted him into a gawky-happy adolescence, pushed him
through high school and then, at eighteen, sent him off to the
University of California at Davis to learn what the pundits of the
United States Department of Agriculture had to say about animal
husbandry and ranch management.

* * * * *

When Hetty and Barney had finished their recitation, Johnny wore a look
of frank disbelief. "If I didn't know you two better, I'd say you both
been belting the bourbon bottle while I was gone. But this I've got to
see."

They finished lunch and, after Hetty stacked the dishes in the sink,
trooped out to the porch where Johnny went through the same examination
of the milk. Again, a little fire was built in the open safety of the
yard and a few drops of the liquid used to produce the same
technicolored, combustive effects.

"Well, what do you k