a
wrenched ankle, suffered when his horse stumbled in a gopher hole and
tossed him.

"You stay off that leg," Hetty ordered. "I'll go into town for the
mail. Them girls can just struggle along without your romancing this
week." Johnny made a wry face but obeyed orders.

"Barneeey," Hetty bawled, "bring me a quarter of beef outta the
cooler." Barney stuck his head out of the barn and nodded. "I been
promising some good beef to Judge Hatcher for a month of Sundays now,"
Hetty said to Johnny.

"If you're going to stop by the courthouse, how about taking those
crazy eggs of yours into the county agent's office and leave them there
for analysis," Johnny suggested. He hobbled into the kitchen to get the
golden eggs.

Barney arrived with the chilled quarter of beef wrapped in burlap. He
tossed it in the bed of the pickup and threw more sacks over it to keep
it cool under the broiling, midmorning sun. Johnny came out with the
eggs in a light cardboard box stuffed with crumpled newspapers. He
wedged the box against the side of beef in the forward corner of the
truck bed. "One more thing, Hetty," he said. "I've got a half drum of
drain oil in the tractor shed that I've been meaning to trade in for
some gearbox lube that Willy Simons said he'd let me have. Can you drop
it off at his station and pick up the grease?"

"Throw it on," Hetty said, "while I go change into some town clothes."

Johnny started to hobble down the porch steps when Barney stopped him.
"I'll get it boy, you stay off that ankle." Barney climbed into the
pickup and drove it around to the tractor shed. He spotted two oil
drums in the gloomy shed. He tilted the nearest one and felt liquid
slosh near the halfway mark, then rolled it out the door. Barney heaved
it into the truck bed, stood it on end against the cab and drove the
pickup back to the ranch house door as Hetty came out wearing clean
jeans and a bright, flowered blouse. Her gray hair was tucked in a neat
bun beneath a blocked Stetson hat.

She climbed into the truck, waved to the two men and drove out the
yard. As she bumped over the cattle guard at the gate, the wooden plug
that Johnny had jury-rigged to cork the gasoline drum with its
twenty-gallon load of pure Sally's milk, bounced out.

A small geyser of white fluid shot out of the drum as she hit another
bump and then the pickup went jolting down the ranch road, little
splashes of Sally's milk sloshing out with each bump and forming a pool