on the bottom of the truck. When Hetty cowboyed onto the county road,
the drum tipped dangerously and then bounced back onto its base. This
time a fountain of milk geysered out and splashed heavily into the box
of golden eggs. Hetty drove on.

But not for long.

With a ranch woman's disregard for watching the road, Hetty constantly
scanned the nearby range lands where small bands of her cherished black
Angus grazed. She prided herself on the fact that despite her sixty
years, her eyes were still sharp enough to spot a worm-ridden cow at a
thousand yards.

Two miles after she turned onto the county road, which ran through
Circle T range land, her roving gaze took in a cow and calf on a
hillside a few hundred yards south of the road. Hetty slowed the pickup
to fifty miles an hour and squinted into the sun. She grunted with
satisfaction and slammed on the brakes. The truck swerved and skidded
to a halt at the left side of the deserted road. Hetty leaped from the
truck and began a fast walk up the hillside for a closer look at the
cow and calf.

She never heard the dull thump of the milk drum tipping onto the edge
of the truck bed. Hetty topped the hill and walked slowly towards the
cow and calf that were now edging away from her. As she eased down the
far side of the hill out of sight of the pickup, a steady stream of
Sally's milk was engulfing the box of golden eggs. A minute later, the
reduced contents caused the drum to shift and slip. It fell onto the
eggs, cracking a half dozen.

* * * * *

The earth split open and the world around Hetty erupted in a roaring
inferno of purple-red fire and ear-shattering sound. The rolling
concussion swept Hetty from her feet and tumbled her into a drywash
gully at the base of the hill. The gully saved her life as the
sky-splitting shock wave rolled over her. Stunned and deafened, she
flattened herself under a slight overhang.

The rolling blast rocked ranches and towns for more than one hundred
miles and the ground wave triggered the seismographs at the University
of California nearly two hundred miles away and at UCLA, four hundred
miles distant. Tracking and testing instruments went wild along the
entire length of the AEC atomic test grounds, a mere sixty miles south
of the smoking, gaping hole that marked the end of the Circle T pickup
truck.

In a direct line, the ranch house was about eight miles from the
explosion.

Johnny