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"Shoo," Hetty Thompson cried, waving her battered old felt hat at the
clucking cluster of hens eddying around her legs as she plowed through
the flock towards the chicken house. "Scat. You, Solomon," she called
out, directing her words at the bobbing comb of the big rooster
strutting at the edge of the mob. "Don't just stand there like a
satisfied cowhand after a night in Reno. Get these noisy females outta
my way." She batted at the hens and they scattered with angry squawks
of protest.
Hetty paused in the doorway of the chicken house to allow her eyes to
become accustomed to the cool gloom after the bright glare of the ranch
yard. She could feel the first trickles of sweat forming under the
man's shirt she was wearing as the hot, early morning Nevada sun beat
down on her back in the doorway.
Moving carefully but quickly through the nests, she reached and groped
for the eggs she knew would be found in the scattered straw. As she
placed each find carefully in the bucket she carried, her lips moved in
a soundless count. When she had finished, she straightened up and left
the chicken house, her face reflecting minor irritation.
Again the hens swirled about her, hoping for the handfuls of cracked
corn she usually tossed to them. On the other side of the yard Solomon
stepped majestically along the edge of the vegetable garden, never
crossing the hoed line separating garden from yard.
"You'd better stay over there, you no-account Lothario," Hetty growled.
"Five eggs short this morning and all you do is act like you were just
the business agent for this bunch of fugitives from a dumpling pot."
Solomon cocked his head and stared Hetty down. She paused at the foot
of the backporch steps and threw the rooster a final remark. "You don't
do any better than this you're liable to wind up in that pot yourself."
Solomon gave a scornful cluck. "Better still, I'll get me a young
rooster in here and take over your job." Solomon let out a squawk and
took out at a dead run, herding three hens before him towards the
chicken house.
With a satisfied smile of triumph, Hetty climbed the steps and crossed
to the kitchen door. She turned and looked back across the yard towards
the barn and corrals.
"Barneeeeey," Hetty yelled. "Ain't you finished with that milking yet?"
"Comin' now, Miz Thompson," came the reply from the barn. Hetty let the
screen door slam behind her as she walked into the kitchen and placed
the bucket of eggs on the big work table. She had her arm up to wipe
her moist forehead on the sleeve of her shirt when she spotted the
golden egg lying in the middle of the others in the galvanized bucket.
She froze in the arm-lifted position for several seconds, staring at
the dully glowing egg. Then she slowly reached out and picked it up. It
was slightly heavier than a regular egg, but for the dull, gold-bronze
metallic appearance of the shell, looked just like any of the other
twenty-odd eggs in the bucket. She was still holding it in the palm of
her hand when the kitchen door again slammed and the handy man limped
into the room. He carried two pails of milk across the kitchen and set
them down near the sink.
"Whatcha lookin' at, Miz Thompson?" Barney Hatfield asked.
Hetty frowned at the egg in her hand without answering. Barney limped
around the side of the table for a closer look. Sunlight streaming
through the kitchen windows glinted on the shell of the odd egg.
Barney's eyes grew round. "Now ain't that something," he whispered in
awe.
Hetty started as though someone had snapped their fingers in front of
her staring eyes. Her normal look of practical dubiousness returned.
"Huh," she snorted. "Even had me fooled for a second. Something wrong
with this egg but it sure is shootin' ain't gold. One of them fool hens
must of been pecking in the fertilizer storeroom and got herself an
overdose of some of them minerals in that stuff.
"What are you staring at, you old fool," she glared at Barney. "It
ain't gold." Hetty laid the egg at one side of the table. She walked to
the sink and took a clean, two-gallon milk can from the drainboard and
set it in the sink to fill it from the pails of rich, frothy milk
Barney had brought in the pails.
"Sally come fresh this morning, Miz Thompson," he said. "Got herself a
real fine little bull calf."
Hetty looked at the two pails of milk. "Well, where's the rest of the
milk, then?"
"That's Queenie's milk," Barney said. "Sally's is still out on the
porch."
"Well bring it in before the sun clabbers it."
"Can't," Barney said.
Hetty swung around and glared at him. "What do you mean, you can't? You
suddenly come down with the glanders?"
"No'm, it's just that Sally's milk ain't no good," he replied.
* * * * *
A frown spread over Hetty's face as she hoisted one of the milk pails
and began pouring into the can in the sink. "What's wrong with it,
Barney? Sally seem sick or something?" she asked.
Barney scratched his head. "I don't rightly know, Miz Thompson. That
milk looks all right, or at least, almost all right. It's kinda thin
and don't have no foam like you'd expect milk to have. But mostly, it
sure don't smell right and it danged well don't taste right.
"_Phooey._" He made a face at the memory of the taste. "I stuck my
finger in it when it looked kinda queer, and took a taste. It shore
tasted lousy."
"You probably been currying that mangey old horse of yours before you
went to milking," Hetty snorted, "and tasted his cancerous old hide on
your fingers. I've told you for the last time to wash your hands before
you go to milking them cows. I didn't pay no eighteen hundred dollars
for that prize, registered Guernsey just to have you give her bag fever
with your dirty hands."
"That ain't so, Miz Thompson," Barney cried indignantly. "I did too,
wash my hands. Good, too. I wuzn't near my horse this morning. That
milk just weren't no good."
Hetty finished pouring the milk into the cans and after putting the
cans in the refrigerator, wiped her hands on her jeans and went out
onto the porch, Barney trailing behind her. She bent over and sniffed
at the two milk pails setting beside the door. "_Whew_," she
exclaimed, "it sure does smell funny. Hand me that dipper, Barney."
Barney reached for a dipper hanging on a nail beside the kitchen door.
Hetty dipped out a small quantity of the milk, sipped, straightened up
with a jerk and spewed the milk out into the yard. "Yaawwwk," she
spluttered, "that tastes worse 'n Diesel oil."
She stared distastefully at the swirling, flat-looking liquid in the
pails and then turned back to the kitchen. "I never saw the like of
it," she exclaimed. "Chickens come out with some kind of sorry-looking
egg and now, in the same morning, an eighteen hundred dollar
registered, fresh Guernsey gives out hogwash instead of milk." She
stared thoughtfully across the yard at the distant mountains, now
shimmering in the hot, midmorning sun. "Guess we could swill the hogs
with that milk, rather'n throw it out, Barney. I never seen anything
them Durocs wouldn't eat. When you get ready to put the other swill in
the cooker, toss that milk in with it and cook it up for the hogs."
Hetty went back into her kitchen and Barney turned and limped across
the yard to the tractor shed. He pulled the brim of his sweat-stained
Stetson over his eyes and squinted south over the heat-dancing sage and
sparse grasslands of Circle T range. Dust devils were pirouetting in
the hazy distance towards the mountains forming a corridor leading to
the ranch. A dirt road led out of the yard and crossed an oiled county
road about five miles south of the ranch. The county road was now the
only link the Circle T had to the cattle shipping pens at Carson City.
The dirt road arrowed south across the range but fifteen miles from the
ranch, a six-strand, new, barbed-wire fence cut the road. A white metal
sign with raised letters proclaimed "Road Closed. U.S. Government
Military Reservation. Restricted Area. Danger--Peligre. Keep Out."
The taut bands of wire stretched east and west of the road for more
than twenty miles in each direction, with duplicates of the metal sign
hung on the fence every five hundred yards. Then the wires turned south
for nearly a hundred miles, etching in skin-blistering, sun-heated
strands, the outlines of the Nevada atomic testing grounds at
Frenchman's Flat.
When the wire first went up, Hetty and her ranching neighbors had
screamed to high heaven and high congressmen about the loss of the road
and range. The fence stayed up. Now they had gotten used to the idea
and had even grown blasé about the frequent nuclear blasts that rattled
the desert floor sixty miles from ground zero.
* * * * *
Barney built a fire under the big, smoke-blackened cauldron Hetty used
for cooking the hog swill. Dale Hamilton, the county agent, had given
Hetty a long talk on the dangers of feeding the pigs, raw, uncooked and
possibly contaminated, garbage. When Hamilton got graphic about what
happened to people who ate pork from such hogs, Hetty turned politely
green and had Barney set up the cooking cauldron.
After dumping the kitchen slops into the pot, Barney hiked back across
the yard to get the two pails of bad milk.
Hetty was sitting at the kitchen table, putting the eggs into plastic
refrigerator dishes when the hog slop exploded in a whooshing roar,
followed a split second later by an even louder blast that rocked the
ranch buildings. The eggs flew across the room as the lid of the slop
cauldron came whistling through the kitchen window in a blizzard of
flying glass and buried itself, edgewise, in the wall over the stove.
Hetty slammed backwards headfirst into a heap of shattered eggs. A
torrent of broken plaster, and crockery fragments rained on her stunned
figure. Through dazed eyes, she saw a column of purple-reddish fire
rising from the yard.
A woman who has been thrown twenty-three times from a pitching bronco
and kicked five times in the process, doesn't stay dazed long. Pawing
dripping egg yokes and plaster from her face, Hetty Thompson struggled
to her feet and staggered to the kitchen door.
"Barneeey," she bawled, "you all right?"
The column of weird-colored flame had quickly died and only a few
flickering pieces of wood from the cauldron fire burned in scattered
spots about the yard. Of the cauldron, there wasn't a sign.
"Barney," she cried anxiously, "where are you?"
"Here I am, Miz Thompson." Barney's blackened face peered around the
corner of the tractor shed. "You O.K., Miz Thompson?"
"What in thunderation happened?" Hetty called out. "You try to build a
fire with dynamite for kindling?"
Shaken but otherwise unharmed, Barney painfully limped over to the
ranch house porch.
"Don't ask me what happened, m'am," he said. "I just poured that milk
into the slop pot and then put the lid back on and walked off. I heered
this big '_whoosh_' and turned around in time to see the lid fly off
and the kettle begin to tip into the fire and then there was one
helluva blast. It knocked me clean under the tractor shed." He fumbled
in his pocket for a cigarette and shakily lighted it.
Hetty peered out over the yard and then looking up, gasped. Perched
like a rakish derby hat on the arm of the towering pump windmill was
the slop cauldron. "Well I'll be...." Hetty Thompson said.
"You sure you didn't pour gas on that fire to make it burn faster,
Barney Hatfield?" she barked at the handy man.
"No siree," Barney declaimed loudly, "there weren't no gas anywhere
near that fire. Only thing I poured out was that there bad milk." He
paused and scratched his head. "Reckon that funny milk coulda done
that, Miz Thompson? There ain't no gas made what'll blow up nor burn so
funny as that did."
Hetty snorted. "Whoever heard of milk blowing up, you old idiot?" A
look of doubt spread. "You put all that milk in there?"
"No'm, just the one bucket." Barney pointed to the other pail beside
the kitchen door, now half-empty and standing in a pool of liquid
sloshed out by the blast wave. Hetty studied the milk pail for a minute
and then resolutely picked it up and walked out into the yard.
"Only one way to find out," she said. "Get me a tin can, Barney."
She poured about two tablespoons of the milk into the bottom of the can
while Barney collected a small pile of kindling. Removing the milk pail
to a safe distance, Hetty lighted the little pile of kindling, set the
tin can atop the burning wood and scooted several yards away to join
Barney who had been watching from afar. In less than a minute a booming
_whoosh_ sent a miniature column of purple, gaseous flame spouting
from the can. "Well whadda you know about that?" Hetty exclaimed
wonderingly.
The can had flown off the fire a few feet but didn't explode. Hetty
went back to the milk pail and collecting less than a teaspoon full in
the water dipper, walked to the fire. Standing as far back as she could
and still reach over the flames, she carefully sprinkled a few drops of
the liquid directly into the fire and then jumped back. Miniature balls
of purple flame erupted from the fire before she could move. Pieces of
flaming kindling flew in all directions and one slammed Barney across
the back of the neck and sent a shower of sparks down his back.
The handy man let out a yowl of pain and leaped for the watering trough
beside the corral, smoke trailing behind him. Hetty thoughtfully
surveyed the scene of her experiment from beneath raised eyebrows. Then
she grunted with satisfaction, picked up the remaining milk in the pail
and went back to the ranch house. Barney climbed drippingly from the
horse trough.
The kitchen was a mess. Splattered eggs were over everything and broken
glass, crockery and plaster covered the floor, table and counters. Only
one egg remained unbroken. That was the golden egg. Hetty picked it up
and shook it. There was a faint sensation of something moving inside
the tough, metallic-looking shell. It shook almost as a normal egg
might, but not quite. Hetty set the strange object on a shelf and
turned to the task of cleaning up.
* * * * *
Johnny Culpepper, the ranch's other full-time hand and Hetty's
assistant manager, drove the pickup into the yard just before noon. He
parked in the shade of the huge cottonwood tree beside the house and
bounced out with an armload of mail and newspapers. Inside the kitchen
door, he dumped the mail on the sideboard and started to toss his hat
on a wall hook when he noticed the condition of the room. Hetty was
dishing out fragrant, warmed-over stew into three lunch dishes on the
table. She had cleaned up the worst of the mess and changed into a
fresh shirt and jeans. Her iron-gray hair was pulled back in a
still-damp knot at the back after a hasty scrubbing to get out the
gooey mixture of eggs and plaster.
"Holy smoke, Hetty," Johnny said. "What happened here? Your pressure
kettle blow up?" His eyes widened when he saw the lid of the slop
cauldron still embedded in the wall over the stove. His gaze tracked
back and took in the shattered window.
"Had an accident," Hetty said matter-of-factly, putting the last dishes
on the table. "Tell you about it when we eat. Now you go wash up and
call Barney. I want you to put some new glass in that window this
afternoon and get that danged lid outta the wall."
Curious and puzzled, Johnny washed at the kitchen sink and then walked
to the door to shout for Barney. On the other side of the yard, Barney
released the pump windmill clutch. While Johnny watched from the porch,
the weight of the heavy slop cauldron slowly turned the big windmill
and as the arm adorned by the kettle rotated downward, the cast-iron
pot slipped off and fell to the hard-packed ground with a booming
clang.
"Well, for the luvva Pete," Johnny said in amazement. "Hey, Barney,
time to eat. C'mon in."
Barney trudged across the yard and limped into the kitchen to wash.
They sat down to the table. "Now just what 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 know," Johnny exclaimed, "a four hundred octane
Guernsey cow!"
Johnny kicked out the fire and carried the milk pail to the tractor
shed. He parked the milk on a workbench and gathered up an armful of
tools to repair the blast-torn kitchen. He started to leave but when
the milk bucket caught his eye, he unloaded the tools and fished around
under the workbench for an empty five-gallon gasoline can. He poured
the remaining milk into the closed gasoline can and replaced the cap.
Then he took his tools and a pane of glass from an overhead rack and
headed for the house.
Hetty came into the kitchen as he was prying at the cauldron lid in the
wall.
"You're going to make a worse mess before you're through," she said,
"so I'll just let you finish and then clean up the whole mess
afterwards. I got other things to do anyway."
She jammed a man's old felt hat on her head and left the house. Barney
was unloading the last of the supplies Johnny had brought from Carson
in the truck. Hetty shielded her eyes against the metallic glare of the
afternoon sun. "Gettin' pretty dry, Barney. Throw some salt blocks in
the pickup and I'll run them down to the south pasture and see if the
pumps need to be turned on.
"And you might get that wind pump going in case we get a little breeze
later this afternoon. But in any case, better run the yard pump for an
hour or so and get some water up into the tank. I'll be back as soon as
I take a ride through the pasture. I want to see how that Angus
yearling is coming that I picked out for house beef."
A few minutes later, Hetty in the pickup disappeared behind a hot swirl
of yellow dust. Barney ambled to the cool pump house beneath the
towering windmill. An electric motor, powered either from the REA line
or from direct current stored in a bank of wet cell batteries, bulked
large in the small shed. To the left, a small, gasoline-driven
generator supplied standby power if no wind was blowing to turn the
arm-driven generator or if the lines happened to be down, as was often
the case in the winter.
Barney threw the switch to start the pump motor. Nothing happened. He
reached for the light switch to test the single bulb hanging from a
cord to the ceiling. Same nothing. Muttering darkly to himself, he
changed the pump engine leads to DC current and closed the switch to
the battery bank. The engine squeaked and whined slowly but when Barney
threw in the clutch to drive the pump, it stopped and just hummed
faintly. Then he opened the AC fuse box.
Johnny had freed the cauldron lid and was knocking out bits of broken
glass from the kitchen window frame before putting in the new glass
when Barney limped into the room.
"That pot busted the pump house 'lectric line, Johnny, when it went
sailing," he said. "Miz Thompson wants to pump up some water and on top
of that, the batteries are down. You got time to fix the line?"
Johnny paused and surveyed the kitchen. "I'm going to be working here
for another hour anyway so Hetty can clean up when she gets back. Why
don't you fire up the gasoline kicker for now and I'll fix the line
when I get through here," he said.
"O.K.," Barney nodded and turned to leave. "Oh, forgot to ask you. Miz
Thompson tell you about the egg?"
"What egg?" Johnny asked.
"The gold one."
Johnny grinned. "Sure, and I saw the goose when I came in. And you're
Jack and the windmill is your beanstalk. Go climb it, Barney and cut
out the fairy tales."
"Naw, Johnny," Barney protested, "I ain't kidding. Miz Thompson got a
gold egg from the hens this morning. At least, it looks kinda like gold
but she says it ain't. See, here it is." He reached into the cupboard
where Hetty had placed the odd egg. He walked over and handed it to
Johnny who was sitting on the sink drain counter to work on the
shattered window.
The younger man turned the egg over in his hand. "It sure feels funny.
Wonder what the inside looks like?" He banged the egg gently against
the edge of the drain board. When it didn't crack, he slammed it
harder, but then realizing that if it did break suddenly, it would
squish onto the floor, he put the egg on the counter and tapped it with
his hammer.
The shell split and a clear liquid poured out on to the drain board,
thin and clear, not glutenous like a normal egg white. A small, reddish
ball, obviously the yolk, rolled across the board, fell into the sink
and broke into powdery fragments. A faint etherlike odor arose from the
mess.
"I guess Miz Thompson was right," Barney said. "She said that hen musta
been pecking in the fertilizer chemicals. Never seen no egg like that
before."
"Yeh," Johnny said puzzledly. "Well, so much for that." He tossed the
golden shell to one side and turned back to his glass work. Barney left
for the pumphouse.
Inside the pumphouse, Barney opened the gasoline engine tank and poked
a stick down to test the fuel level. The stick came out almost dry.
With another string of mutterings, he limped across the yard to the
tractor shed for a gas can. Back in the pumphouse, he poured the engine
tank full, set the gas can aside and then, after priming the
carburetor, yanked on the starter pull rope. The engine caught with a
spluttering roar and began racing madly. Barney lunged for the throttle
and cut it back to idle, but even then, the engine was running at near
full speed. Then Barney noticed the white fluid running down the side
of the engine tank and dripping from the spout of the gasoline can. He
grinned broadly, cut in the pump clutch and hurriedly limped across the
yard to the kitchen.
"Hey, Johnny," he called, "did you put that milk o' Sally's into a gas
can?"