I. THE GIFT
AT DAYBREAK Billy Buck emerged from the bunkhouse and stood
for a moment on the porch looking up at the sky. He was a broad, bandy-legged
little man with a walrus mustache, with square hands, puffed and muscled on the
palms. His eyes were a contemplative, watery grey and the hair which protruded
from under his Stetson hat was spiky and weathered Billy was still stuffing his
shirt into his blue jeans as he stood on the porch. He unbuckled his belt and
tightened it again. The belt showed, by the worn shiny places opposite each
hole, the gradual increase of Billy's middle over a period of years. When he
had seen to the weather, Billy cleared each nostril by holding its mate closed
with his forefinger and blowing fiercely. Then he walked down to the barn,
rubbing his
hands together. He curried and brushed two saddle horses in
the stalls, talking quietly to them all the time; and he had hardly finished
when the iron triangle started ringing at the ranch house. Billy stuck the
brush and currycomb together and laid them on the rail, and went up to
breakfast. His action had been so deliberate and yet so wasteless of time that
he came to the house while Mrs. Tiflin was still ringing the triangle. She
nodded her grey head to him and withdrew into the kitchen. Billy Buck sat down
on the steps, because he was a cow hand, and it wouldn't be fitting that he
should go first into the dining-room. He heard Mr. Tiflin in the house,
stamping his feet into his boots.
The high jangling note of the triangle put the boy Jody in
motion. He was only a little boy, ten years old, with hair like dusty yellow
grass and with shy polite grey eyes, and with a mouth that worked when he
thought. The triangle picked him up out of sleep. It didn't occur to him to
disobey the harsh note. He never had: no one he knew ever had. He brushed the
tangled hair out of his eyes and skinned his nightgown off. In a moment he was dressed-blue
chambray shirt and overalls. It was late in the summer, so of course there were
no shoes to bother with. In the kitchen he waited until his mother got from in
front of the sink and went back to the stove. Then he washed himself and
brushed back his wet hair with his fingers. His mother turned sharply on him as
he left the sink. Jody looked shyly away.
"I've got to cut your hair before long," his
mother said. "Breakfast's on the table. Go on in, so Billy can come."
Jody sat at the long table which was covered with white
oilcloth washed through to the fabric in some places. The fried eggs lay in
rows on their platter. Jody took three eggs on his plate and followed with
three thick slices of crisp bacon. He carefully scraped a spot of blood from
one of the egg yolks.
Billy Buck clumped in. "That won't hurt you,"
Billy explained. "That's only a sign the rooster leaves."
Jody's tall stern father came in then and Jody knew from the
noise on the floor that he was wearing boots, but he looked under the table
anyway, to make sure. His father turned off the oil lamp over the table, for
plenty of morning light now came through the windows.
Jody did not ask where his father and Billy Buck were riding
that day, but he wished he might go along. His father was a disciplinarian.
Jody obeyed him in everything without questions of any kind. Now, Carl Tiflin sat
down and reached for the egg platter.
"Got the cows ready to go, Billy?" he asked.
"In the lower corral," Billy said. "I could
just as well take them in alone."
"Sure you could. But a man needs company. Besides your
throat gets pretty dry." Carl Tiflin was jovial this morning.
Jody's mother put her head in the door. "What time do
you think to be back, Carl?"
"I can't tell. I've got to see some men in Salinas.
Might be gone till dark."
The eggs and coffee and big biscuits disappeared rapidly. Jody
followed the two men out of the house. He watched them mount their horses and
drive six old milk cows out of the corral and start over the hill toward Salinas.
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