about?" Hetty asked as she climbed downfrom the pickup.
"Know what this tractor's running on?" Johnny shouted over the noise ofthe engine.
"Of course I do, you young idiot," she exclaimed. "It's gasoline."
"Wrong," Johnny yelled triumphantly. "It's running on Sally's milk!"
* * * * *
The next morning, Johnny had mixed up two hundred gallons of Sally'sFuel and had the pickup, tractor, cattle truck and his 1958 Ford andHetty's '59 Chevrolet station wagon all purring on the mixture.
Mixing it was a simple process after he experimented and found theright proportions. One quart of pure Sally's milk to one hundredgallons of water. He had used the two remaining quarts in the gasolinecan to make the mixture but by morning, Sally had graced the ranch withfive more gallons of the pure concentrate. Johnny carefully stored theconcentrated milk in a scoured fifty-five gallon gasoline drum in thetool shed.
"We've hit a gold mine," he told Hetty exultantly. "We're never goingto have to buy gasoline again. On top of that, at the rate Sally'sturning this stuff out, we can start selling it in a couple of weeksand make a fortune."
That same morning, Hetty collected three more of the golden eggs.
"Set 'em on the shelf," Johnny said, "and when we go into town nexttime I'll have Dale look at them and maybe tell us what those hens havebeen into. I'll probably go into town again Saturday for the mail."
But when Saturday came, Johnny was hobbling around the ranch on awrenched ankle, suffered when his horse stumbled in a gopher hole andtossed him.
"You stay off that leg," Hetty ordered. "I'll go into town for themail. Them girls can just struggle along without your romancing thisweek." Johnny made a wry face but obeyed orders.
"Barneeey," Hetty bawled, "bring me a quarter of beef outta thecooler." Barney stuck his head out of the barn and nodded. "I beenpromising 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 thosecrazy eggs of yours into the county agent's office and leave them therefor analysis," Johnny suggested. He hobbled into the kitchen to get thegolden eggs.
Barney arrived with the chilled quarter of beef wrapped in burlap. Hetossed it in the bed of the pickup and threw more sacks over it to keepit cool under the broiling, midmorning sun. Johnny came out with theeggs in a light cardboard box stuffed with crumpled newspapers. Hewedged the box against the side of beef in the forward corner of thetruck bed. "One more thing, Hetty," he said. "I've got a half drum ofdrain oil in the tractor shed that I've been meaning to trade in forsome gearbox lube that Willy Simons said he'd let me have. Can you dropit 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 thepickup and drove it around to the tractor shed. He spotted two oildrums in the gloomy shed. He tilted the nearest one and felt liquidslosh near the halfway mark, then rolled it out the door. Barney heavedit into the truck bed, stood it on end against the cab and drove thepickup back to the ranch house door as Hetty came out wearing cleanjeans and a bright, flowered blouse. Her gray hair was tucked in a neatbun beneath a blocked Stetson hat.
She climbed into the truck, waved to the two men and drove out theyard. As she bumped over the cattle guard at the gate, the wooden plugthat Johnny had jury-rigged to cork the gasoline drum with itstwenty-gallon load of pure Sally's milk, bounced out.
A small geyser of white fluid shot out of the drum as she hit anotherbump and then the pickup went jolting down the ranch road, littlesplashes of Sally's milk sloshing out with each bump and forming a poolon the bottom of the truck. When Hetty cowboyed onto the county road,the drum tipped dangerously and then bounced back onto its base. Thistime a fountain of milk geysered out and splashed heavily into the boxof golden eggs. Hetty drove on.
But not for long.
With a ranch woman's disregard for watching the road, Hetty constantlyscanned the nearby range lands where small bands of her cherished blackAngus grazed. She prided herself on the fact that despite her sixtyyears, her eyes were still sharp enough to spot a worm-ridden cow at athousand yards.
Two miles after she turned onto the county road, which ran throughCircle T range land, her roving gaze took in a cow and calf on ahillside a few hundred yards south of the road. Hetty slowed the pickupto fifty miles an hour and squinted into the sun. She grunted withsatisfaction and slammed on the brakes. The truck swerved and skiddedto a halt at the left side of the deserted road. Hetty leaped from thetruck and began a fast walk up the hillside for a closer look at thecow and calf.
She never heard the dull thump of the milk drum tipping onto the edgeof the truck bed. Hetty topped the hill and walked slowly towards thecow and calf that were now edging away from her. As she eased down thefar side of the hill out of sight of the pickup, a steady stream ofSally's milk was engulfing the box of golden eggs. A minute later, thereduced contents caused the drum to shift and slip. It fell onto theeggs, cracking a half dozen.
* * * * *
The earth split open and the world around Hetty erupted in a roaringinferno of purple-red fire and ear-shattering sound. The rollingconcussion swept Hetty from her feet and tumbled her into a drywashgully at the base of the hill. The gully saved her life as thesky-splitting shock wave rolled over her. Stunned and deafened, sheflattened herself under a slight overhang.
The rolling blast rocked ranches and towns for more than one hundredmiles and the ground wave triggered the seismographs at the Universityof California nearly two hundred miles away and at UCLA, four hundredmiles distant. Tracking and testing instruments went wild along theentire length of the AEC atomic test grounds, a mere sixty miles southof the smoking, gaping hole that marked the end of the Circle T pickuptruck.
In a direct line, the ranch house was about eight miles from theexplosion.
Johnny was lounging in Hetty's favorite rocking chair on the wide backverandah, lighting a cigarette and Barney was perched on the porchrailing when the sky was blotted out by the dazzling violet light ofthe blast. They were blinking in frozen amazement when the shock wavesmashed into the ranch, flattening the flimsier buildings and bucklingthe side and roof of the steel-braced barn. Every window on the placeblew out in a storm of deadly glass shards. The rolling ground wave inthe wake of the shock blast, rocked and bounced the solid, timber andadobe main house.
The concussion hit Johnny like a fist, pinwheeling him backwards in therocker against the wall of the house. It caught Barney like a sack ofsodden rags and flung him atop the dazed and semiconscious younger man.
The first frightened screams of the horses in the barns and corralswere mingling with the bawling of the heifers in the calf pens when thesound of the explosion caught up with the devastation of the shock andground waves.
Like the reverberation of a thousand massed cannon firing at once, thesoul-searing sound rumbled out of the desert and boiled with almosttangible density into the shattered ranch yard. It flattened thefeebly-stirring men on the porch and then thundered on in a tidal waveof noise.
Barney moaned and rolled off the tangle of porch rocker and stunnedyouth beneath him. Johnny lay dazed another second or two and thenbegan struggling to his feet.
"Hetty," he croaked, pointing wildly to the south where a massive,dirty column of purple smoke and fire rose skyward like the stem of amonstrous and malignant toadstool. "Hetty's out there."
He stumbled from the porch and broke into a staggering run to the pileof broken planks that seconds ago had been the tractor shed. As hecrossed the yard, a great gust of wind whipped back from the north,pumping clouds of dry, dusty earth before it. The force of the windalmost knocked the bruised and shaken Johnny from his feet once againas it swept back over the ranch, in the direction of the great pillarof pur
ple smoke.
"Implosion," Johnny's mind registered.
He tore at the stack of loose boards leaning against the station wagon,flinging them fiercely aside in his frantic efforts to free thevehicle. Barney limped up to join him and a minute later they hadcleared a way into the wagon. Johnny squeezed into the front seat anddrove it back from under more leaning boards. Three of the side windowswere smashed but the windshield was intact except for a small, starredcrack in the safety glass. Clear of the debris, Barney opened theopposite door and slid in beside Johnny. Dirt spun from beneath thewheels of the car as he slammed his foot to the floor and raced towardsthe smoke column that now towered more than a mile and a half into theair.
Beneath her protective overhang, Hetty stirred