She called onions “engerns” and told me to “pack them spuds to the dudes,” and if Mrs. Brunson scolded her, she said with a laugh, “The old heifer’s on the prod agin.” I memorized her expressions and used them in imaginary conversations with men in ten-gallon hats as I rode the range or hog-tied the steers or branded the calves. Under the influence of Maudie’s magazines, which I pored over far into the night after my mother had gone to bed, I began to write a story: “On a cold November morning,” I wrote with a blue pencil on manila drawing paper, “you might have seen, if you had been on the sharp lookout, a shabbily dressed man standing in a dark doorway on the main street of Boise, Idaho. Over his left hip was a bulge and that was a shiny black single-action Colt .44 meant to kill Buck Johnson, steely blue-eyed foreman of the Lazy S 4 later in the day. The party in the doorway was a tough customer and his name was Scrub Maxwell. The men of Boise, who were every last one of them square-shooters, hated Scrub’s innards, for he was a cattle rustler and a scalawag in more ways than one.” There followed a series of unconnected adventures, including stampedes, the discovery of wolves in the chuck-wagon, the puncturing of the bellies of “five million head of pure-bred Hereford white-face cows and bulls as well as calves, heifers and steers that had the bloat off Indian paintbrush.” Miss Pickens, to whom I unwisely showed my story, deplored this intellectual climate as much as she had my postprandial snoozes when my father had given me beer, and my compositions, all upon the same subject, that is, the heroism of the young sheriff, Sonny Marburn, came back marked in a vehement red pencil. And when I wrote in an examination that “st.” was the abbreviation for “steer” she held me up to the class as an outrageous example of the idle mind.