The room in his father’s house used by young Tom Milford and his wife was a low lean-to. The August heat lay trapped inside it. Tom had a brief sense of being trapped, too, like a dog in too small a kennel. The front room would make a fine bedroom, but his father kept it piled with such things as tanned cowhides, saddles and sweet feed for the horses, and would not allow them to be disturbed.

Tom drew a clean shirt over his head and left the room to Doney. The girl mopped a towel over her bare arms and neck, but they were wet again at once. She put on her one good dress, left from the courting days before her marriage. The thin red silk stuck to her skin. She combed back her soft hair in front of the dime-store mirror. It was hard to see exactly how she looked against the distortion of its rippling. She was too thin, she knew, and her eyes—damn calf eyes, her father-in-law said—were too big in her small pointed face. But Tom thought she was as pretty as a play-dolly, and there was no reality beyond his opinion. The harshness of old man Milford played like harmless heat lightning outside her contentment. She heard him now, grumbling in the yard, and hurried to the porch, not to stir his anger by delaying him.

He was trying to mount his horse. He put a wrinkled boot into the stirrup and heaved his obese bulk up toward the saddle. Each time that he heaved, his paunch reached as high as the horse’s backbone, but there was no muscle in arm or thigh to lift him higher.

The horse stood patiently. Milford’s broad-brimmed straw hat slipped from his bald head to the sand, and the horse shied. The old man jerked the reins and gave a wordless bellow.

Young Tom said, “Go get up on the porch. You’ve got too heavy to mount from the ground.”

He took the reins from his father and led the horse to the edge of the open porch. Milford panted up the steps. He flung his leg violently across the saddle, not to be done out of the appearance of capacity. Doney ran to the yard and handed up his hat to him. He slapped it on his head. He stared down at her.

He said, “What’s my daughter-in-law doin’, wearin’ her red silk dress to the unloadin’?”

The girl dropped her eyes and stroked the tight, short skirt.

“Since when you gettin’ dressed up to go look at a mess of cattle?”

She said, “I figured there’d be people there.”

“Fixin’ to catch the eye of that Yankee, eh? Fixin’ to go gape at that thief. Don’t neither of you get no idee we’re goin’ to look at no outlander. I aim to get me one look of that Barnum bull, and then we’re shut of the whole damned unloadin’.”

Doney looked at her husband.