Old Milford’s face was purple. He bellowed above the tumult, “Laugh, you yellow-bellies! That there bull is takin’ the rations right out of your mouths!”

The crowd hushed. Milford dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and rode up to Dixon.

“You cain’t do this to honest men just because they’re poor! We’ve ranged our stock in these woods since before your ma changed your didies. You cain’t take a pocketful of dirty Yankee money and run our cattle outen our own woods!”

Dixon stared at the gross and apoplectic figure overflowing its saddle. He looked Milford up and down, then swung his horse and moved away. He was heard giving orders for the handling of the Brahman.

Doney caught her breath. He had ignored old man Milford, whom all men reckoned with. Milford headed out of the crowd, and Tom followed. The men lifted their hands to him. They spoke approvingly as he passed along.

“That’s tellin’ him!”

The Milfords made the highway and slowed down. The old man mopped the sweat from his neck. “Block our pastures!” He turned sideways in his saddle and gaped at his son. He roared, “The pastures ain’t the half of it! He’s got us blocked from the river!”

“Mebbe the ponds’ll hold out.”

“Do this drought keep up, they’ll not. They’ll go dry as a haystack. Then we’ll see. We’ll just natchelly see.”

Tom said over his shoulder to Doney, “Looks to me like Dixon better pray for rain. And pray quick.”

The drought was implacable. Old Milford wrote Dixon three times, “Get your cattle out of here or we will cut your fences. Signed, a Cattleman, speaking for All.” The Dixon herds continued to graze over the fenced acres of fast-drying wire grass. It was as though the owner had turned indifferently away from the anonymous letters as he had turned from Milford himself. There was no one to threaten about the drought, although Milford once shook his fist at the sky on a red and breathless evening.

On the morning of the tenth day after the unloading, Doney and the old man sat together on the porch, waiting for Tom. A dry, hot breeze, like air from the oven, stirred the boughs of the chinaberry over the roof. One bough lifted and fell with a steady thudding, so that it sounded like the hoofs of the mare in the sand. Doney had sometimes thought of climbing to the roof and sawing off the bough, for there had been other times when it interfered with the sound of her husband’s coming. She stretched her bare legs on the hard pine floor of the porch to cool them, but the boards were hot against her skin. She brushed back a strand of hair from her forehead and her hand came away wet.

Milford stirred in his cushioned rocker. “If that last pond’s dried up, I got my mind made up what to do,” he said. “Nobody livin’ can keep my stock from water.”