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something about it. Wendell—I didn’t dare think of him as Sparrowhead just then—was examining me as if he hadn’t seen me every day of the past couple of years. “I hear you’re getting a trip to Minnesota.”
    â€œWisconsin.”
    â€œNuhhuh.” This strangulated utterance was a habit of his. Gram said it made him sound like he was constipated in the tonsils. “It amounts to about the same, back there.” I suppose trying to be civil, he drawled, “Come to say ‘Aw river,’ have you?”
    The joke about “au revoir,” if that was what it was, went over my head. “Uh, not exactly,” I stammered in spite of myself. “It’s about something else.” He waited expressionlessly for me to get it out. Heaven only knew what rash requests had been heard in this office down through the years by one poker-faced Double W boss or the next. None quite like mine, though. “What it is, I want to get your autograph.”
    He gave me a beady look, as if suspicious I was making fun of him. I quickly displayed the autograph book. “Mered—Mrs. Williamson—already put in her name and a sort of ditty for me.”
    That changed his look, not necessarily for the better. “She did you the honor, did she. You must have caught her when she wasn’t packing up for Beverly Hills again.” He reluctantly put out a paw-like hand, saying he guessed he’d better keep up with her any way he could. Taking the album from me, he splayed it on the desk with the practiced motion of someone who had written out hundreds of paychecks, a good many of them to cooks he’d fired. I waited anxiously until he handed back what he wrote.
    In the game of life, don’t lose your marbles.
    Wendell Williamson
    Double W ranch
    in the great state of Montana
    â€œGee, thanks,” I managed. “That’s real good advice.”
    He grunted and fiddled busily with some papers on his desk, which was supposed to be a signal for me to leave. When I did not, he frowned. “Something else on your mind?”
    I had rehearsed this, my honest reason for braving the ranch boss in his lair, over and over in my head, and even so it stumbled out.
    â€œI, uh, sort of hoped I could get a haying job. Instead of, you know. Wisconsin.”
    Wendell could not hide his surprise. “Nuhhuh. Doing what?”
    I thought it was as obvious as the nose on his face. “Driving the stacker team.”
    This I could see clear as anything, myself paired with the tamest workhorses on the place, everyone’s favorites, Prince and Blackie, just like times on the hay sled last winter when whoever was pitching hay to the cows let me handle the reins. The hayfield job was not much harder than that, simply walking the team of horses back and forth, pulling a cable that catapulted a hayfork load onto the stack. Kids my age,
girls
even, drove the stacker team on a lot of ranches. And once haying season got underway and gave me the chance to show my stuff at driving the easy pair of horses, it all followed: Even the birdbrain behind the desk would figure out that in me he had such a natural teamster he’d want to keep me around as a hayhand every summer, which would save Gram’s spot as cook after her recuperation, and the cook shack would be ours again. To my way of thinking, how could a plan be more of a cinch than that?
    I waited expectantly for the boss of the Double W to say something like “Oh man, great idea! Why didn’t I think of that myself?”
    Instead he sniffed in a dry way and uttered, “We’re gonna use the Power Wagon on that.”
    No-o-o!
something inside me cried. The Power Wagon for
that
? The thing was a huge beast of a vehicle, half giant jeep and half truck. Talk about a sparrowheaded idea; only a couple of horsepower, which was to say two horses, were required to hoist hay onto a stack, and he was going to employ the