“The rock doesn’t have to be very funny to make you forget what you’re told to do,” his father said curtly, and added to the others: “His mother can’t keep pockets in his clothes for the rocks he packs around in them, and they’re piled all over the house. He wants her to send away and get him a book about rocks.”
“Perhaps he’ll be one of these rock-sharps when he gets big,” suggested Mr. Mosher humorously. “Wouldn’t it be kinda nice to have a perfesser in the family—with long hair and goggles? I come acrost one once that hunted bugs. He called a chinch bug a Rhyparochromus, but he saddled his horse without a blanket and put bakin’ powder in the sour-dough.”
In the same way that the farmer’s wife knew that boys liked gizzards, she knew that Bruce was writhing under the attention and the ridicule.
“He’ll be a cattleman like his dad,” and she smiled upon him.
His father shook his head.
“No, he doesn’t take hold right. Why, even when I was his age I could tell a stray in the bunch as far as I could see it, and he don’t know the milk cow when she gets outside of the barn. I tell his mother I’m goin’ to work him over again with a trace strap——”
The sensitive boy could bear no more. He gave one regretful glance at his heaping plate, a shamed look at Mrs. Mosher, then sprang to his feet and faced his father.
“I won’t learn cattle, and you can’t make me!” he cried, with blazing eyes. “And you won’t work me over with a trace strap! You’ve licked me all I’ll stand. I’ll go away! I’ll run away, and I won’t come home till I’m white as a darned sheep!”
“Bruce!” His father reached for his collar, but the boy was gone. His chair tipped over, and his precious rock dropped from his shirt front and bounced on the floor. It was a precious rock, too, a fragment of meteorite, one which fell perhaps in the shower of meteoric stones in Iowa in ’79.