Johnny filled the buckets with the same, flat, oily-looking white fluid that Sally had been producing since Wednesday. The scientist began to show mild interest. Johnny finished, stripped the cow, and then carried the pails out and set them down beside the first two. "O.K., now look them over yourself," he told Peterson. The scientist peered into the buckets. Johnny handed him a ladle. "Look, Culpepper," Peterson said, "I'm a physicist, not a farmer or an agricultural expert. How do you expect me to know what milk is supposed to do? Until I was fifteen years old, I thought the milk came out of one of those spigots and the cream out of another." "Stir it," Johnny ordered. The scientist took the ladle angrily and poked at the milk in Queenie's buckets. "Taste it," Johnny said. Peterson glared at the younger man and then took a careful sip of the milk. Some of the froth clung to his lips and he licked it off. "Taste like milk to me," he said. "Smell it," Johnny ordered. Peterson sniffed. "O.K., now do the same things to the other buckets." Peterson swished the ladle through the buckets containing Sally's milk. The white liquid swirled sluggishly and oillike. He bent over and smelled and made a grimace. "Go on," Johnny demanded, "taste it." Peterson took a tiny sip, tasted and then spat. "All right," he said, "I'm now convinced that there's something different about this milk. I'm not saying anything is wrong with it because I wouldn't know. All I'm admitting is that it is different. So what?" "Come on," Johnny took the ladle from him. He carried the buckets of Queenie's milk into the cooler room and dumped them in a small pasturizer. Then carrying the two pails of Sally's milk, Johnny and the physicist left the barn and went to the shattered remains of the tractor shed. Fumbling under wrecked and overturned tables and workbenches, Johnny found an old and rusted pie tin. Placing the tin in the middle of the open spaces of the yard, he turned to Peterson. "Now you
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