by Ralph Moody
The belt I got for Hazel wasn’t quite as fancy as the one Sid made for Jenny, but it was a real pretty one. And I got something for Kenny and Martha and the littler girls—but I liked the belt best of all.
It was twilight on the Monday before Labor Day when we brought our trail herd in to the home ranch. Of course, it was too late then for Hazel and me to ride out to our secret spring, but we did walk around the corrals, and looked at the new cows, and named some of them; and I gave her the belt.
While we were feeding pieces of biscuit to Blueboy, Hazel got tears in her eyes, and when I asked her what the trouble was, she said, “I got to take back what I said to you at the horse-pickin’. It was a lie! I said you’d be sorry all the rest of your life if you ever picked Blueboy, but not you, nor nobody . . . nor anybody else could be sorry now.”
“I guess I was just lucky,” I said. “I guess I was lucky when I picked every single one of my string. Did you ever think of it: if I hadn’t picked Clay and Pinch I’d have been out on trading trips all summer?”
Hazel didn’t really lean against me, but we were standing sort of close together, and we touched when she turned her face up to look at me, and asked, “Why do you think I told you which ones to pick, Ralph?”
That was the first time I ever wanted to kiss a girl, but I didn’t. Hazel whirled away and raced for the house. With my high-heeled boots and chaps on, I couldn’t run fast enough to catch her.
About the Author
RALPH OWEN MOODY was born December 16, 1898, in Rochester, N. H. His father was a farmer whose illness forced the family to move to Colorado when Ralph was eight years old. The family’s life in the new surroundings is told from the point of view of the boy himself in Little Britches.
The farm failed and the family moved into Littleton, Colorado, when Ralph was about eleven. Soon after, the elder Moody died of pneumonia, leaving Ralph as the oldest boy, the man of the family. After a year or so—described in Man of the Family and The Home Ranch—Mrs. Moody brought her three sons and three daughters back to Medford, Mass., where Ralph completed his formal education through the eighth grade of grammar school. This is the period of Mary Emma & Company. Later, Ralph joined his maternal grandfather on his farm in Maine—the period covered in The Fields of Home.
A new series of books, about Ralph’s experiences as a young man, starts with Shaking The Nickel Bush.
In spite of his farming experience, Ralph Moody was not destined to be a farmer. He abandoned the land because his wife was determined to raise her family (they have three children) in the city.
“When I was twenty-one,” he writes, “I got a diary as a birthday present and I wrote in it that I was going to work as hard as I could, save fifty thousand dollars by the time I was fifty, and then start writing.” True to his word, he did start writing on the night of his fiftieth birthday.
—Adapted from the Wilson Library Bulletin
