Decision by Allen Drury Page A

with mock admiration. “How do you do it?”
    “I’ll show you sometime,” she said shortly. “Now can we get back on the track, please? That must have been a tough talk you had with your father.”
    “Not really,” he said; and looking back now he could see that it really hadn’t been, although at first his father, as always, appeared massive, formidable and quite overwhelming to the nervous and genuinely frightened youth Tay was then.
    “Let’s take a walk,” Frank Barbour suggested next night after dinner; and, “Yes, sir,” he said humbly, thinking, Oh, my God, here it comes. What will I do? But his mother gave him an encouraging smile and a definite nod that said: Don’t worry. That was comforting but not enough to make it an easy walk. It was a silent one, ending in the middle of the newly plowed fields when his father broke the silence with an abrupt “Let’s stop here.”
    Tay would always remember what a beautiful spring evening it was, the air soft and warm with the smell of fresh-turned earth, the valley stretching away below as far as the eye could see, the western range falling into darkness behind them, the eastern still aglow with the gently fading purple light. He would find his private tranquility here many, many times in the future but it was not here now. He felt frightened, miserable, terribly tense and just plain sick.
    “You see all this,” Frank Barbour said with a quick, almost embarrassed gesture that encompassed it.
    “Yes, sir,” he said.
    “Four thousand acres of it belong to us. That’s a mighty damned hell of a lot.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    His father stopped quickly, scooped up a handful of the rich black soil, let it dribble through his fingers.
    “It’s damned fine ground, too,” he said harshly, as though someone were arguing with him.
    “Yes, sir!” agreed Tay, who wouldn’t have dreamed of it. Or dared to.
    Frank Barbour swung around and looked him squarely in the face.
    “Why don’t you like it?”
    “I do like it!” he cried then, halfway between tears and anger. “I love the ranch! You know that! I love the ranch!”
    “That isn’t the way I hear it.”
    “Then you don’t hear the truth!” He paused for a moment, everything heightened by emotion, the earth darker, the sky bluer, the mountains sharper, his heritage everywhere more lovely. “Who told you that?” he demanded finally, voice shaking. “That isn’t true!”
    “Your mother and your teacher say you want to leave it.”
    “But that doesn’t mean I don’t love it!” he protested, quivering with the unfairness of it. “They didn’t say that!”
    “No,” his father admitted grudgingly. “But they said you like something else more.”
    For a moment he didn’t answer, knowing that it would be one of the most decisive answers he would ever give to anything. Then he said, very low, “Yes sir.”
    A silence fell, evening deepened, night advanced. Finally his father spoke, more softly and more reasonably.
    “Tell me about it.”
    “I like the law,” he said, voice still shaking at first but growing calmer and steadier as he went along; and not deterred by his father’s first derisive “Hmph!”
    “Yes, sir,” he said, more strongly, ‘I think I want to be a lawyer.”
    “Hmph!” his father said again, but this time in so much more reasonable a tone that Tay was emboldened to tell him, with a shaky little laugh, “And don’t say Hmph! It can be an honorable profession.”
    “Really?”
    “Don’t you think it will be when your son is in it?” he demanded like a flash; and before he knew it his father had started laughing, and after a tentative moment he joined in, though at first he didn’t quite know why.
    “That’s mighty sharp,” Frank Barbour said, still chuckling. “Mighty quick. You turned it right back on me. Maybe you wouldn’t be such a bad lawyer, at that.”
    “Then you’ll let me—” he began eagerly. But his father held up a hand.
    “Slow down, now.