When the auctioneer reached the back of the yard just before noon, the crowd that followed him had thinned. People had bought what they came for and drifted toward the food or the parking lot. The auctioneer, a heavyset man with a voice like a chainsaw, stood on the bed of a flatbed truck and looked down the row with the expression of a man reading a eulogy for someone he had not much liked.
"Folks, lot two-eighteen. Sixty tractors, sold as a single unit. As is, where is. Removal in fourteen days. Who'll start me at ten thousand?"
Silence.
"Five thousand. Five thousand for sixty tractors, folks, that's less than a hundred dollars a tractor."
Somebody snorted. A man near the front said, "You'd have to pay me to haul them."
"Two thousand. Anybody. Two thousand dollars."
Nothing. The auctioneer looked at his clerk. The clerk looked at her clipboard. Gordon Hale, who had drifted back to watch, crossed his arms and smiled the small, satisfied smile of a man who has been proven right in public.
"All right," the auctioneer said. "I'm told to ask for an opening bid. Any bid. Somebody give me a number so I can tell the bank I tried."
And from the back of the crowd, in a voice that was not loud but carried anyway, the way a calm voice carries in a room full of people who expect noise, Earl Whitaker said:
"One thousand."
Every head turned.
The auctioneer blinked. "One thousand. I have one thousand dollars. Do I hear eleven hundred?"
He did not hear eleven hundred. He did not hear anything at all except a low, rising murmur that broke, about three seconds later, into the laughter.
"Going once. Going twice." The gavel came down on the bed of the truck with a sound like a rifle shot. "Sold, for one thousand dollars, to the gentleman in the red cap."
And that was when the man in the seed company cap slapped his knee, and somebody whistled the falling bomb, and Gordon Hale shook his head slowly and turned away.
Earl folded his bidder card in half and looked down the row.
He did not see what they saw. He never had.