"Can you help me?"
He sighed.
"Yes."
That was the last time Gene Vickers appeared in the story as a skeptic.
To understand why Della spent sixty dollars on something everybody else considered worthless, you have to understand that she had been thinking about those carrots for nearly three months.
The bid was not an impulse.
It was the final move in a calculation.
Della Mae Mayes was born in 1940 on a beef and hay operation six miles outside Viroqua.
She was the second of four children and the only one who cared much about the horses.
Her father, Raymond Mayes, owned two hundred eighty acres of hilly ground.
Most of it was better suited to cattle, hay, and pasture than to serious row cropping.
Raymond understood the limitations of the land without resenting them.
He was not romantic about farming.
He did not talk about sunsets.
He did not describe the soil as sacred.
He did not trust luck.
He trusted arithmetic.
Every January he bought three green-covered composition notebooks from the hardware store in Viroqua.
One was for farm income.
One was for expenses.
The third was spare.
Raymond wrote in handwriting so small and exact it looked printed.
Seed.
Wire.
Veterinary work.
Fuel.
Machinery parts.
Salt blocks.
Property tax.
Milk.
Egg income.
Cattle sales.
Hay.
Every dollar went into the ledger.
When Della was nine, Raymond discovered her sitting beside him at the kitchen table watching him add a column.
He handed her the pencil.
"Check this."
Della looked at the numbers.
"I don't know how."
"You know addition."
"Not like this."
"It's the same addition."
She spent twenty minutes checking a page.
She found a ten-cent error.
Raymond stared at the total.
Then at his daughter.
"Again."
She checked.
The error was real.
After that, Della became part of the bookkeeping.
Raymond taught her a rule she would remember for the rest of her life.
"The ledger tells the truth whether you like it or not."
Della once asked:
"What if you don't write something down?"
"Then you're lying to yourself."
He closed the book.
"Most farms don't fail because the farmer can't grow anything."
"They fail because the farmer doesn't know what it costs him to grow it."
Della was nine.
She understood only part of that.
By thirty-one, she understood all of it.
Raymond kept four horses.
Two were Belgian drafts named Albert and Clarence.
They pulled logs from the woodlot and worked wet ground when the tractor sank.
The other two were a chestnut mare named Pepper and Pepper's foal.
Della named the foal Biscuit.
At eleven, she started spending every spare hour around him.
At thirteen, she decided she was going to break him to saddle.
Raymond offered to help.
Della said she wanted to do it herself.
She found a library book on horse training.
The book provided instructions.
Biscuit provided corrections.
If Della moved too quickly, he stepped away.
If she tightened the saddle too suddenly, his ears flattened.
If she stayed patient, he relaxed.
Della started watching instead of forcing.
That became the foundation of the horse sense people later called unusual.
Raymond watched from the fence.
He rarely interfered.
One afternoon his wife, Margaret, joined him.
Raymond nodded toward Della and Biscuit.
"She has a feel for it."