They laugh at her for almost a month. Then one phone call rings, and the laughter dies."$55!"The girl raised her arm high in the middle of the Lindquist farm sale, and for one second, the whole crowd went silent. Then Cal Rudd burst out laughing so hard he had to grab the side of a pickup to stay on his feet. Thirty grown men and women laughing at a 12-year-old who had just put every dollar she owned on a rusted iron drum."Go on, kid! Cut those wires!" Cal hollered. "Open it up and show us what $55 of junk looks like!"The girl had a pair of wire cutters in her jacket pocket. Would she use them?Her name was Junie Halverson. She did not reach into her pocket. She lowered her arm slow and careful, and walked straight through the laughing crowd to the thing she had just bought. She laid her hand flat on the cold iron, the way you settle a nervous horse, and stood there and let them laugh.What she had bought was a cylindrical iron canister, almost two meters long. It had sat in a corner of the grain barn for longer than anyone could remember, and that morning, a tractor had dragged it out into the yard. It was caked in grain dust and bird droppings. The lid was fastened with six heavy bolts, and through each bolt ran a length of steel wire, the end of each wire sealed with a flat lead tag stamped with a stalk of wheat. Along the side ran a line of faded white paint:Department of Agriculture – National Seed Bank. Do not open without witnesses.The sale bill read: Lot 77, one large iron canister, contents unknown. Buyer to remove within 7 days.Now, back to that farmyard, and how an iron canister went for $55.Garrett Moe, the auctioneer, had been trying to sell it for twenty minutes. He had started at $400 and gotten nothing. He had dropped to $200, then to $100. Then he had pushed his hat back and said into the microphone, "Folks, I'll sell it to anybody with a pulse."Nobody moved. That was when Cal Rudd stepped up.Cal owned Rudd Feed and Grain out on the highway. He was a big, heavyset man in a red jacket who liked to be the loudest voice at every sale. If you had bought seed, fertilizer, or livestock feed anywhere in the county in the last twenty years, you had bought it from Cal. And he had never once forgotten to remind you he'd done you a favor.