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has reached his goal in life when he gets a title on his door and a corner office with two windows instead of one. But I’m not a businessman. I am a full-time cockfighter.
    My goal in life was that little silver coin, not quite as large as a Kennedy half dollar. On one side of the medal there is an engraved statement: Cockfighter of the Year. In the center, the year the award is given is engraved in Arabic numerals. At the bottom of the coin are three capital letters: S.C.T. These letters stand for Southern Conference Tournament.
    To a noncocker, this desire might sound childish but, to a cockfighter, this award is his ultimate achievement in one of the toughest sports in the world. The medal is awarded to the man Senator Jacob Foxhall decides to give it to at the completion of the annual S.C.T. held in Milledgeville, Georgia. However, Senator Foxhall doesn’t always see fit to award the medal. In the last fifteen years he has only awarded the medal to four cockfighters. Ed Middleton was one of them.
    In addition to the medal there is a cash award of one thousand dollars. In effect, the cocker who wins this award has the equivalent of a paid-up insurance policy. He can demand a minimum fee of one hundred and fifty dollars a day as a referee from any pit operator in the South, and the operator considers it an honor to pay him. To a cocker, this medal means as much as the Nobel Prize does to a scientist. If that doesn’t convey an exact meaning of the award, I can state it simpler. The recipient is the best damned cockfighter in the South, and he has the medal to prove it.
    For ten years this medal has been my goal. The S.C.T. is the toughest pit tourney in the United States, and a cockfighter can’t enter his game fowl without an invitation. Only top men in the game receive invitations, and I had been getting mine for eight years—even during the two years I was in the Army and stationed in the Philippine Islands.
    A vow of silence, however, isn’t necessary to compete for the award. That had been my own idea, and not a very bright one either, but I was too damned stubborn to break it.
    Three years before I had been riding high on the list of eligible S.C.T. cockfighters. In a hotel room in Biloxi, I had gotten drunk with a group of chicken men and shot off my big mouth, boasting my Ace cock, a Red Madigan named Freelance.
    Another drunken breeder challenged me, and we staged the fight in the hotel room. Freelance killed the other cock easily, but in the fight he received a slight battering. The next day at the scheduled S.C.T. pitting, I had been forced to pit Freelance again because I had posted a two-hundred-dollar forfeit, and I had been too shamed to withdraw. Freelance lost, and I had lost my chance for the award.
    A few weeks later, while brooding about this lost fight, a fight that had been lost by my personal vanity and big mouth, I made my self-imposed vow of silence. I intended to keep the vow until I was awarded that little silver medal. No one, other than myself, knew about my vow, and I could have broken it at any time without losing face. But I would know, and I had to shave every day. At first it had been hell, especially when I had had a few drinks and wanted to get in on the chicken talk in a bar or around the cockhouses at a game club. But I had learned how to live with it.
    On the day Mr. Middleton picked me up in his Cadillac at Captain Mack’s trailer court in Belle Glade, I hadn’t said a word to anyone in two years and seven months.
    â€œYou’re a hard man to talk to since you lost your voice!” Ed Middleton boomed in his resonant baritone.
    With a slight start, I turned and grinned at him.
    â€œI mean it,” he said seriously. “I feel like a radio announcer talking into a microphone in a soundproof room. I know I must be reaching somebody, but I’ll be damned if I know who it is. You’ve changed a lot in the last three years, Frank. I know