He started before sunrise the next morning, pulling tractors one at a time onto a set of jack stands in the yard. The first one would not turn over at all. The second cranked but had no oil pressure. The third had a wiring harness so corroded the connectors had fused solid. By the end of two days he had opened nine tractors and gotten exactly none of them running. The gap between what he had pictured at the auction and what he was actually looking at in the yard felt a lot wider than it had from a distance.
He nearly gave up on the fourth night. He sat in the shed with the overhead bulb buzzing and his grandfather's ledger open on the bench. Decades of notes on that engine family. Fault patterns. Torque specs. Which seals wore out first and why. Otis had never gone to a trade school for any of it. He had learned it by doing the same repair two hundred times and writing down what he found. Isaiah pulled three tractors from the matched group and lined them up side by side. The first had a healthy engine and a dead hydraulic pump. The second had a seized engine and hydraulics that still held pressure clean. The third had good hydraulics, a good engine, and a transmission stuck in neutral. He pulled the engine from the first and the hydraulic pump from the second and mounted both into the third tractor's frame, which had the cleanest chassis of the group and a transmission he could still salvage. It took most of a day routing lines, torquing mounts, bleeding the hydraulic system by hand the way his grandfather's notes described. Close to midnight, he turned the key. The engine caught on the third try. He let it idle, checked for leaks, and lowered the loader arm. It moved smooth, no shudder.
Dale Pruitt heard about the running tractor from somebody at the auction yard and showed up at the Callaway place two days later. He looked over the rows of stripped hulks and the one tractor sitting clean by the shed door, engine idling, and made an offer. Twenty-six hundred for the whole lot. Right now. Take it or leave it. He called it doing Isaiah a favor. Isaiah looked at the running tractor for a second, then told him no. Pruitt did not come back with a second number. He got in his truck and left.
Isaiah's next problem was not whether the idea worked. One tractor had proven that much. It was that getting one running had taken the better part of a week, and at that pace he would be old before he worked through the rest of the matched group. He needed to size up a tractor fast. Fuel and power first, then oil pressure, then hydraulics, then drivetrain, instead of tearing into it blind. He spent three days sorting the failures he had already seen into categories and building a rough checklist he taped inside the shed door. By the tenth tractor, diagnosis had dropped from most of a day to under an hour.