MOST OF THE TALENTS OF GIFTED PEOPLE nowadays are given over to satisfy the needs of a company. Talented people trade their gifts to organizations in exchange for hourly wages.

A few loners of great talent still hold out against the company and apply their talents in ways that they alone dictate. They find a way to dedicate themselves to their own life's work. The better they are at producing, out of their own camp, the goods, services, or arts that people want, the more they enjoy the fruits of their own independence. Maintaining this state of affairs means more to them than an hourly paycheck. Companies and front offices don't figure in their scenario.

COWBOYS ARE THE KIND THAT LIVE their own way. They trade their talents cheap to the company for enough room, board, and spending money to keep their tools and gear in shape, and to stay alive. They would not do this unless their work paid them in better ways than money. They would be fools to cowboy for the money, because they never see much of it. They give their care to livestock, because they need to see it thrive. When they can see that it has all the feed, water, and shelter it needs, they are compensated.

A cowboy is also compensated when he develops as a hand, as when he sharpens his power of observation. He likes it when he has learned to recognize a sick animal a half mile away by the way he walks, holds his head, or switches his tail. He feels compensated when he is wise enough to know that the grass he provides will begin to put tallow on his animals. He storehouses the knowledge he gains, taking satisfaction from knowing he can read the signs-such as when livestock will lie down and rest or jump up and run. He finds great strength and proficiency in his tools. With a horse, saddle, and rope he can catch an animal several times his size, lay it down, and give it the care it needs.

A cowboy develops great talents that are in demand, but usually only his comrades know about them. The company won't let on that it knows, and cowboy talents aren't advertised much. The livestock knows, but doesn't appreciate them when it's trying to get away. Another of a cowboy's compensations that cannot be measured in dollars is the camaraderie of a crew. With so much of his time devoted to lonely vigils and labors, with no one to talk to but his animals and no way to show off his prowess, he values the moments when he can mix with other cowboys and swap stories or enjoy another cook's chuck, whether it's on a roundup or at a rodeo.

Stories told to a crew at supper about the day's work are usually well seasoned with laughter. A brag is mostly met with silence, and so is a sad story. Cowboys are allowed, even encouraged, by other cowboys to tell windies, but they don't get many brags, and are never allowed to get plumb down and sorrowful. The tales and the way they are told are also part of a hand's education in the cowboy way, and never ends.

One cowpuncher author who grew up knowing what it is to work alone as well as with a crew, to go it afoot or horseback, and to do it all with great good humor, is Max Evans of Albuquerque, N.M. At 82 he has rightly attained a special stature among chroniclers of the cowboy way. With two of his novels (The Rounders, The Hi-Lo Country) made into movies and the rest of his output deemed Western classics, Evans' place among Western writers is secure. Last year, in the New York Times' profile of Evans, writer Ralph Blumenthal called him "a cowboy, painter, prospector, land trader, and used car dealer," but Evans' reputation stands on his cowboying credentials.

Charles Champlin said of Evans: "He understands the present West better than anyone else, what it's like to be there now living in two worlds of the pickup truck and the bronco."

Evans was an observer from his earliest days. As a youngster he could sit still for long hours to read, listen to cowboy tales, or lose himself in movie matinees. Those events, fun as they were, also served him as his principle education. Had he been able to sit for as many hours at a desk in a classroom doing figures and conjugations as he actually did spend sitting a horse holding herd, he might have become a necktie salesman, but never the famed cowboy, painter, and writer that he became.

When Evans' stories first emerged, nobody had written about cowboying in the language used in the bunkhouse, around a herd, or on a fence line. The literature that existed was in language that cowboys used only around women and children. Most stories, novels, paintings, and movies with cowboys as their protagonists were Boo-Hoo, Kiss-Kiss, Bang-Bang epics with "cowboy" heroes. Only Will James had written about the work real cowboys did with no audience, no ticket sales, and no background music. However, James' prose was in the language cowboys used only around women and kids and maybe old preachers, when they knew any.

Evans at a book signing in Santa Fe. Beside him is Slim Randles, a New Mexico writer and the author of a biography of Evans entitled Ol' Max Evans: The First Thousand Years.

Max Evans was the first who wrote fiction about the men who spoke bad words when manure hit them in the face, but sat their horses right all day and cleaned up their vocabulary and put on a clean shirt when they went to supper with the boss's family. Evans' goodhumored stories about cowboy mischief, cussing, and cussedness, and the unsentimental way cowboys expressed themselves about the life they loved, brought the first real truth about cowboys to American literature. All by himself, Evans took the monumental risk of making himself and his kind unpopular, but it worked. Americans like his cowboys better.

Max Allen Evans was born on Roundup Street in Ropes, Texas, Aug. 29, 1924. Ropes was only a rope corral that held cattle on a West Texas railhead. His father W.B Evans was a cattle rancher, storekeeper, inventor, adventurer, judge, and trader. Hazel Evans, his mother, was the daughter of Bob Swafford, a pioneer who traded in everything from ranches to livestock and kept hounds and whiskey for fun. Hazel's mother was a Cherokee medicine woman.

Interviewed at his studio in Albuquerque, Evans said, "I grew up a loner, but I had a lot of friends and my folks let me come and go as I pleased. After the blizzard of 1918 wiped everybody out, my daddy gave half his ranch in Lea County, New Mexico, to his widowed sister, Pearl Nettles. He founded Humble City on the other half.

"As soon as I could ride out alone on my horses Cricket and Dolly, Aunt Pearl hired me to look after her cattle. The country was starved out, so I had to dayherd them to find feed. They stayed together, because they knew I helped them survive. I had a Winchester .22 and hunted for meat. I always say that rabbits saved the world, because they were often the only meat we had at home.

"I needed to be observant to help those cows. I was alone with them so much, we became one unit. I also observed that grownups who knew cows were the best kind to teach me about life.

"I was 10 when a one-eyed cowboy named Boggs landed in Ropes. A man at the stockyards owned a paint bronc he wanted ridden. The horse had crippled a bunch of cowboys, but Boggs hired on to ride him, and that right away qualified him as my hero.

"Everybody in the country came to bet money on the contest. A cowboy snubbed Paint to a saddle horse and blindfolded him while Boggs climbed on. The blindfold came off and Paint bucked into the fence, knocked himself down and landed on Boggs' leg. Boggs stayed with him when he jumped up and rode him down the railroad tracks where he fell again. This time Boggs stepped off and let him go on to act the fool all by himself. Grandfather Evans judged the contest a draw and called off all bets to keep the peace."

It was at about this time that Evans' father bought 25 horses from a ranch in Lea County, near Jal, N.M., hiring Boggs, accompanied by Max, to drive them to a sale in Oklahoma. Evans recalls that Boggs didn't have a saddle. Outside Jal, the one-eyed cowboy pulled up and called him over for a talk.

"He said, 'Youngster, I'm worried. If you ride all the way to Oklahoma in that old saddle, you'll end up bowlegged as me. You're only a growing boy and that saddle will put a terrible bow in your legs. If you ride bareback, your legs will grow straight in the natural way. You can do as you please, but I suggest you turn that saddle over to me. I'll keep it limber and give it back when you head home.' And that's how Boggs conned me into riding across three states bareback.

"On the trail, we'd drive the horses for a day, then let them graze a day. We started in May and finished in the middle of August. Boggs talked every step of the way. My attention strayed from time to time, but his stories taught me a lot and the repetition made it sink in.

"Although feed was scarce on the trail, the horses' condition picked up. Boggs had a coyote's instinct for finding grass. We'd start out one way, then he'd change our direction and before long we'd find green grass where a spot of rain had fallen.

"I rode a gray mare that had a nice rein on her. She was a survivor and the farther we went, the more I learned from her. Then a flash flood caught us on the Canadian River near Amarillo and she drowned. I came so close to bawling, I couldn't talk for days. "We delivered the horses to my dad's uncle, Pit Emery, who auctioned them off in Guymon. They sold so well that the rough ride home in the back of a pickup didn't bother me at all. Uncle Pit had eight kids and the money boosted both our families through the rest of the Depression. Boggs and I had pulled it off. When we started out I don't think anyone believed we had enough ante in the deal to get in a marble game."

Evans was 11 years old and wanted to find work on a big outfit where he could learn to be a top hand. With his parents' blessing, he boarded the bus to Lamy, N.M., where his uncle Slim Evans rode rough string for Pete Coleman in the Glorieta Mesa country.

"My Uncle Slim was a cowboy all his life and wanted to see all the country he could," Evans said. "He took me out to Coleman's, gave me a bed that hadn't been rolled out since the Mexican War, and told me he was about to leave for Montana.

"The next day I helped the crew drive a herd to the top of Glorieta Mesa and found myself in the big middle of some big, lonesome hardscrabble country. I made friends right away with Little Joe MacDonald, a boy from a neighboring ranch who came to help. He spoke Spanish as well as English and began to teach me.

"Slim found me a job on Ed and Mother Lucy Young's Rafter EY ranch before he left. He never worked any way but horseback. He married three or four times, but was too wild to stay. He enjoyed great renown as a horse breaker, even after he became too old to step up on a bronc safely. After he got on he could ride the hair off one. "Later in life he worked on a lot of rich dude outfits and women flocked to him. Once, I had the guts to ask him why he hadn't settled down with a rich woman on his own outfit.

"He said, 'Because I didn't want to spend the rest of my life doing this,' and he reached behind his back with his palm upturned, like a bellhop does when he takes a tip on the sly. On a high mountain in the Sierra Nevadas, he died and fell off his horse at 83.

"On the Rafter EY, Old Snip, the horse Ed Young gave me to ride, began to teach me cowboying. I did the headquarters chores, worked cattle with the crew, and was often loaned out to help the neighbors.

"Mother Young's children Eddie and Lawrence were grown and gone, so she gave me a room in the main house, but I slept in the bunkhouse when a crew was borrowed from other outfits. My mother had taught me to read before I started school, because I couldn't wait. I read everything I could find, from pulp Western magazines to American literature. The Youngs had a small library where I discovered the novels of Honore de Balzac, the great literary giant of 1800s French literature. I also liked to draw. When I wasn't cowboying, I read and sketched.

"All my best friends were older men. I didn't think of myself as a kid and nobody treated me as one. Old man Gould, the tough old gentleman who ran the San Cristobal ranch, liked to read and talk books with me. Every cowboy in the country liked to be loaned out to the San Cristobal, because it fed the help good.

"Bill Ward, the best cowboy I ever knew, had been on the old trail drives. Nobody knew cattle the way he did or had worked in as many different countries. Folks who didn't know him wrote him off as old and broke-down, but he'd worked in the brush, rock, and rolling hills, on big outfits and little ones, and was still the best of the top hands.

"One day, Bill and I were way out where we thought no other humans go and suddenly rode on to a tent camp of archeologists from Harvard. They had found the bones of some critter called the feightasaur and were digging for more. After the head man conversed with Bill a while, he thought he'd discovered a new prehistoric species. As one of the intellectual elite, he thought he would find out everything Cowboy Bill knew in about five minutes, so to loosen him up he offered him a drink of whiskey. To humor the man, Bill lightened his bottle by half in six swallows.

" 'Mr. Ward,' the archeologist said, 'I guess the West was still plenty wild when you were young.' Bill could tell he wanted a fable about shooting scrapes.

" 'Yes, it was,' Bill said. 'The broncs we rode had to be blindfolded and eared down so we could get on and ride to work.

"Disappointed in that answer, the archeologist said, "You did shoot a man or two in your time, didn't you?"

" 'No,' Bill said. 'We all thought it best to run from fellers with guns. When we had to shoot somebody, we waited until he slept and shot him in the head so he wouldn't know what hit him. That was painless for us and a favor we did for the one we shot.' "

Another good friend and mentor to Evans was Eldon Butler. "Eldon ran his cattle by himself on a lease the south end of the San Cristobal," Evans said. "I loved it when the Youngs loaned me out to him. He kept a kerosene-run ice box stocked with homemade ice cream and beer. I thought Eldon's camp was the most magic palace in the world.

"My time on the Rafter EY was the turning point of my life," Evans said with satisfaction. "Those veteran cowboys enjoyed being my mentors, Ed Young began my education in ranching, and I discovered Honore de Balzac."