On the seventeenth day of June Hiram had “grappled out” a mess of potatoes for their dinner. They were larger than hen's eggs and came upon the table mealy and white.
Potatoes were selling at retail in Scoville for two dollars the bushel. Before the end of that week—after the lowland corn was planted—Hiram dug two rows of potatoes, sorted them, and carted them to town, together with some bunched beets, a few bunches of young carrots, radishes and salad.
The potatoes he sold for fifty cents the five-eighth basket, from house to house, and he brought back, for his load of vegetables, ten dollars and twenty cents, which he handed to Mrs. Atterson, much to that lady's joy.
“My soul and body, Hiram!” she exclaimed. “This is just a God-send—no less. Do you know that we've sold nigh twenty-five dollars' worth of stuff already this spring, besides that pair of pigs I let Pollock have, and the butter to St. Beris?”
“And it's only a beginning,” Hiram told her. “Wait til' the peas come along—we'll have a mess for the table in a few days now. And the sweet corn and tomatoes.
“If you and Sister can do the selling, it will help out a whole lot, of course. I wish we had another horse.”
“Or an automobile,” said Sister, clapping her hands. “Wouldn't it be fine to run into town in an auto, with a lot of vegetables? Then Hiram could keep right at work with the horse and not have to stop to harness up for us.”
“Shucks, child!” admonished Mrs. Atterson. “What big idees you do get in that noddle o' yourn.”
The girls' boarding school and the two hotels proved good customers for Hiram's early vegetables; for nobody around Scoville had potatoes at this time, and Hiram's early peas were two weeks ahead of other people's.
Having got a certain number of towns folks to expect him at least thrice a week, when other farmers had green stuff for sale they could not easily “cut out” Hiram later in the season.
And not always did the young farmer have to leave his work at home to deliver the vegetables and Mrs. Atterson's butter. Sister, or the old lady herself, could go to town if the load was not too heavy.
Of course, it cost considerable to live. And hogfood and grain for the horse and cow had to be bought. Hiram was fattening four of the spring shoats against winter. Two they could sell and two kill for their own use.
“Goin' to be big doin's on the Fourth this year, Hiram,” said Henry Pollock, meeting the young farmer on the road from town one day. “Heard about it?”
“In Scoville, do you mean? They're going to have a 'Safe and Sane' Fourth, the Banner says.”
“Nope. We don't think much of goin' to town Fourth of July. And this year there's goin' to be a big picnic in Langdon's Grove—that's up the river, you know.”
“A public picnic?”
“Sure. A barbecue, we call it,” said Henry. “We have one at the Grove ev'ry year. This time the two Sunday Schools is goin' to join and have a big time. You and Sister don't want to miss it. That Mr. Bronson's goin' to give a whole side o' beef, they tell me, to roast over the fires.”
“A big banquet is in prospect, is it?” asked Hiram, smiling.
“And a stew! Gee! you never eat one o' these barbecue stews, did ye? Some of us will go huntin' the day before, and there'll be birds, and squirrels, as well as chickens in that stew—and lima beans, and corn, and everything good you can think of!” and Henry smacked his lips in prospect.
Then he added, bethinking himself of his errand:
“Everybody chips in and gives the things to eat. What'll you give, Hiram?”
“Some vegetables,” said Hiram, quickly. “Mrs. Atterson won't object, I guess. Do they want tomatoes for their stew?”
“Won't be no tomatoes ripe, Hiram,” said Henry, decidedly.
“There won't, eh? You come out and take a look at mine,” said Hiram, laughing.
Of all the rows of vegetables in Hiram's garden plot, the thriftiest and handsomest were the trellised tomato plants. It took nearly half of Sister's time to keep the plants tied up and pinched back, as Hiram had taught her.
But the stalks were already heavily laden with fruit; and those hanging lowest on the sturdy vines were already blushing.
“By Jo!” gasped Henry. “You've done it, ain't you? But the cannery won't take 'em yet awhile—and they'll all be gone before September.”
“The cannery won't get many of my tomatoes,” laughed Hiram. “And these vines properly trained and cultivated as they are, will bear fruit up to frost. You wait and see.”
“I'll have to tell dad to come and look at these. I dunno, Hiram, if you can sell 'em at retail, but you'll git as much for 'em as dad does for his whole crop—just as you said.”
“That's what I'm aiming for,” responded Hiram. “But would the ladies who cook the barbecue stew care for tomatoes, do you think?”
“We never git tomatoes this early,” said Henry. “How about potatoes? And there ain't many folks dug any of theirn yet, but you.”
So, after speaking with Mrs. Atterson, Hiram agreed to supply a barrel of potatoes for the barbecue, and the day before the Fourth, one of the farmers came with a wagon to pick up the supplies.
Everybody at the Atterson farm would go to the grove—that was understood.
“If one knocks off work, the others can,” declared Mother Atterson. “You see that things is left all right for the critters, Hiram, and we'll tend to things indoors so that we can be gone till night.”
“And do, Hiram, look out for my poults the last thing,” cried Sister.
Mrs. Larriper had given Sister a setting of ten turkey eggs and every one of them had hatched under one of Mrs. Atterson's motherly old hens. At first the girl had kept the young turkeys and their foster mother right near the house, so that she could watch them carefully.
But poults are rangy, and these being particularly strong and thrifty, they soon ran the old hen pretty nearly to death.
So Hiram had built a coop into which they could go at night, safe from any vermin, and set it far down in the east lot, near the woods. Sister usually went down with a little grain twice a day to call them up, and keep them tame.
“But when they get big enough to roost in the fall, I expect we'll have to gather that crop with a gun,” Hiram told her, laughing.
Many of the farmers teams were strung out along the road long before Hiram was ready to set out. He had made sure that the spring wagon was in good shape, and he had built an extra seat for it, so that the four rode very comfortably.
Like every other Fourth of July, the sun was broiling hot! And the dust rose in clouds as the faster teams passed their slow old nag.
Mrs. Atterson sat up very primly in her best silk, holding a parasol and wearing a pair of lace mits that had appeared on state occasions for the past twenty years, at least.
Sister was growing like a weed, and it was hard to keep her skirts and sleeves at a proper length. But she was an entirely different looking girl from the boarding house slavey whom Hiram remembered so keenly back in Crawberry.
As for Old Lem Camp, he was as cheerful as Hiram had ever seen him, and showed a deal of interest in everything about the farm, and had proved himself, as Mrs. Atterson had prophesied, a great help.
Scarcely a house along the road was not shut up and the dooryard deserted—for everybody was going to the barbecue. All but the Dickerson family. Sam was at work in the fields, and the haggard Mrs. Dickerson looked dumbly from her porch, with a crying baby in her scrawny arms as the Attersons and Hiram passed.
But Pete was at the barbecue. He was there when Hiram arrived, and he was making himself quite as prominent as anybody.
Indeed, he made himself so obnoxious finally, that one of the rough men who was keeping up the fires threatened to chuck Pete into the biggest one, and then cool him off in the river.
Otherwise, however, the barbecue passed off very pleasantly. The men who governed it saw that no liquor was brought along, and the unruly element to which Pete belonged was kept under with an iron hand.
There was so little “fun”, of a kind, in Pete's estimation that, after the big event of the day—the banquet—he and some of his friends disappeared. And the picnicking ground was a much quieter and pleasanter place after their departure.
The newcomers into the community made many friends and acquaintances that day. Sister was going to school in the fall, and she found many girls of her age whom she would meet there.
Mrs. Atterson met the older ladies, and was invited to join no less than two “Ladies' Aids”, and, as she said, “if she called on all the folks she'd agreed to visit, she'd be goin' ev'ry day from then till Christmas!”
As for Hiram, the men and older boys were rather inclined to jolly him a bit. Not many of them had been upon the Atterson place to see what he had done, but they had heard some stories of his proposed crops that amused them.
When Mr. Bronson, however, whom the local men knew to be a big farmer in the Middle West, and who owned many farms out there now, spoke favorably of Hiram's work, the local men listened respectfully.
“The boy's got it in him to do something,” the Westerner said, in his hearty fashion. “You're eating his potatoes now, I understand. Which one of you can dig early potatoes like those?
“And he's got the best stand of corn in the county.”
“On that river-bottom, you mean?” asked one.
“And on the upland, too. You fellows want to look about you a little. Most of you don't see beyond the end of your noses. You watch out, or Hiram Strong is going to beat every last one of you this year—and that's a run-down farm he's got, at that.”
But Lettie was not at the barbecue, and to tell the truth, Hiram Strong was disappointed.
Despite the fact that she had seemed inclined to snub him, the young farmer was vastly taken with the pretty girl. He had seen nobody about Scoville as attractive as Lettie—nor anywhere else, for that matter!
He was too proud to call at the Bronson place, although Mr. Bronson invited him whenever he saw Hiram. And at first, Lettie had asked him to come, too.
But the Western girl did not like being thwarted in any matter—even the smallest. And when Hiram would not come to take Pete Dickerson's place, the very much indulged girl had showed the young farmer that she was offended.
However, the afternoon at Langdon's Grove passed very pleasantly, and Hiram and his party did not arrive at the farm again until dusk had fallen.
“I'll go down and shut your turkeys up for the night, Sister,” Hiram said, after he had done the other chores for he knew the girl would be afraid to go so far from the house by lantern-light.
And when he reached the turkey coop, 'way down in the field, Hiram was very glad indeed that he had come instead of the girl.
For the coop was empty. There wasn't a turkey inside, or thereabout. It had been dark an hour and more, then, and the poults should long since have been hovered in the coop.
Had some marauding fox, or other “varmint”, run the young turkeys off their reservation? That seemed improbable at this time of year—and so early in the evening. Foxes do not usually go hunting before midnight, nor do other predatory animals.
Hiram had brought the barn lantern with him, and he took a look around the neighborhood of the empty coop.
“My goodness!” he mused, “Sister will cry her eyes out if anything's happened to those little turks. Now, what's this?”
The ground was cut up at a little distance from the coop. He examined the tracks closely.
They were fresh—very fresh indeed. The wheel tracks of a light wagon showed, and the prints of a horse's shod hoofs.
The wagon had been driven down from the main road, and had turned sharply here by the coop. Hiram knew, too, that it had stood there for some time, for the horse had moved uneasily.
Of course, that proved the driver had gotten out of the wagon and left the horse alone. Doubtless there was but one thief—for it was positive that the turkeys had been removed by a two-footed—not a four-footed—marauder.
“And who would be mean enough to steal Sister's turkeys? Almost everybody in the neighborhood has a few to fatten for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Who—did—this?”
He followed the wheel marks of the wagon to the road. He saw the track where it turned into the field, and where it turned out again. And it showed plainly that the thief came from town, and returned in that direction.
Of course, in the roadway it was impossible to trace the particular tracks made by the thief's horse and wagon. Too many other vehicles had been over the road within the past hour.
The thief must have driven into the field just after night-fall, plucked the ten young turkeys, one by one, out of the coop, tying their feet and flinging them into the bottom of his wagon. Covered with a bag, the frightened turkeys would never utter a peep while it remained dark.
“I hate to tell Sister—I can't tell her,” Hiram said, as he went slowly back to the house. For Sister had been “counting chickens” again, and she had figured that, at eighteen cents per pound, live weight, the ten turkeys would pay for all the clothes she would need that winter, and give her “Christmas money”, too.
The young farmer shrank from meeting the girl again that night, and he delayed going into the house as long as possible. Then he found they had all retired, leaving him a cold supper at the end of the kitchen table.
The disappearance of the turkeys kept Hiram tossing, wakeful, upon his bed for some hours. He could not fail to connect this robbery with the other things that had been done, during the past weeks, to injure those living at the Atterson farm.
Was the secret enemy really Peter Dickerson? And had Pete committed this crime now?
Yet the horse and wagon had come from the direction opposite the Dickerson farm, and had returned as it came.
“I don't know whether I am accusing that fellow wrongfully, or not,” muttered Hiram, at last. “But I am going to find out. Sister isn't going to lose her turkeys without my doing everything in my power to get them back and punish the thief.”
He usually arose in the morning before anybody else was astir, so it was easy for Hiram to slip out of the house and down to the field to the empty turkey coop.
The marks of horse and wagon were quite as plain in the faint light of dawn as they had been the night before. In the darkness the thief had driven his wagon over some small stumps, amid which his horse had scrambled in some difficulty, it was plain.
Hiram, tracing out these marks as a Red Indian follows a trail, saw something upon the edge of one of the half-decayed stumps that interested him greatly.
He stood up the next moment with this clue in his hand—a white, coarse hair, perhaps four inches in length.
“That was scraped off the horse's fetlock as he scrambled over this stump,” muttered Hiram. “Now, who drives a white horse, or a horse with white feet, in this neighborhood?
“Can I narrow the search down in this way, I wonder?” and for some moments the youth stood there, in the growing light of early morning, canvassing the subject from that angle.
A broad streak of crimson along the eastern horizon, over the treetops, announced the coming of the sun when Hiram Strong reached the automobile road to which he, on the previous night, had traced the thief that had stolen Sister's poults.
Now he looked at the track again. It surely had come from the direction of Scoville, and it turned back that way.
Yet he looked at the white horse-hair scraped off upon the stump, and he turned his back upon these signs and strode along the road toward his own home.
Smoke was just curling from the Atterson chimney; Sister, or Mrs. Atterson, was just building the fire. But they did not see Hiram as he went by.
Hiram's quest led him past the place and to the Dickerson farm. There nobody was yet astir, save the mules and horses in the barnyard, who called as he went by, hoping for their breakfast.
Hiram knew that the Dickersons had turkeys and, like most of the other farmers, cooped them in distant fields away from the house. He found three coops in the middle of an old oat-field tinder a spreading beech.
The old turks roosted upon the limbs of the beech at night; they were already up and away, hunting grasshoppers for breakfast. But quite a few poults were running and peeping about the coops, with two hen turkeys playing guard to them.
Hiram saw where a wagon had been driven in here, and turned, too. The tracks were made recently. And one of the coops was shut tight, although he knew by the rustling within that there were young turkeys in it.
It was too dark within the hutch, however, for the youth to number the poults confined there.
He strolled back across the fields to the rear of the Dickerson house. Passing the barnyard first, he halted and examined the bright bay horse, with white feet—the one that Pete had driven to the barbecue the day before—the only one Pete was ever allowed to drive off the farm.
The Dickersons, father and son, were not as early risers as most farmers in those parts. At least, they were not up betimes on this morning.
But Mrs. Dickerson had built the fire now and was stirring about the porch when Hiram arrived at the step, filling her kettle at the pump.
“Mornin', Mr. Strong,” she said, in her startled way, eyeing Hiram askance.
She was a lean, sharp-featured woman, with a hopeless droop to her shoulders.
“Good-morning, Mrs. Dickerson,” said Hiram, gravely. “How many young turkeys have you this year?”
The woman shrank back and almost dropped the kettle she had filled to the pump-bench. Her eyes glared.
Somewhere in the house a baby squatted; then a door banged and Hiram heard Dickerson's heavy step descending the stair.
“You have a coop of poults down there, Mrs. Dickerson,” continued Hiram, confidently, “that I know belongs to us. I traced Pete's tracks with the wagon and the white-footed horse. Now, this is going to make trouble for Pete——”
“What's the matter with Pete, now?” demanded Dickerson's harsh voice, and he came out upon the porch.
He scowled at sight of Hiram, and continued:
“What are you roaming around here for, Strong? Can't you keep on your own side of the fence?”
“It's little I'll ever trouble you, Mr. Dickerson,” said Hiram, “sharply, if you and yours don't trouble me, I can assure you.”
“What's eating you now?” demanded the man, roughly.
“Why, I'll tell you, Mr. Dickerson,” said Hiram, quickly. “Somebody's stolen our turkeys—ten of them. And I have found them down there where your turkeys roost. The natural inference is that somebody here knows about it——”
Dickerson—just out of his bed and as ugly as many people are when they first get up—leaped for the young farmer from the porch, and had him in his grip before Hiram could help himself.
The woman screamed. There was a racket in the house, for some of the children had been watching from the window.
“Dad's goin' to lick him!” squalled one of the girls.
“You come here and intermate that any of my family's thieves, do you?” the angry man roared.
“Stop that, Sam Dickerson!” cried his wife. She suddenly gained courage and ran to the struggling pair, and tried to haul Sam away from Hiram.
“The boy's right,” she gasped. “I heard Pete tellin' little Sam last night what he'd done. It's come to a pretty pass, so it has, if you are goin' to uphold that bad boy in thieving——”
“Hush up, Maw!” cried Pete's voice from the house.
“Come out here, you scalawag!” ordered his father, relaxing his hold on Hiram.
Pete slouched out on the porch, wearing a grin that was half sheepish, half worried.
“What's this Strong says about turkeys?” demanded Sam Dickerson, sternly.
“'Tain't so!” declared Pete. “I ain't seen no turkeys.”
“I have found them,” said Hiram, quietly. “And the coopful is down yonder in your lot. You thought to fool me by turning into our farm from the direction of Scoville, and driving back that way; but you turned around in the road under that overhanging oak, where I picked Lettie Bronson off the back of the runaway horse last Spring.
“Now, those ten turkeys belong to Sister. She'll be heart-broken if anything happens to them. You have played me several mean tricks since I have been here, Pete Dickerson——”
“No, I ain't!” interrupted the boy.
“Who took the burr off the end of my axle and let me down in the road that night?” demanded Hiram, his rage rising.
Pete could not forbear a grin at this remembrance.
“And who tampered with our pump the next morning? And who watched and waited till we left the lower meadow that night we burned the rubbish, and then set fire to our woods——”
Mrs. Dickerson screamed again. “I knew that fire never come by accident,” she moaned.
“You shut up, Maw!” admonished her hopeful son again.
“And now, I've got you,” declared Hiram, with confidence. “I can tell those ten poults. I marked them for Sister long ago so that, if they went to the neighbors, they could be easily identified.
“They're in that shut-up coop down yonder,” continued Hiram, “and unless you agree to bring them back at once, and put them in our coop, I shall hitch up and go to town, first thing, and get out a warrant for your arrest.”
Sam had remained silent for a minute, or two. Now he said, decidedly:
“You needn't threaten no more, young feller. I can see plain enough that Pete's been carrying his fun too far——”
“Fun!” ejaculated Hiram.
“That's what I said,” growled Sam. “He'll bring the turkeys back-and before he has his breakfast, too.”
“All right,” said Hiram, knowing full well that there was nothing to be made by quarreling with Sam Dickerson. “His returning the turkeys, however, will not keep me from speaking to the constable the very next time Pete plays any of his tricks around our place.
“It may be 'fun' for him; but it won't look so funny from the inside of the town jail.”
He walked off after this threat. And he was sorry he had said it. For he had no real intention of having Pete arrested, and an empty threat is of no use to anybody.
The turkeys came back; Sister did not even know that they had been stolen, for when she went down to feed them about the middle of the forenoon, all ten came running to her call.
But Pete Dickerson ceased from troubling for a time, much to Hiram's satisfaction.
Meanwhile the crops were coming on finely. Hiram's tomatoes were bringing good prices in Scoville, and as he had such a quantity and was so much earlier than the other farmers around about, he did, as he told Henry he would do, “skim the cream off the market.”
He bought some crates and baskets in town, too, and shipped some of the tomatoes to a produce man he knew in Crawberry—a man whom he could trust to treat him fairly. During the season that man's checks to Mrs. Atterson amounted to fifty-four dollars.
Three times a week the spring wagon went to town with vegetables for the school, the hotels, and their retail customers. The whole family worked long hours, and worked hard; but nobody complained.
No rain fell of any consequence until the latter part of July; and then there was no danger of the river overflowing and drowning out the corn.
And that corn! By the last of July it was waist high, growing rank and strong, and of that black-green color which delights the farmer's eye.
Mr. Bronson walked down to the river especially to see it. Like Hiram's upland corn, there was scarcely a hill missing, save where the muskrats had dug in from the river bank and disturbed the corn hills.
“That's the finest-looking corn in this county, bar none, Hiram,” declared Bronson. “I have seldom seen better looking in the rich bottom-lands of the West. And you certainly do keep it clean, boy.”
“No use in putting in a crop if you don't 'tend it,” said the young farmer, sententiously.
“And what's this along here?” asked the gentleman, pointing to a row or two of small stuff along the inner edge of the field.
“I'm trying onions and celery down here. I want to put a commercial crop into this field next year—if we are let stay here—that will pay Mrs. Atterson and me a real profit,” and Hiram laughed.
“What do you call a real profit?” inquired Mr. Bronson, seriously.
“Four hundred dollars an acre, net,” said the young farmer, promptly.
“Why, Hiram, you can't do that!” cried the gentleman.
“It's being done—in other localities and on soil not so rich as this—and I believe I can do it.”
“With onions or celery?” “Yes, sir.” “Which—or both?” asked the Westerner, interested.
“I am trying them out here, as you see. I believe it will be celery. This soil is naturally wet, and celery is a glutton for water. Then, it is a late piece, and celery should be transplanted twice before it is put in the field, I believe.”
“A lot of work, boy,” said Mr. Bronson, shaking his head.
“Well, I never expect to get something for nothing,” remarked Hiram.
“And how about the onions?”
“Why, they don't seem to do so well. There is something lacking in the land to make them do their best. I believe it is too cold. And, then, I am watching the onion market, and I am afraid that too many people have gone into the game in certain sections, and are bound to create an over-supply.”
The gentleman looked at him curiously.
“You certainly are an able-minded youngster, Hiram,” he observed. “I s'pose if you do so well here next year as you expect, a charge of dynamite wouldn't blast you away from the Atterson farm?”
“Why, Mr. Bronson,” responded the young farmer, “I don't want to run a one-horse farm all my life. And this never can be much more. It isn't near enough to any big city to be a real truck farm—and I'm interested in bigger things.
“No, sir. The Atterson Eighty is only a stepping stone for me. I hope I'll go higher before long.”
But Hiram was not at all sure that he would ever see a celery crop in this bottom-land. Pepper still “hung fire” and he would not go to Mr. Strickland with his option.
“I don't hafter,” he told Hiram. “When I git ready I'll let ye know, be sure o' that.”
The fact was that the railroad had made no further move. Mr. Strickland admitted to Mrs. Atterson that if the strip along the east boundary of the farm was condemned by the railroad, she ought to get a thousand dollars for it.
“But if the railroad board should change its mind again,” added the lawyer, “sixteen hundred dollars would not be a speculative price to pay for your farm—and well Pepper knows it.”
“Then Mr. Damocles's sword has got to hang over us, has it?” demanded the old lady.
“I am afraid so,” admitted the lawyer, smiling.
Mrs. Atterson could not be more troubled than was Hiram himself. Youth feels the sting of such arrows of fortune more keenly than does age. We get “case-hardened” to trouble as the years bend our shoulders.
The thought that he might, after all, get nothing but a hundred dollars and his board for all the work he had done in preparation for the second year's crop sometimes embittered Hiram's thoughts.
Once, when he spoke to Pepper, and the snaky man sneered at him and laughed, the young farmer came near attacking him then and there in the street.
“I certainly could have given that Pepper as good a thrashing as ever he got,” muttered Hiram. “And even Pete Dickerson never deserved one more than Pepper.”
Pete fought shy of Hiram these days, and as the summer waned the young farmer gradually became less watchful and expectant of trouble from the direction of the west boundary of the Atterson Eighty.
But there was little breathing spell for him in the work of the farm.
“When we lay by the corn, you bet dad an' me goes fishing!” Henry Pollock told Hiram, one day.
But it wasn't often that the young farmer could take half a day off for any such pleasure.
“You've bit off more'n you kin chaw,” observed Henry.
“That's all right; I'll keep chewing at it, just the same,” returned Hiram cheerfully.
For the truck crop was bringing them in a bigger sum of money than even Hiram had expected. The season had been very favorable, indeed; Hiram's vegetables had come along in good time, and even the barrels of sweet corn he shipped to Crawberry brought a fair price—much better than he could have got at the local cannery.
When the tomato pack came on, however, he did sell many baskets of his “seconds” to the cannery. But the selected tomatoes he continued to ship to Crawberry, and having established a reputation with his produce man for handsome and evenly ripened fruit, the prices received were good all through the season.
He saw the sum for tomatoes pass the hundred and fifty dollar mark before frost struck the vines. Even then he was not satisfied. There was a small cellar under the Atterson house, and when the frosty nights of October came, Hiram dragged up the vines still bearing fruit, by the roots, and hung them in the cellar, where the tomatoes continued to ripen slowly nearly up to Thanksgiving.
Other crops did almost as well in proportion. He had put in no late potatoes; but in September he harvested the balance of his early crop and, as they were a good keeping variety, he knew there would be enough to keep the family supplied until the next season.
Of other roots, including a patch of well-grown mangels for Mrs. Atterson's handsome flock of chickens, there were plenty to carry the family over the winter.
As the frosts became harder Hiram dug his root pits in the high, light soil of the garden, drew pinetags to cover them, and, gradually, as the winter advanced, heaped the earth over the various piles of roots to keep them through the winter.
Meanwhile, in September, corn harvest had come on. The four acres Hiram had planted below the stables yielded a fair crop, that part of the land he had been able to enrich with coarse manure showing a much better average than the remainder.
The four acres yielded them something over one hundred and sixty baskets of sound corn which, as corn was then selling for fifty cents per bushel, meant that the crop was worth about forty dollars.
As near as Hiram could figure it had cost about fifteen dollars to raise the crop; therefore the profit to Mrs. Atterson was some twenty-five dollars.
Besides the profit from some of the garden crops, this was very small indeed; as Hiram said, it did not pay well enough to plant small patches of corn for them to fool with it much.
“The only way to make a good profit out of corn corn a place like this,” he said to Henry, who would not be convinced, “is to have a big drove of hogs and turn them into the field to fatten on the standing corn.”
“But that would be wasteful!” cried Henry, shocked at the suggestion.
“Big pork producers do not find it so,” returned Hiram, confidently. “Or else one wants a drove of cattle to fatten, and cuts the corn green and shreds it, blowing it into a silo.
“The idea is to get the cost of the corn crop back through the price paid by the butcher for your stock, or hogs.”
“Nobody ever did that around here,” declared young Pollock.
“And that's why nobody gets ahead very fast around here. Henry, why don't you strike out and do something new—just to surprise 'em?
“Stop selling a little tad of this, and a little tad of that off the farm and stick to the good farmer's rule: 'Never sell anything off the place that can't walk off.'”
“I've heard that before,” said Henry, sighing.
“And even then just so much fertility goes with every yoke of steers or pair of fat hogs. But it is less loss, in proportion, than when the corn, or oats, or wheat itself is sold.”
Sister had begun school on the very first day it opened—in September. She was delighted, for although she had had “lessons” at the “institution”, they had not been like this regular attendance, with other free and happy children, at a good country school.
Sister was growing not alone in body, but in mind. And the improvement in her appearance was something marvelous.
“It certainly does astonish me, every time I think o' that youngun and the way she looked when she come to me from the charity school,” declared Mother Atterson.
“Who'd want a better lookin' young'un now? She'd be the pride of any mother's heart, she'd be.
“If there's folks belongin' to her, and they have neglected her all these years, in my opinion they're lackin' in sense, Hiram.”
“They certainly have been lacking in the milk of human kindness,” admitted the young farmer.
“Huh! That milk's easily soured in many folks,” responded Mrs. Atterson. “But Sister's folks, whoever they be, will be sorry some day.”
“You don't suppose she really has any family, do you?” demanded Hiram.
“No father nor mother, I expect. But many a family will get rid of a young'un too small to be of any use, when they probably have many children of their own.
“And if there was a little bait of money coming to the child, as that lawyer told the institution matron, that would be another reason for losing her in this great world.”
“I'm afraid Sister will never find her folks, Mrs. Atterson,” said Hiram, shaking his head.
“Huh! If she don't, it's no loss to her. It's loss to them,” declared the old lady. “And I'd hate to have anybody come and take her away from us now.”
Sister no longer wore her short hair in four “pigtails”. She had learned to dress it neatly like other girls of her age, and although it would never be like the beautiful blue-black tresses of Lettie Bronson, Hiram had to admit that the soft brown of Sister's hair, waving so prettily over her forehead, made the girl's features more than a little attractive.
She was an entirely different person, too, from the one who had helped Lettie and her friends ashore from the grounded motor-boat that day, so long ago—and so Lettie herself thought when she rode into the Atterson yard one October day on her bay horse, and Sister met her on the porch.
“Why, you're Mrs. Atterson's girl, aren't you?” cried Lettie, leaning from her saddle to offer her hand to Sister. “I wouldn't have known you.”
Sister was getting plump, she had roses in her cheeks, and she wore a neat, whole, and becoming dress.
“You're Miss Bronson,” said Sister, gravely. “I wouldn't forget you.”
Perhaps there was something in what Sister said that stung Lettie Bronson's memory. She flushed a little; but then she smiled most charmingly and asked for Hiram.
“Husking corn, Miss, with Henry Pollock, down on the bottom-land.”
“Oh! way down there? Well! you tell him—Why, I'll want you to come, too,” laughed Lettie, quite at her best now.
Nobody could fail to answer Lettie Bronson's smile with its reflection, when she chose to exert herself in that direction.
“Why, I just came to tell you both that on Friday we're going to have an old-fashioned husking-bee for all the young folks of the neighborhood, at our place. You must come yourself—er—Sister, and tell Hiram to come, too.
“Seven o'clock, sharp, remember—and I'll be dreadfully disappointed if you don't come,” added Lettie, turning her horse's head homeward, and saying it with so much cordiality that her hearer's heart warmed.
“She is pretty,” mused Sister, watching the bay horse and its rider flying along the road. “I don't blame Hiram for thinking she's the very finest girl in these parts.
“She is,” declared Sister, emphatically, and shook herself.
Hiram had finished husking the lowland corn that day, with Henry's help, and it was all drawn in at night. When the last measured basket was heaped in the crib by lantern light, the young farmer added up the figures chalked up on the lintel of the door.
“For goodness' sake, Hiram! it isn't as much as that, is it?” gasped Henry, viewing the figures the young farmer wrote proudly in his memorandum book.
“Six acres—six hundred and eighty baskets of sound corn,” crowed “Hiram. And it's corn that is corn, as Mr. Bronson says.
“It's not quite as hard as the upland corn, for the growing season was not quite long enough for it; but it's better than the average in the county——”
“Three hundred and forty bushel of shelled corn from six acres?” cried Henry. “I should say it was! It's worth fifty cents now right at the crib—a hundred and seventy dollars. Hiram! that'll make dad let me go to the agricultural college.”
“What?” cried Hiram, surprised and pleased. “Have you really got that idea in your head?”
“I been gnawin' on it ever since you talked so last spring,” admitted his friend, rather shyly. “I told father, and at first he pooh-poohed.
“But I kept on pointing out to him how much more you knowed than we did—”
“That's nonsense, Henry,” interrupted Hiram. “Only about some things. I wouldn't want to set myself up over the farmers of this neighborhood as knowing so much.”
“Well, you've proved it. Dad says so himself. He was taken all aback when I showed him how you had beat him on the tomato crop. And I been talking to him about your corn.
“That hit father where he lived,” chuckled Henry, “for father's a corn-growing man—and always has been considered so in this county.
“He watched the way you tilled your crop, and he believed so much shallow cultivating was wrong, and said so. But he says you beat him on poor ground; and when I tell him what that lowland figures up, he'll throw up his hands.
“And I'm going to take a course in fertilizers, farm management, and the chemistry of soils,” continued Henry.
“Just as you say, I believe we have been planting the wrong crops on the right land! Anyway, I'll find out. I believe we've got a good farm, but we're not getting out of it what we should.”
“Well, Henry,” admitted Hiram, slowly, “nothing's pleased me so much since I came into this neighborhood, as to hear you say this. You get all you can at the experiment station this winter, and I believe that your father will soon begin to believe that there is something in 'book farming', after all.”
If it had not been for the hair-hung sword over them, Mrs. Atterson and Hiram would have taken great delight in the generous crops that had been vouchsafed to them.
“Still, we can't complain,” said the old lady, “and for the first time for more'n twenty years I'm going to be really thankful at Thanksgiving time.”
“Oh, I believe you!” cried Sister, who heard her. “No boarders.”
“Nope,” said the old lady, quietly. “You're wrong. For we're going to have boarders on Thanksgiving Day. I've writ to Crawberry. Anybody that's in the old house now that wants to come to eat dinner with us, can come. I'm going to cook the best dinner I ever cooked—and make a milkpail full of gravy.”
“I know,” said the good old soul, shaking her head, “that them two old maids I sold out to have half starved them boys. We ought to be able to stand even Fred Crackit, and Mr. Peebles, one day in the year.”
“Well!” returned Sister, thoughtfully. “If you can stand 'em I can. I never did think I could forgive 'em all—so mean they was to me—and the hair-pulling and all.
“But I guess you're right, Mis' Atterson. It's heapin' coals of fire on their heads, like what the minister at the chapel says.”
“Good Land o' Goshen, child!” exclaimed the old lady, briskly. “Hot coals would scotch 'em, and I only want to fill their stomachs for once.”
The husking at the Bronsons was a very well attended feast, indeed. There was a great barn floor, and on this were heaped the ear-corn in the husks—not too much, for Lettie proposed having the floor cleared and swept for square dancing, and later for the supper.
She had a lot of her school friends at the husking, and at first the neighborhood boys and girls were bashful in the company of the city girls.
But after they got to work husking the corn, and a few red ears had been found (for which each girl or boy had to pay a forfeit) they became a very hilarious company indeed.
Now, Lettie, broadly hospitable, had invited the young folk far and wide. Even those whom she had not personally seen, were expected to attend.
So it was not surprising that Pete Dickerson should come, despite the fact that Mr. Bronson had once discharged him from his employ—and for serious cause.
But Pete was not a thin-skinned person. Where there was anything “doing” he wanted to cut a figure. And his desire to be important, and be marked by the company, began to make him objectionable before the evening was half over.
For instance, he thought it was funny to take a run down the long barn floor and leap over the heads of those huskers squatting about a heap of corn, and land with his heavy boots on the apex of the pile, thus scattering the ears in all directions.
He got long straws, too, and tickled the backs, of the girls' necks; or he dumped handfuls of bran down their backs, or shook oats into their hair—and the oats stuck.
Mr. Bronson could not see to everything; and Pete was very sly at his tricks. A girl would shriek in one corner, and the lout would quickly transport himself to a distant spot.
When the corn was swept aside, and the floor cleared for the dance, Pete went beyond the limit, however. He had found a pail of soft-soap in the shed and while the crowd was out of the barn, playing a “round game” in the yard while it was being swept, Pete slunk in with the soap and a swab, and managed to spread a good deal of the slippery stuff around on the boards.
A broom would not remove this soft-soap. When the hostler swept, he only spread it. And when the dancing began many a couple measured their length on the planks, to Pete's great delight.
But the hired man had observed Pete sneaking about while he was removing the last of the corn, and Hiram Strong discovered soft-soap on Pete's clothes, and the smell of it strong upon his unwashed hands.
“You get out of here,” Mr. Bronson told the boy. “I had occasion to put you off my land once, and don't let me have to do it a third time,” and he shoved him with no gentle hand through the door and down the driveway.
But Pete laid it all to Hiram. He called back over his shoulder:
“I'll be square with you, yet, Hi Strong! You wait!”
But Hiram bad been threatened so often from that quarter by now, that he was not much interested.
The fun went on after that with more moderation, and everybody had a pleasant time. That is, so supposed Hiram Strong until, in going out of the barn again to get a breath of cool air after one of the dances, he almost stumbled over a figure hiding in a corner, and crying.
“Why, Sister!” he cried, taking the girl by the shoulders, and turning her about. “What's the matter?”
“Oh, I want to go home, Hi. This isn't any place for me. Let me—me run—run home!” she sobbed.
“I guess not! Who's bothered you? Has that Pete Dickerson come back?”
“No!” sobbed Sister.
“What is it, then?”
“They—they don't want me here. They don't like me.”
“Who don't?” demanded Hiram, sternly.
“Those—those girls from St. Beris. I—I tried to dance, and I slipped on some of that horrid soap and—and fell down. And they said I was clumsy. And one said:
“'Oh, all these country girls are like that. I don't see what Let wanted them here for.'
“'So't we could all show off better,' said another, laughing some more.
“And I guess that's right enough,” finished Sister. “They don't want me here. Only to make fun of. And I wish I hadn't come.”
Hiram was smitten dumb for a moment. He had danced once with Lettie, but the other town girls had given him no opportunity to do so. And it was plain that Lettie's school friends preferred the few boys who had come up from town to any of the farmers' sons who had come to the husking.
“I guess you're right, Sister. They don't want us—much,” admitted Hiram, slowly.
“Then let's both go home,” said Sister, sadly.
“No. That wouldn't be serving Mr. Bronson—or Lettie—right. We were invited in good faith, I reckon, and the Bronsons haven't done anything to offend us.
“But you and I'll go back there and dance together. You dance with me—or with Henry; and I'll stick to the country girls. If Lettie Bronson's friends from boarding school think they are so much better than us folks out here in the country, let us show them that we can have a good time without them.”
“Oh, I'll go back with you, Hiram,” cried Sister, gladly, and the young fellow was a bit conscience-stricken as he noted her changed tone and saw the sparkle that came into her eye.
Had he neglected Sister because Lettie Bronson was about? Well! perhaps he had. But he made up for it with the attention he paid to Sister during the remainder of the evening.
They went home early, however, and Hiram felt somewhat grave after the corn husking. Had Lettie Bronson invited the country-bred young folk living about her father's home, to meet her boarding school friends, and the town boys, merely that the latter might be compared with the farmer-folk to their disfavor?
He could not believe that—really. Lettie Bronson might be thoughtless, and a little proud; but she was still a princess to Hiram, and he could not think this evil of her.
But there were too many duties every day for the young farmer to give much thought to such problems. Harvesting was not complete yet, and soon flurries of snow began to drive across the fields and threaten the approach of winter.
Finally the wind came out of the northwest for more than a day, and toward evening the flakes began to fall, faster and faster, thicker and thicker.
“It's going to be a snowy night—a real baby blizzard,” declared Hiram, stamping his feet on the porch before coming into the warm kitchen with the milkpail.
“Oh, dear! And I thought you'd go over to Pollock's with me to-night, Hi,” said Sister.
“Mabel an' I are goin' to make our Christmas presents together, and she's expecting me.”
“Shucks! 'Twon't be fit for a girl to go out if it snows,” said Mother Atterson.
But Hiram saw that Sister was much disappointed, and he had tried to be kinder to her since that night of the corn husking.
“What's a little snow?” he demanded, laughing. “Bundle up good, Sister, and I'll go over with you. I want to see Henry, anyway.”
“Crazy young'uns,” observed Mother Atterson. But she made no real objection. Whatever Hiram said was right, in the old lady's eyes.
They tramped through the snowy fields with a lantern, and found it half-knee deep in some drifts before they arrived at the Pollocks, short as had been the duration of the fall.
But they were welcomed vociferously at the neighbor's; preparations were made for a long evening's fun; for with the snow coming down so steadily there would be little work done out of doors the following day, so the family need not seek their beds early.
The Pollock children had made a good store of nuts, like the squirrels; and there was plenty of corn to pop, and molasses for candy, or corn-balls, and red apples to roast, and sweet cider from the casks in the cellar.
The older girls retired to a corner of the wide hearth with their work-boxes, and Hiram and Henry worked out several problems regarding the latter's eleven-week course at the agricultural college, which would begin the following week; while the young ones played games until they fell fast asleep in odd corners of the big kitchen.
It was nearly midnight, indeed, when Hiram and Sister started home. And it was still snowing, and snowing heavily.
“We'll have to get all the plows out to-morrow morning!” Henry shouted after them from the porch.
And it was no easy matter to wade home through the heavy drifts.
“I never could have done it without you, Hi,” declared the girl, when she finally floundered onto the Atterson porch, panting and laughing.
“I'll take a look around the barns before I come in,” remarked the careful young farmer.
This was a duty he never neglected, no matter how late he went to bed, nor how tired he was. Half way to the barn he halted. A light was waving wildly by the Dickerson back door.
It was a lantern, and Hiram knew that it was being whirled around and around somebody's head. He thought he heard, too, a shouting through the falling snow.
“Something's wrong over yonder,” thought the young farmer.
He hesitated but for a moment. He had never stepped upon the Dickerson place, nor spoken to Sam Dickerson since the trouble about the turkeys. The lantern continued to swing. Eagerly as the snow came down, it could not blind Hiram to the waving light.
“I've got to see about this,” he muttered, and started as fast as he could go through the drifts, across the fields.
Soon he heard the voice shouting. It was Sam Dickerson. And he evidently had been shouting to Hiram, seeing his lantern in the distance.
“Help, Strong! Help!” he called.
“What is it, man?” demanded Hiram, climbing the last pair of bars and struggling through the drifts in the dooryard.
“Will you take my horse and go for the doctor? I don't know where Pete is—down to Cale Schell's, I expect.”
“What's the matter, Mr. Dickerson?”
“Sarah's fell down the bark stairs—fell backward. Struck her head an' ain't spoke since. Will you go, Mr. Strong?”
“Certainly. Which horse will I take?”
“The bay's saddled-under the shed—get any doctor—I don't care which one. But get him here.”
“I will, Mr. Dickerson. Leave it to me,” promised Hiram, and ran to the shed at once.