HIRAM IN THE MIDDLE WEST

OR

A YOUNG FARMER'S UPWARD STRUGGLE

BY BURBANK L. TODD

AUTHOR OF "HIRAM THE YOUNG FARMER."

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY

Copyright, 1920, By
GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

BACK TO THE SOIL SERIES

By BURBANK L. TODD

12mo. Cloth. Illustrated.

HIRAM THE YOUNG FARMER
Or, Making the Soil Pay

HIRAM IN THE MIDDLE WEST
Or, A Young Fanner's Upward Struggle

(Other Volumes in Preparation)

George Sully & Company, New York

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

HIRAM IN THE MIDDLE WEST

CHAPTER I

THE MAN WHO WAS AFRAID OF RATS

For an hour before the accommodation train stopped at Pringleton the rain had etched zigzag lines upon the windowpane beside Hiram Strong's seat; so to find the platform aglitter with puddles in the dull lamp light and the water dripping drearily from the station eaves did not surprise him. What was rather astonishing was to find Pringleton such a very lonely place.

As far as he could see, when he had walked around the bungalow-built station the light in the stationmaster's ticket office was the only light visible save the switch-targets and the disappearing green lamps on the end of the train. Hiram, with his heavy bag, was the only passenger who had got off the evening train.

When he came around to the front of the station again he saw the stationmaster humped over his desk in the bay window, with a pen stuck over his ear, looking for all the world like a secretary bird. He peered out of the window at Hiram curiously, and finally pushed up the sash.

"I don't know whether you know it or not, young fellow," the stationmaster said, "but the company charges mileage if you use this platform for a walking track. And you'll make trouble for me if you keep going around, for I never have found out how many laps make a mile, and I sha'n't know what to charge you."

Hiram Strong smiled his approval of this brand of humor, yet his question put in reply was quite serious:

"Have you seen anybody around here, sir, from a place called Sunnyside Farm?"

"There isn't anybody at Sunnyside Farm, as far as I know," said the stationmaster; "and there hasn't been since the house burned down last year."

"Yes, I know," Hiram said quickly. "But I rather expected Mr. Bronson would have somebody over here to meet me."

"Mr. Stephen Bronson?" asked the man. "Him that's just bought the Sunnyside place?"

"Yes. It's quite a walk to the farm, isn't it?"

"It is the longest two miles you ever walked, son," declared the stationmaster. "Were you thinking to walk it to-night?"

"As there is nobody here to meet me, I guess I'll have to," replied the youth cheerfully. "Which way do I head? You'll have to start me right, or else I may wear out your platform walking around and around on it all night."

The stationmaster chuckled. "Well, young fellow," he observed, "it is evidently to my advantage to put you on your way. Turn around, pick up your bag, go right down those steps to the road and walk straight ahead. You are now facing west. When you get into the road you will find it not so dark as it seems."

"Dark enough, I guess," muttered Hiram.

"You can't miss the road even on a dark night, for there is no fork in it till after you pass Sunnyside."

"But," asked the youth, "is there anybody up that way who will lodge me for the night, as the Sunnyside house is burned?"

"You may get taken in at Miss Delia Pringle's, just beyond Sunnyside—first house after you pass the ruins of the burned farmhouse. This station is named after her folks. Don't make the mistake of going to the first house this side of Sunnyside."

He said this last so curiously that Hiram asked him: "Why not?"

"Because that is Yancey Battick's place. He'll likely blow a charge of rock salt into you from his shotgun and then ask what you want afterward."

"Why, what's his idea?" asked Hiram much amazed.

"Says he's afraid of rats—that's all," declared the stationmaster, and immediately slammed down the window to shut out the searching February wind.

The youth hesitated for only a moment longer. He rather thought the stationmaster of Pringleton was quite as odd as the man he called Yancey Battick, who met all visitors with a salt-loaded shotgun and was afraid of rats.

"And this isn't really a night fit for a rat to be out," Hiram muttered, after he had walked for some time along the muddy road leading west from the station.

Occasionally while he was still near the railroad he passed a dwelling; but it was just about supper time, and nearly all the lights were at the backs of the houses. Hardly a ray of cheerful lamp light reached the road.

The houses were situated farther apart as he continued his march. The fine rain was penetrating in the extreme. Hiram desired shelter more than he ever had before, it seemed to him.

And just when it appeared as though nothing about his situation could be worse, the heavens opened. It had been doing this, off and on, all day. But this water fall seemed heavier than any of those that had preceded it.

Hiram Strong saw a light ahead and a little to one side of the road. It was not a very bright light (perhaps it was drowned by the curtain of falling rain) but it must be in a house, he thought. At a time like this, it was any port in a storm.

He set out at a heavy run toward the light. He found a sagging gate in a decrepit fence. Plunging up a muddy path, he reached a tiny porch which might have offered some shelter had not the roof leaked like a sieve.

"Hard luck!" muttered the youth. "If they won't let me in—"

His feet pounding on the rickety steps and the thump of his heavy bag on the porch aroused somebody within. Hiram heard a firm step at the other side of the door.

Suddenly the door opened with an abruptness which was startling. The door opened on a chain, and through the aperture of about eight inches was thrust the brown muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun that, at the moment, looked as big as a cannon to the youth. He stepped back promptly, and a cascade off the roof of the porch went down the back of his neck.

"What are you after?" demanded a harsh voice.

Above the slanted gun-barrel appeared a ferocious black moustache which completely hid the wearer's mouth, a beak-like nose, and a pair of blue eyes that glittered half wildly. Altogether the householder was of most forbidding aspect, and the youth at once identified him as Yancey Battick. He had evidently stopped at the wrong house after all!

"I want nothing, Mr. Battick, but shelter till the rain holds up," Hiram answered.

"Who told you my name?" demanded the man. "I never saw you before, young fellow."

"I guessed it," Hiram replied. "I'm a pretty good Yankee at guessing."

"And you are a Yankee, I imagine," the man said. "You're from the East, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir," replied Hiram, and mentioned the locality from which he had just come in answer to Mr. Stephen Bronson's summons.

The man still presented the gun, and although Hiram had stepped from under the cascade pouring down from the roof, he was anything but comfortable out there on the porch.

"Where are you going?" asked Battick, scowling still.

"To Sunnyside Farm."

"Why, there's nobody there! The house is burned down."

"I expect to work that place this year for Mr. Stephen Bronson. I want to find a place to lodge near the farm, and I was told to apply to—Miss Pringle, I believe the name is."

"What!" gasped the man. "A young fellow like you? Who sent you unwarned into the clutches of that old maid?"

"Why—is she so bad?" Hiram asked.

"There isn't any male too young nor yet too old to be out of danger of that old maid. Come on in," added Mr. Battick, unchaining the door. "I wouldn't let any male creature get into that woman's clutches."

Hiram stepped rather doubtfully into the house. Mr. Yancey Battick certainly was a very odd person. He had been warned that the man with the welcoming shotgun was afraid of rats; it appeared that he was likewise much afraid of spinsters.

CHAPTER II

A KERNEL OF WHEAT

"Hold on!" said Yancey Battick, halting Hiram just after he was inside the house and the door was closed. "Who sent you here?"

He seemed a very suspicious man. His blue eyes searched the open countenance of the boy from the East, and his expression, with bristling moustache and all, was fierce indeed.

"I tell you I was not sent here at all," Hiram explained rather wearily. "In fact, I was advised strongly against knocking at your door."

"Who advised you?" demanded Battick quickly.

"The stationmaster."

"That old thimblerigger, Jason Oakley? Huh! Are you a friend of his?"

It was evident that Mr. Battick was not on friendly terms with many of his neighbors. Hiram Strong did not lack common sense. He proposed to say nothing to cause the householder to turn him out into the downpour, which was now very severe.

"I am just as much a friend of his, Mr. Battick, as I am of yours," the youth said.

"Humph! Well! And I suppose Jason told you to try at Delia Pringle's?"

"He did."

"Humph!" Battick said again, and finally set the gun in a rack near the chimney corner.

At last Hiram Strong felt as though he could look about the room. Heretofore his attention had been given to that gun. The door by which he had entered opened directly from the porch; there was no entry-way. The room seemed to be the entire width of the cottage with a wide fireplace facing the door, and evidently there was another room behind the chimney—perhaps two.

This living room was sufficiently interesting—not to say surprising—to the visitor to hold his full attention for the time being. The two ends of the room, at the right and left of the doorway, first gained Hiram Strong's interest. At the right the wall was completely masked from floor to ceiling by bookshelves, and those shelves were filled with books, the nature of which he could not so easily learn, for the hanging lamp did not thoroughly illuminate the apartment.

At the other end was a bench upon which were retorts, a mortar-and-pestle, an alcohol forge, and other implements and instruments which suggested chemical—and other—experiments. There were, too, racks of seed-boxes for testing. Hiram was thoroughly familiar with these shallow trays.

But in the middle of the room was the object that most excited Hiram's interest. This was a high table—or so it seemed—its shape something like that of a coffin. At least, it was as long as a full length casket, about as wide, and was side-boarded like no table Hiram had ever seen before. But there was a tarpaulin spread over it. The four legs were of round, barked, straight logs four inches in diameter.

After setting the gun in the rack Battick turned toward his visitor and, though not very graciously, invited him to be seated, pointing to a rustic armchair at the side of the hearth farthest from the gun-rack.

"And take off your coat, stranger. What did you say your name was?"

"It is Hiram Strong."

"What did you say about working Sunnyside for Mr. Bronson?" continued the host. "I guess you mean you're going to chore around for him?"

"I hope to run the farm for Mr. Bronson."

"A boy like you?"

"I'll never be any younger," Hiram laughed, for he was rather used to having people cast reflections upon his age. He had had, however, much greater experience in practical farming than many men on farms who were twice his age.

"What do you know about farming?" asked Battick abruptly. "What experience have you had, Mr. Strong?"

Hiram smiled slowly. He was by no means a handsome boy, but he was wholesome looking and his smile was disarming. Even the scowling visage of Yancey Battick began to smooth out as he watched his visitor. But it was plain to be seen that the man was a misanthrope.

"You see," Hiram began, "my father was a very good farmer indeed, although he farmed for other men all his life. He read a great deal and studied farming methods, and I worked right along with him until I was fourteen. What he learned—at least, a good deal of it—I learned, too."

"Humph!" sniffed Battick, "a boy of that immature age?"

"Father made a friend of me. We were like brothers—chums," Hiram Strong continued. "Somehow, he was an easy man to learn from—he was patient."

"I see," muttered Battick. "Well, I take it your father died?"

"Yes, sir. I had got it into my head that I did not want to be a tenant farmer, as he was all his life, and there was no money left. So I went to town thinking there would be more and better chances for a boy."

"Humph! You were starting out young."

"I didn't have any folks," explained Hiram. "I got a job that barely paid my board and lodging. And I soon got sick of it."

"Of the job or the city?" asked Battick, the ghost of a smile passing over his face as he listened to his involuntary guest and stared into the leaping flames on the hearth.

"Of both," replied Hiram promptly. "The city is no place for a fellow who loves the country as I found I did. Mother Atterson, with whom I boarded, had eighty acres left her near the town of Scoville, and she and I made a dicker. I farmed it for her for two years, and when our contract ended at Christmas last, I had fixed things so that she could run it on a paying basis with the help of a friend of mine, Henry Pollock, and by the aid of Sister, whom Mother Atterson has adopted, and Lem Camp, who lives with them.

"Mr. Stephen Bronson bought a place near Scoville—"

"He's always buying farms," grumbled Battick. "Got more money than brains."

"I wouldn't say that," Hiram emphasized in disagreement. "I do not believe that Mr. Bronson ever invests in a farm without getting a good return for his outlay. He did on the old Fleigler place there in Scoville. And he only bought that place to live there for a part of each year while his daughter, Lettie, is going to school at St. Beris."

"Yes. I've heard he has a daughter that just about leads him around by the nose," sniffed Battick.

Hiram Strong laughed.

"She's a girl that most any man would be willing to be led around by, by the nose or otherwise," he said. "Lettie Bronson is a mighty pretty girl. Anyhow, her father liked my work on the Atterson Eighty; so he has made me this offer to come out here to the Middle West and farm Sunnyside for a couple of years."

In this brief way Hiram Strong had related the more important occurrences narrated in the first volume of this series, entitled "Hiram the Young Farmer; Or, Making the Soil Pay." His modest statement that "Mr. Bronson had liked my work on the Atterson Eighty" scarcely described the farm owner's enthusiasm, however, or explained why Mr. Bronson had sent for so young a fellow to run his new purchase here at Pringleton near the Ohio River.

The rain continued to slap against the old clapboards of the house and the limbs of the huge buttonwood tree Hiram had seen in the front yard creaked loudly. A long and hard storm threatened, and the outlook for pushing on to Miss Pringle's was not a happy one. The woman would be in bed before Hiram reached her place.

As Mr. Battick seemed to have fallen into a brown study and asked no further questions, Hiram felt free to examine the furniture of the living room again. The table—if it was a table—was an odd thing. The young man did not know what to make of it.

The piece of tarpaulin that covered it was sunk in along the top, and he came to the conclusion that there was no real top to the table. Then, in leaning back in his low chair near the fire, he saw that the long frame was bottomed with heavy planks. It was a box on four legs rather than a table.

Mr. Battick spoke again, in his usual abrupt fashion:

"Have you had your supper yet, young fellow?"

The tone could not be called cordial.

"I had something to eat on the train," replied Hiram indifferently.

"On that old accommodation?" sniffed Battick. "Case-hardened sandwiches, I bet."

Hiram laughed, but admitted the fact.

"I know what it is to ride on that train," the man said. "In spite of what Jase Oakley told you about me, I wouldn't see a man starve—not right here in my own house," added this queer individual, though still gruffly.

"Oh, the stationmaster did not say anything about you except that you were afraid of rats," Hiram rejoined, watching Battick slyly, for he was very curious about the man.

"That's what that old thimblerigger said about me, eh?" growled Battick. "Lucky he don't often come up this way. It might happen that I should take him for a rat."

He said it so savagely that Hiram considered it best to say nothing more to excite his strange host. Battick brought eggs and bacon and half of a corn pone from a cupboard, preparing the meal deftly at the open fire.

Suddenly Hiram's attention was caught by something on the floor just under the nearest corner of the odd table, or box, in the middle of the room. It was a tiny, cone-shaped heap of grain—wheat, he thought. It had dribbled through the bottom of that box by some tiny hole, it was plain, and had fallen unnoticed to the floor.

There was something odd about this grain—something that immediately attracted Hiram's particular interest. When Battick's back was turned he stooped sideways from his chair and secured one of the kernels of wheat between his thumb and finger. He placed it in his palm and studied it minutely.

The kernel of wheat was different from any grain he had ever seen. First of all, it was a very large, plump grain, perfectly formed, and upon one side was a tiny yet distinct red stripe.

Suddenly Hiram looked up from the grain in his hand. Battick had made a strange move. He had set the skillet down on the hearth and was reaching for the shotgun. His eyes seemed to glow and a deep flush was diffused over the man's forbidding looking countenance.

Hiram Strong was amazed and startled at his host's appearance.

"What is the matter, Mr. Battick?" cried the visitor. "What are you doing with that gun?" for the man had seized it now.

"Hush!" hissed Yancey Battick. "I think I see a rat!"

CHAPTER III

INVENTOR'S LUCK

The thought had been impressed upon Hiram Strong's mind from the very first that there was something altogether wrong with Yancey Battick. His wild eyes and excited manner now convinced the visitor that this suspicion was correct. Battick was not altogether sane. And when he reached for that rock-salt loaded shotgun the visitor prepared to defend himself.

The muzzle of the gun swung toward Hiram. The latter slid out of his chair and darted sideways just as Battick rose up with the butt of the gun at his shoulder. The muzzle seemed closely following Hiram's movements.

Then the man's finger pressed the trigger and the gun roared. It seemed that the wind of the charge passed over Hiram's head.

"What under the sun are you doing?" demanded the youth, leaping up and facing the householder.

"What did you move for?" retorted Battick. "I might have got you instead of the rat."

"The rat?" repeated Hiram in some doubt.

Battick returned the smoking shotgun to its rack and crossed the room to the workbench. Under it, deep in the shadow of the corner, he found his game—a fat, gray rat, still kicking.

"Great Scott!" murmured the boy from the East, "it really was a rat."

"What did you think I would be shooting in this old house?" growled Battick. "It's rat-ridden. They give me no peace. They have cost me more—well, no use going into that," said the man, and so concluded.

But Hiram Strong was now immensely interested in this strange individual. His fright because of Mr. Battick's reckless use of his shotgun was soon over. The rats about this ancient cottage certainly were very bold. But there must be—there was—a particular reason why the man was afraid of the rats. This fear of which Hiram had first heard from Jason Oakley, the stationmaster, was not merely some idiosyncrasy of Battick's.

"Have you tried poison for the vermin?" Hiram demanded.

"I've tried everything," replied the man gruffly.

"What makes them so bold?"

"The place was overrun with them when I came on it four years ago. I can't keep anything in the barn. Why, they have eaten a good buggy harness on me! I have to keep my harnesses in my bedroom. I've got an alarm clock in there and it ticks so loud that it scares them off, I guess. And, then, I snore. That must keep the creatures on the move."

Hiram did not know whether the man was all together in earnest, or not; but he had to laugh at this last statement.

"It ain't no laughing matter," Yancey Battick said, wagging his head. "My old horse got a nail in his hoof and I greased it well. Hanged if the rascals didn't near eat him up in one night. If he hadn't kicked and snorted so and woke me up, I guess they would have had the most of him eaten before morning."

"But what brings them into the house—and so bold? You must be on the watch for them continually."

"I am. Jase Oakley is right. I am afraid of the things. I scarcely dare leave the house because of them—"

He halted. Hiram knew instinctively that the man thought he had said too much. He had verged on some secret, the mystery of which the youth had felt to be in the very air of the house since he had entered it. He saw that Battick was eyeing him again in his suspicious, if not ugly, way, so he hastily asked:

"Did you learn to shoot on the fly like that by shooting rats?"

"Oh, I knew how to use a gun before I came to Pringleton."

"You've got good eyesight. I did not see that rat at all."

"I saw the glint of his eyes under the bench." Battick was again giving his attention to the preparations for supper. "I've got so I am continually on the watch for the rascals."

And he did not dare leave the house because of them! Then, decided Hiram Strong, there was something in the house that he feared the rats would destroy.

Hiram looked under the odd box in the middle of the room at the little heap of grain that lay there. Wheat! A special kind of wheat! The seed-boxes on the bench told something. Hiram could guess more. But he said nothing at the moment. In fact Yancey Battick was scarcely a man to whom one would address a personal remark or ask a direct question about himself or his affairs.

Yancey Battick brought a small stand from one corner of the room and set it before the fire. He spread a clean, if coarse, cloth upon it, and then the tableware, such as a camper would use. The smoking food, together with a pot of coffee, came on the table, and Battick beckoned Hiram to draw up his chair.

"This is mighty good of you, Mr. Battick," the visitor said, "especially when I know you do not make a practice of harboring wayfarers."

"I hope I shall not be sorry for having befriended you," the man said gloomily.

"I assure you—"

"You couldn't assure me of anything," interrupted Battick. "I have had sufficient experience to make me a thorough pessimist. You look like a nice young fellow; but I shall not be surprised if I am, in the end, very sorry that I took you in."

"Even to save me from the clutches of Miss Delia Pringle?" the visitor suggested slyly.

There came a sudden twinkle into Yancey Battick's eye. Whether or not he was a monomaniac on some subject (and Hiram Strong was tempted to believe he was) it was evident that the man appreciated a joke. He nodded his appreciation of Hiram's words.

"That woman is a pest!" Battick said with vigor. "But I guess she is honest—wouldn't steal anything but an unsophisticated and helpless man-critter, I mean."

So it was stealing that he was afraid of! Rats are great thieves. Hiram guessed again—and believed he had hit the fundamental trouble with his odd host. Battick had originated, or developed, a new seed-wheat. He feared somebody would steal it from him, and the rats were doing so.

The rats were so troublesome that he had to keep the wheat in his living room. This table-looking thing was a box full of wheat. And because the rats were so bold he dared not leave the house. Even with all these precautions the thieving creatures were getting some of the wheat, as note that little pile of grain under the box on the floor.

The young fellow from Scoville was interested in more than one way. First of all, Battick himself aroused his curiosity. But that single kernel of wheat he had picked up interested Hiram Strong much more.

He had examined many samples of seed-wheat, but nothing that had ever looked like this large, plump grain with the tiny crimson stripe upon it This was indeed a distinct variety, and if its culture was possible on all wheat lands, and it milled all right, Hiram knew the strange man had the basis of a fortune—if he could put it over.

This section around Pringleton, as Hiram had learned from Mr. Bronson, was not particularly a wheat-growing country. And yet every farmer of any importance grew some wheat. If this box was full of grain the man had about eight bushels, if Hiram was any judge of bulk and measure. Sown carefully, this would be enough for five or six acres. Five or six acres of wheat is a very small wheat crop, but an excellent seed crop.

If Battick really had a new and good wheat, the crop from this amount of seed would pay him a good penny, if he could sell it to an honest seedsman. There was thus reason why he should be so afraid of thieves—and especially of the rats.

Under fortunate conditions, the increase of these few bushels of wheat would yield Battick a small fortune. Perhaps the man was by no means as crazy as he at first appeared. And it might be that he knew his neighbors, and had reason to suspect them of desiring to rob him of the fruits of his discovery.

The two finished supper and pushed back from the table. There was a sink in one corner of the room, and at this Battick quickly washed the cooking utensils and tableware, while Hiram dried them. They spoke of inconsequential things while they did this work Then Battick said:

"I wouldn't have the heart to turn you out on a night like this, even if it cleared off—which it isn't likely to do. I'll let you sleep in my bed and I'll bunk down here before the fire."

"Oh, no, Mr. Battick! I could not think of taking your bed," Hiram urged, but with a smile. "You have proved to me that you are a much better neighbor than you were quoted at; but there is no use in carrying the demonstration too far. I will sleep here before the fire and be very glad of the chance."

Yancey Battick flashed him another of those hard, suspicious glances. It was not difficult to read the man's mind now that Hiram had discovered, as he thought, the key to the mystery. Battick was suspicious of him yet. He said gruffly:

"If you remain here to-night, young man, you will sleep in my bed. And see that you do sleep, too, for although I snore, I'm easily roused, and I keep that gun right beside me."

Hiram could not help being somewhat exasperated by all this suspicion. He was glad enough of the shelter; but he did not think he looked so dishonest that his host had to guard himself with a shotgun.

"Look here, Mr. Battick," he said, rather tartly. "You're one of those cows that give a good pail of milk and then step in it. You give me supper and a bed, but distrust me. How do you know but you are entertaining an angel unawares?" and he ended by laughing a little to cover his vexation.

"That's all right, too," Battick replied. "I know all about those 'angels unaware.' I've had my experience with them, and I've had to run 'em off the place with my shotgun. Besides, I don't see any wings sprouting on you, Mr. Strong. I'll treat you just as good as you treat me. But as I tell 'em all, when you come to my front gate, call out; and if I don't answer, keep off."

"If you are a pessimist, Mr. Battick," Hiram said shortly, "I hope I'll never get to be one."

Suddenly the man flashed him a more earnest glance than before. His countenance became suffused with red.

"I hope you never will, young man," Battick said. "And never be an inventor. Immediately a man starts out to help his fellows, everybody's hand is turned against him. He is pariah—and likewise the prey of all those with thieving instincts. Consider Goodyear, what he suffered; and Elias Howe, and a horde of others.

"I came to Pringleton to escape people who wanted to rob me. Some of them had. But it seems people are the same in all localities. I have to watch, and threaten, and live like an outlaw to keep what is my own, Mr. Strong. You are young and have faith. Keep that faith in people if you can. But never be an inventor; for that is a crime that should be punished by being boiled in oil, or sawn asunder, or drawn and quartered, or some other middle-age device for making capital criminals suffer."

"That is dreadful!" exclaimed Hiram.

"Sounds pretty rough, I admit," Battick said, in his usual tone. "But believe me, I know whereof I speak. Now, come this way, Mr. Strong. I think you will be comfortable."

He lit a candle at the blaze on the hearth and led the way into his bedroom. It was a comfortable room, and Battick insisted upon putting clean sheets on the bed, which he aired before the fire, and left his guest finally with the word:

"Don't be frightened if you hear the gun in the night, Strong. I shall probably be only shooting at a rat."

Hiram had never been entertained in just this way before. He peered through the crack of the door and saw Yancey Battick loading the barrel of the shotgun that had previously been emptied. The young fellow went to bed finally feeling that he was in the midst of alarms.

CHAPTER IV

SUNNYSIDE

As so often happens after a hard storm, the weather cleared at daybreak and a patch of cold blue wintry sky met Hiram Strong's inquisitive gaze through the window as he rolled over in Yancey Battick's comfortable bed to look out.

He judged immediately that it would be a race between Boreas and Jack Frost as to which would gain the most advantage by the stopping of the rain. The sturdy wind would try to dry up the saturated earth before Jack Frost could get his fetters on the puddles and plowed ground.

From what he had read of conditions here about Pringleton, the winter had already been severe enough for all farming purposes. The grain was in good shape, the plowed ground had already been well frozen to the detriment of the bugs and worms, and the fruit trees were showing no signs of early sap-rising.

Another month of cold weather, some snow for a wheat-cover, and some strong March winds, would put the land in ideal shape for corn.

And Hiram Strong had been brought here to the Corn Belt of the Middle West for the express purpose of raising corn.

He was enthusiastic over the prospect. He had worked hard and intelligently on the little Eastern farm, and now had come his chance, not only to work out his present theories on a larger scale, but to experiment further and with greater facilities for carrying his plans through to successful completion. Yes, it was with eager anticipation and high hopes that he looked forward to the advancing spring.

Mr. Stephen Bronson had been growing bumper crops on all his farms through the Middle West, and especially those in the vicinity of Pringleton. Without doubt the big farm owner, having seen what Hiram Strong had accomplished on the Atterson Eighty, determined to learn if such methods of cultivation would pay on a larger acreage and under somewhat different conditions of climate and with different tools.

The young fellow quite realized that he was on trial only. He must make good within two years or he would be a failure in the eyes of such a sharp business man as Stephen Bronson.

Hiram, however, had no intention of being a failure; he had come here to Pringleton to win, just as he had gone upon the old Jeptha Atterson farm to win.

Hiram remained in bed on this morning until he heard a stir in the living room and the sizzling of bacon in the skillet. He had not been disturbed by Mr. Battick shooting at rats in the night (for which he was grateful), but he had not dared to venture into the outer room until he was sure his host was moving about.

Hiram brought his bag out of the bedroom already packed. Battick only grunted a "good morning," and was evidently in no more cheerful mood than on the evening before. Had he been invited to do so, the youth from the East would not have wished to prolong his stay with the man.

Battick, however, seemed still opposed to Hiram's getting into the clutches of Miss Delia Pringle. At breakfast he said:

"If you can stand to 'bach it,' as I do, Mr. Strong, you can make yourself comfortable up there at Sunnyside, and no thanks to anybody."

"But you say the house is burned down!"

"That's right. The last fellow who was on the farm, however, went in strong for poultry. Believed in fowls—it was a religion with him. And I take it a man has got to make 'em his religion really to get anything out of them. I never had the patience myself."

"I believe eighty per cent. of those who try hens for profit, fail; but the successful ones can easily enough point out the reasons for those failures," said Hiram.

"Well, maybe. However, that Brandenburg who lived at Sunnyside last fixed up a pretty good hen plant. After the fire he went in a hurry. Feared he would be blamed, perhaps. And I guess that Pringle woman would have done something to him if she could have got the law on him."

"Miss Delia Pringle?" Hiram asked, with some curiosity.

"Yes. Her folks owned pretty near all the land around here two or three generations ago. That's why it is called Pringleton. Sounds like a nursery rhyme. She sold Sunnyside to Stephen Bronson, same as she sold me this place."

"Indeed?"

"This was the old Pringle homestead. Built before the Flood, or thereabout," said Battick. "That is why it is rat-ridden. The rodents had it to themselves for years, while the farm lay idle. It had not been cropped to death by tenants; that is why I bought it. You will find part of Sunnyside in worse shape than this old place was. Miss Pringle had one tenant after another on the big farm, each one worse than the previous incumbent. I hope Stephen Bronson got it cheap enough."

"You intimated I might find some means of housekeeping up there, after all," said Hiram. "What did you mean?"

"That Brandenburg left his chicken plant just as it was. The end shed is tight and has a good stove in it and a bunk. He watched his incubators there. You get some bedclothes and some cooking utensils and you'll be fixed right," said Battick.

"Anything rather than give me up to the teeth and claws of Miss Pringle, is it?" asked Hiram, with a quiet chuckle.

"No laughing matter, young fellow," advised Battick, as the visitor prepared to depart. "I'll bet you she'll be over to see you before you are at Sunnyside twenty-four hours—unless she has a broken leg. Oh, I know her, Mr. Strong. I pretty near had to run her off this place with my gun."

"I hope not, Mr. Battick."

"Fact," said the man in a perfectly serious way. "As I tell you, this was the old Pringle place. She claimed she liked to come down here for old time's sake and sit under that buttonwood tree out there. She'd bring her sewing and stay all the afternoon and I had to dress up and make believe I was going to town to get rid of her."

"That was a good deal of a time-consumer," interrupted Hiram, his eyes dancing with his inward mirth.

"Then," pursued the harassed man, "folks riding by began to ask me if we were going to be married soon and whether I'd continue to live down here or go up to Miss Pringle's new house to live with her. It got right embarrassing for a modest man, for a fact!

"Besides," added Battick, "I didn't know but she was aiming to get me into court for breach of promise. Circumstantial evidence has hung many a man."

"I hope I shall have no similar trouble," Hiram replied, vastly amused.

He believed Battick, in spite of all his moodiness, and his fear of rats—and dislike for visitors—was a wit and worth cultivating. At least, he determined to learn more about that new wheat that the man was guarding so religiously.

In fact, Hiram had found a chance to pick up a pinch of the wheat corns from under the trough, and had the grain safely twisted up in a bit of paper in his pocket.

He knew better than to offer Mr. Battick anything like money in return for the queer hospitality the misanthrope had shown him. Hiram did, however, make one attempt to return something for the kindness.

"I see you have seed wheat in this box, Mr. Battick," he said. "If you wish to keep the rats out of it, I believe I can show you a wrinkle."

"You can?" rejoined Battick, watching him with keen suspicion again.

"You have a couple of old milk pans there and two wash basins. Invert a basin or a pan over each leg of that box and no rat can run up the leg and over the side of the box, or gnaw into it."

"I get you!" ejaculated Battick, seeing the point at once. "I believe that's a good idea, young fellow."

"I know it is," rejoined Hiram with confidence. "I built me a corncrib that way only last year. It surely gives Mr. Rat something new to think about."

He picked up his bag, shook hands with his odd host, and went out. It was a keen wind he faced as he started up the hill to Sunnyside Farm.

A jay winging its way from one wood to another, stopped upon a dead limb to stare curiously at the wayfarer. Then, with raucous cry, it disappeared in a piece of woodland that evidently belonged to the old farm that Yancey Battick had purchased from the terrible Miss Pringle. This windbreak divided the Battick place from Sunnyside.

While he was yet at some distance Hiram saw the burned ruins of the farmhouse on the hill and the barns and other outbuildings. All the arable land of Sunnyside seemed to lie on the south side of the road; and the slope of the fields was toward that same point of the compass.

The higher land on his right was heavily timbered clear to the summit of the hill. As he mounted the incline he obtained a pretty clear idea of what the acres he expected to farm looked like.

Hiram Strong was deeply interested in his calling. Every young fellow must, if he would get on in the world and really amount to anything. As he had told Yancey Battick the evening before, Hiram's father had been a good farmer, and he had not only given his son knowledge, but had instilled into his mind the principle of thoroughness, as well.

As Hiram looked, searching the fields to the far-distant line of the forest-bounded farm, he wondered what would be his fortune here. Would he be able to show a profit for Mr. Bronson on the ledger, as he had for Mother Atterson? As to his own contract, Hiram was on a straight salary, and whether he made little or much for his employer his own income would not be affected.

But money was not the only thing that Hiram Strong saw in the bargain. He was after a reputation. Moreover, he desired to learn something from his experience—whatever it might be—here at Sunnyside.

He reached the plain at the top of the rise at last. The outlook all about was promising, save in one direction where there was a piece of burned timber. The nearest house was a white painted cottage with green blinds on the other side of the road and a few rods beyond the burned timber lot.

"That must be Miss Pringle's," Hiram thought, and on the heels of this mental decision he beheld to his surprise a woman with a shawl thrown hastily over her head running out of this small dwelling and out of the yard, approaching the main gate of the Sunnyside place, evidently in a state of exaggerated excitement.

"Say, young man!" she shouted while still some distance away, "I want to know why you've kept this whole neighborhood in a stir-up all this blessed night? Where have you been? And you as dry as a bone right now!"

CHAPTER V

THE TERRIBLE MISS PRINGLE

The woman so excitedly approaching Sunnyside was a buxom person with every sign of an assertive and determined character. This first speech addressed to Hiram made him feel that he must somehow be in the wrong—that he had done something to shock Miss Pringle and the neighborhood in general.

Hiram took off his hat as Miss Pringle came near. But he did not offer his hand, for he was not at all sure that her greeting was intended to be a friendly one.

"I suppose you are Mr. Strong?" the woman gasped, rather out of breath when she arrived.

"Yes, ma'am," replied Hiram.

"Well, for the land's sake, where have you been?"

"I guess I don't understand you," he said. "Are you Miss Pringle?"

"That's who I am," she declared with emphasis. "And I heard all about you from Mr. Bronson. You were comin' to stay at my house last night and you didn't come. Were you told to come to me?"

"Not exactly. I was advised to try at your house for lodging—"

"Who by?" she flashed at him.

"By the stationmaster."

"That dumbhead! I might have known Jase Oakley would ball it all up. When Mr. Bronson 'phoned to me that he could not get over in the storm to meet you at the depot, I turned right around and 'phoned Jason to tell you that I would be on the lookout for you. Didn't he tell you that, Mr. Strong?"

"Not in just that way," replied Hiram.

"Well, for the land's sake, where did you stop? When you didn't come along at the proper time after the train got in last evening I began calling folks on the line. I called everybody that had a 'phone, and none of 'em had seen you. It was so rough a night—"

Hiram saw at once that the terrible Miss Pringle was, after all, a kindly soul. It could not be for the mere possession of a "male creature," sight unseen, that she had taken all this trouble to locate him, a stranger in Pringleton.

"You were most kind, Miss Pringle," he said quickly. "I am sorry to have caused you any disturbance of mind."

"But where did you stay?" insisted the woman, eyeing Hiram with two very sharp brown eyes.

It was evident that very little of importance went on in Miss Delia Pringle's neighborhood that she did not see. She was kindly of disposition as well as shrewd, Mr. Yancey Battick's opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Hiram was not at all afraid of her when he looked into her plump and rosy face.

"I tell you," he said, smiling covertly, for he suspected from what the stationmaster had said how the majority of the neighbors looked upon Yancey Battick, "a heavy shower caught me and I made for the nearest house."

"And whose was that, for the land's sake?" was the instant demand.

"Mr. Battick's," Hiram said demurely.

"Yancey Battick?" almost shrieked Miss Pringle. "Why, he's crazy!"

"I shouldn't wonder if he is a little," admitted Hiram. "But I am sure he is harmless."

"I don't know about that," she demurred. "He's altogether too quick to use a gun. A poor tramp came past here last summer—he never would have stopped, I guess, only he was out of breath completely—and Battick had blown his coat-tails off with a charge of rock-salt just because the hobo had gone into the yard of the old house and around to the well. That's the coldest water anywhere in Pringleton; but nobody ever gets a drink of it but Yancey Battick now."

"I suppose he's paid for it, Miss Pringle?" said Hiram quietly.

"I don't know that he has," was her quick reply. "At least, the neighbors blame me for selling the old place to such a man. They know I didn't need the money. And Yancey Battick certainly ain't what you can call with truth a good neighbor. We count on getting good neighbors into the Pringleton district if we can. That is why I was so glad to sell Sunnyside to Mr. Bronson.

"And do you really mean to tell me that you spent the night with Mr. Battick?" she added.

"And he did not eat me up," laughed Hiram.

"Well! All I've got to say, young man, is that you're a regular Daniel. You'd find it cozy and comfortable, I guess, in a lion's den. Never heard of anybody's even getting inside of the old house before since Battick got into it. He did let you inside, didn't he?"

"I don't look as though I had stayed out on that leaky old porch of his, do I?" asked Hiram, still much amused.

"You're as dry as a bone, as I said before."

"Not only did he entertain me for supper and breakfast, but he gave me his own bed in which to sleep."

"For the land's sake!" Miss Pringle shook her head in wonder. Then her brown eyes suddenly snapped. All the inquisitiveness in the woman's nature came to the surface; perhaps it was her single sin. "What's he got in that house he's so afraid the neighbors might see, Mr. Strong?"

"I did not see anything particularly mysterious—nothing at all," Hiram assured her.

"Not a thing? Wasn't he trying to hide anything from you? Didn't he seem afraid of anything?"

"He certainly has a great fear of rats," Hiram admitted, answering her second query but avoiding the first. "And he has good reason to. He shot a big fellow right there in the house while we sat before the fire."

"You don't say!"

"If it was me I'd get me a weasel and turn him loose in the house and then pour cement and broken glass in the rat holes."

"He knew the rats were there when he bought the old homestead," declared Miss Pringle defensively.

"And I guess he has a right to shoot them if he wishes to," laughed Hiram.

"But he is too promiscuous with his shotgun," declared the woman, shaking her head. "Well, now, Mr. Strong, I'm sorry you did not reach my house. I—and Abigail Wentworth who lives with me—would have been glad to put you up. But I am glad you made out as well as you did at Mr. Battick's. I'm glad to know he's not so bad as we all thought him."

"Perhaps the neighbors haven't approached him just right," Hiram suggested. "He wishes to be let alone."

"Then there is something wrong with him," Miss Pringle declared. "Something that he's ashamed of."

"You are jumping at a conclusion there, that may not be correct," Hiram said. "At any rate I saw nothing really wrong with Mr. Battick. And I feel grateful for his hospitality."

"Well, now, Mr. Strong," the woman said quickly, "you bring your bag right over to the house and stop with me till Mr. Bronson can make other arrangements for you."

"You are more than kind," Hiram told her. "But I understand that I may be able to go to housekeeping on my own account in one of the sheds—where the former tenant of the farm ran his incubators and brooders."

"That Jim Brandenburg! He made me a lot of trouble. But he did have ideas about hens. I suppose that shed could be made comfortable for you if Mr. Bronson wants you right on the place."

"I will try 'baching it,' Miss Pringle," Hiram said with firmness.

"Well, just as you say. But I want you to come over to-day to dinner. You ain't prepared to go right to housekeeping, I'm sure."

"Thank you; I will certainly come," Hiram assured her.

"Do so," Miss Pringle said warmly, as she turned away. "Abigail will blow the horn when it's ready."

He thanked her again. The terrible Miss Pringle did not prove to be so very formidable after all. It was evident that Battick had gained just as wrong an idea about his neighbors as the neighbors had about him.

"I will keep on the blind side of both parties," Hiram Strong told himself. "It is well to have friends in both camps. One thing I surely want—that is, to keep on good terms with everybody about Sunnyside. I don't want to have any such difficulty here as I had with the Dickersons at first, back there at Scoville," he added, remembering very poignantly a neighborhood feud that had hampered him when he first went to work on the Atterson Eighty.

When Miss Pringle had gone back to her neat little cottage across the road, Hiram began examining the buildings left standing on the Sunnyside premises. Nothing of importance but the dwelling itself had been destroyed by the fire.

The barn had a basement with swinging stanchions for ten cows and stalls for several horses. The mows were filled with a good quality of hay, and some oats in the straw—a feed that Hiram did not much approve of. For a horse or mule has to be very hungry indeed to eat oat-straw, and fed in this way a large proportion of the grain is wasted and trampled underfoot with the roughage.

"It looks to me," Hiram decided, after coming out of the barn, "that somebody tried to run a small dairy here without a silo. There are stacks of corn fodder, half of it winter-spoiled, and not a beast on the place to eat it up. It would pay Mr. Bronson to buy some young stock right now and turn it into the paddock back of the barn, and feed up all this roughage.

"Even if there is little pasture on the farm, it would pay to do this, and if the stock is not fattened by May, hire pasture for them on neighboring farms. I hate to see fodder go to waste, for it is the most expensive feed a farmer can raise."

Many an older farmer would have called in question the young fellow's statement. But Hiram was thinking no longer as a "one-horse farmer." He had got out of that class now. Here at Sunnyside, if he made a profit at all, it must be through much bigger agricultural activities than he had ever been able to compass before.

He went on to the row of poultry houses and entered the first one. This was the incubator house of which Mr. Battick had told him. It was a well-built and comfortable place. There was a good-sized pot stove and a bunk to sleep in. There was a cupboard, too, and a table and a chair.

"Guess I can make out here for a while, at any rate," he thought as he came out-of-doors again. "Of course, later I shan't have time to get my own meals; but at first—Ah! here comes an automobile. I wonder if this is not Mr. Bronson now?" and he started for the gate to meet the machine.

CHAPTER VI

FARMING AND FURBELOWS

The motor-car that came swiftly along the ridge road to the gate of Sunnyside Farm was a big, seven-passenger touring car. Behind the wheel sat a big man in a fur coat. To tell the truth, however, it was not Mr. Bronson, his employer, at whom Hiram Strong first looked.

He had caught sight of a veil trailing upon the wind from the tonneau. A girl sat there—a very winsome looking, bright-faced girl—and before the car stopped she had spied Hiram and waved a gloved hand at him, shouting:

"Oh, Hiram Strong! isn't this a beautiful spot? How are you?"

"I'm all right, Miss Lettie," he said answering the second question first. "I guess it is pretty here at Sunnyside in summer. But look at those wheels and mudguards!"

Mr. Bronson began to chuckle, shutting off his engine.

"Hiram's right, Lettie," he said to his daughter. "You'd better stay in the car and keep out of this mud. What do you think of the drainage hereabout, Hi?"

He stepped out of the car himself and shook hands with Hiram, man to man. It was evident by his manner and look that Mr. Stephen Bronson both liked and respected Hiram Strong.

"I haven't had much time to look about, Mr. Bronson," replied the youth, "only got here an hour ago. But it does look as though that field yonder"—and he pointed to one at the east of the house lot that was covered with shallow puddles—"would be the better for some tiling."

"And yet it is high and should be dry."

"All high land isn't dry—that piece proves it. What's in it?"

"Wheat."

"Thought so. It won't be much of a crop, I fear."

"How much tiling would it need to drain that whole piece properly, do you think? I understand from the farmers about here that that twenty acres has never made heavy crops—neither of corn nor grain. It has been limed well, too."

"The litmus paper test will prove or disprove that," said Hiram. "But it is high, almost level land, and right along the roadside. It ought to grow you a good crop to advertise the farm."

"I presume that's so, Hiram," laughed Mr. Bronson. "But a carload of tiles, and dragged clear up here from the siding at Pringleton, would cost a heap of money."

"Yes," agreed the young farmer. "Perhaps you had better make the better fields pay in advance for the improvements on the poor ones."

"Oh, wait!" cried Lettie Bronson, with a pout. "You men have begun talking farming like a house afire—right at the start! I can't get a word in edgewise, and I've got news for Hiram. You know, Hiram, I only came on from St. Beris yesterday, just to remain at Plympton with father over Sunday."

"And I only got here last night, Miss Lettie," the young fellow said.

"Then we might have traveled together just as well as not!" she cried.

"I guess not," laughed her father. "You went to see that machinery we talked about, didn't you, Hi?"

"Yes, sir. I went all through the Comet Plow Factory and the big agricultural warehouse in Cincinnati."

"You see, Lettie, he was several days coming here from Scoville."

"I don't care," Miss Lettie declared, "I want to tell him something he doesn't know."

"There are a whole lot of things I guess you could tell me that I don't know, Miss Lettie," said Hiram rather ruefully, for he felt his lack of book knowledge most keenly.

"It is about Sister. Cecilia, I suppose her real name is, Hiram?"

"But rather stiff and formal for Sister," said the young fellow, dodging the query.

"I chanced to ride past the Atterson place," pursued Lettie Bronson, "and Mrs. Atterson was on the porch and waved to me. I rode into the yard, and she was full of the news. It seems that Sister has not known just who her people were."

"She was an orphan when Mother Atterson got her," admitted Hiram.

"Well, it seems that she really has some relatives, somewhere. And Mrs. Atterson says she thinks there will be some money coming to Sister—Cecilia. She had just received a letter from a lawyer who had been trying to find Cecilia for some time. It's quite a romance, isn't it?"

"I am awfully glad for Sister's sake," the young farmer said. "But if she finds her folks I hope they will not take her away from Mother Atterson. She needs Sister."

"I did not see Cecilia to speak to," Lettie said. Then to her father: "Now, Papa Bronson, I know you and Hiram want to tramp all over this farm, and you certainly shall not leave me here in the car to catch my death of cold. Let Hiram take me over to Miss Pringle's. She will give me shelter till you are ready to go home again."

"Go ahead and take the chatterbox over there, Hiram," said Mr. Bronson. "We'll have no peace until you do."

It could not be said honestly that Hiram Strong found Lettie a nuisance, if her father did. He would have enjoyed talking to the pretty girl at any length. When Lettie hopped out of the automobile, too, resting one hand lightly in his, the young farmer saw that she was, as always, very becomingly dressed. Perhaps her outfit was more expensive and somewhat too "grown-up" for a girl of her age; but Hiram—nor Mr. Bronson—did not realize that defect in the motherless girl's garments. That Lettie was growing up too fast for her own good, perhaps, would not appeal to the masculine mind as it would to a thoughtful woman.

Having been reminded of Sister, Hiram took mental note that the girl whom he had first known as the boarding house slavey in Mother Atterson's kitchen had never in her life dressed anything like Lettie Bronson. Fine feathers do not always make fine birds; but the feathers help!

Lettie chattered as Hiram helped her over the muddy spots in the road to the cottage where Miss Pringle lived. The woman welcomed Lettie vociferously. To Hiram she said, with a smirk:

"Now, don't forget, Mr. Strong, to come over to dinner when Abigail blows the horn."

Hiram saw Lettie's dancing eyes and he could not keep from blushing when Miss Pringle was so urgent and significant in both look and speech.

"I guess Yancey Battick isn't so far out of the way, after all," the young fellow muttered as he went to rejoin Mr. Bronson. "Miss Pringle does rather work on a modest fellow. Lettie Bronson's got the laugh on me, all right."

Mr. Bronson had been going through the poultry houses and Hiram caught him at the house in which he thought to set up housekeeping.

"Perhaps that is a good idea, Hiram," said the gentleman thoughtfully. "I haven't told you what I intend to do here, have I?"

"Only that you intend to farm it," the boy replied with a smile.

"You are to do that, my boy, for me," rejoined Mr. Bronson. "I expect you to bring this farm into such a state of fertility in a few years that I can sell it at a big profit."

"That sounds like a big contract, Mr. Bronson," said Hiram, shaking his head thoughtfully.

"You're equal to it, my boy!" declared Bronson, confidently. "Now, is this the hut you think you can camp in?"

"I can make myself comfortable here for a while—until the spring work really opens, at any rate."

"All right. That suits me. We'll run down to the store at the Forks before I go back to Plympton and buy provisions, bedding and cooking utensils for you."

"No need to go to any great expense," put in Hiram.

"The things I buy will all come in handy later. And that brings me around to what I started to say before, Hiram. It does not pay me to farm this place so far from my headquarters. My other farms are right around Plympton. I can move my tractor and my reapers and my thrashing machine and hay-balers from farm to farm in my Plympton string of places. But Sunnyside is too far away from headquarters to send over many of the machines, unless it is the thrasher. That is why I had you look at the farm machinery on your way out here."

Hiram merely nodded.

"My idea," pursued the man, "is to put Sunnyside Farm in good shape and then sell it at a profit to some man who wants a 'gentleman's farm'—you know, catch one of these city men who wants to retire to the country; the kind the farmers say have more money than brains."

"I know," chuckled Hiram, remembering what Battick had said about Mr. Stephen Bronson himself. "Sometimes those gentlemen farmers show the old timers a thing or two."

"Yes. They can afford to experiment and try out new things. However, that is not just what we were getting at. If I sell this farm for a good price I must have a good house on it. I mean to build on the site of the old house that was burned. I shall have to bring workmen here and lodge and feed them. As there are no neighbors who make a practice of taking boarders, other than their own farm help, I shall have to put up a shack, hire a cook, and feed the gang for three months at least."

"I see," said Hiram. "And I can get my meals with them."

"Yes. That is my idea. So if you can get along alone for a while—"

"Of course I can, Mr. Bronson."

"I will have a shack built and a kitchen and bunks established just as soon as the weather is warm enough. Meanwhile my trucks, when not otherwise in use, can be hauling the frame and lumber for the new house."

"One word, Mr. Bronson," said Hiram Strong quickly. "As long as you must build a shed, why not build one that will afterward house these new tools you propose to buy for my use? I see there is no storage room for such things save on the barn floor, and in time they will be in the way there."

A gleam of approval flashed into Mr. Bronson's eyes.

"Good idea, Hiram! And you are as full of good ideas as an egg is of meat," said Mr. Bronson with enthusiasm. "Have you thought of any particular way in which this farm should be run—for the biggest profit, I mean?" and the man smiled at Hiram curiously.

"I'll tell you what struck me right off the reel, Mr. Bronson," said the youth thoughtfully. "But it is only a thought."

"Let's have it," urged Mr. Bronson.

"This land has been worked by tenants only for some years. Tenant farmers usually supply commercial fertilizer to some extent, but not enough humus. The land needs humus—and that in the form of stable manure. Especially the manure from cattle—from cows—if you want to raise bumper crops of corn."

"I presume that is so, Hiram."

"The barn yonder is arranged for the keeping of cattle. You should at least drive some young stock up here right away to eat up the roughage that is going to waste. We want to make all the fertilizer possible and spread it on the land as fast as it can be made and carted out of the barn basement."

"But we can't handle milch cows here, Hiram, before we have a house in which to put a family to look after the cows and the milk."

"That is why I say buy some young stock for the present. I can attend to them myself. They can be fattening at practically no expense. And all the time they will be making fertilizer for the place."

"Well, Hiram, what is going to happen," asked Mr. Bronson, quizzically, "when we give up farming with horses and mules entirely and use only tractors?"

"A hundred tractors won't put back into the soil the fertility that one horse will," the young farmer said. "That is sure. Soiling crops are all right. But in the end, the only farms run by tractor power that are not going to be injured beyond repair are the dairy farms. And I believe the easiest and quickest way to get this half run-down farm into shape is by putting cattle on it."

"Young stock—yes. I agree with you that can be done at once. In fact," said Mr. Bronson, "I should not be surprised if I could pick up a score of head of stock to send up here within the week from my other farms."

"Good! That will be a beginning. But two score will be better. Pasture them later if the pasture is any good here."

"There is good pasture and the fences are in good condition. I looked them over before I bought the place."

"All right, sir. You agree with me, then, that we should aim in the end to make Sunnyside a dairy farm?"

"That seems to be the idea, Hiram. I fancy you are right."

"That being the case, Mr. Bronson, there is one thing you must do. There is only one really profitable way to feed dairy cattle. That is from the silo."

"Oh! Oh! Hiram, you hurt!" exclaimed his employer, and his smile was very rueful. "Do you realize that any kind of silo runs into money?"

"Yes, sir. But it will cost you less to put up a silo now, while you have workmen on the place building your house, than at a later time. If you are going to make Sunnyside fertile, you must have cattle; if you are going to feed cattle cheaply you must cut your corn green and shred it and blow it into the silo. It is the safest and the cheapest way."

"I suppose I have got to admit all you say as true. But your suggestions, are all expensive. The first outlay will be enormous. Here you want to tile that twenty acres of upland. And goodness knows what you may want to do with some of the lowland."

"Make it grow good crops—bumper crops if possible—that is all," said Hiram smiling. "And about that twenty acres along the county road that is now in wheat—"

"Well?"

"I've an idea about underdraining that! but I won't tell you what it is until I have looked over the ground a little. I am convinced that that particular piece should be as fertile as any acreage around here."

"It never has been, they tell me."

"That is no reason why we shouldn't make it the best, is it?" and the young farmer laughed again.

CHAPTER VII

SEED TESTING

By evening of his first day on Sunnyside Farm Hiram Strong was comfortably established in the incubator shed and prepared to keep house after a fashion. Mr. Bronson supplied him with the requisites for a home on the limited plan Hiram intended to follow. The young farmer believed, however, that Miss Delia Pringle really would have taken him to board had he not been so firm in his stand for independence.

It could not be denied that Miss Pringle was a very friendly neighbor; but Hiram saw that Yancey Battick had some right on his side when he stated that he was afraid of the spinster. During those first few days that Hiram was at Sunnyside he, too, thought it the part of wisdom to dodge her as much as possible.

Not that there was any harm in Miss Pringle. She was merely silly, or seemed to be, about men; but Lettie Bronson had teased Hiram all the way to the store in the automobile and back again that first day about the conquest the youth had made of his nearest neighbor at Sunnyside.

This had made Hiram self-conscious and had served to exaggerate in his mind Miss Pringle's already too pronounced attentions.

"You will not be lonely at all, Mr. Strong," the rougish girl told him, immensely pleased by the situation. "Delia Pringle is going to make life there at Sunnyside for you one grand sweet song! You see if she doesn't."

"I hope she will not insist upon being too kind to me," sighed Hiram.

"She told me that she thinks you are very manly for your age," giggled Lettie, who enjoyed making the youth feel uncomfortable. "And I am sure she thinks your age is just right."

"Hold on, Lettie!" advised her father. "I've heard you praise Hiram yourself on occasion. At least, I never heard you run him down much when talking about him."

This statement closed the girl's lips immediately and gave Hiram peace. But he did not wish Lettie to think for a moment that he considered Miss Pringle's interest in him really earnest. However, during his first week or ten days at Sunnyside Farm Hiram Strong was about as busy as one could be; so he did not have to invent many excuses to escape Miss Pringle's rather pressing attentions.

Farming is an exacting occupation. One cannot let loose ends lie and be successful. Before the actual plowing and planting begins there are innumerable details to be gone into and many matters to be settled, for when the spring work once opens there is time for nothing else. And to Hiram, this first year of his work in this strange section of the country, came more than the ordinary number of affairs to be looked into.

Mr. Bronson sent him over a dependable road horse and a run-about, so that he could get about the neighborhood on such errands as he might find necessary. And one of his first errands was to hunt up the best corn growers in that section and buy seed corn of them.

He believed, as he had shown in farming the Atterson Eighty, that raising such corn as was already being grown in the locality was the wiser course. Corn becomes acclimated, and men who have raised the crop year after year in one neighborhood must know more about the proper seed to use than a stranger.

Methods of raising the crop was another matter. Hiram had certain methods he wished to try out to improve and increase the yield of corn that had nothing to do with locality, climate, or soil. These experiments he would try in any case.

He found one man whose cribs were full of a small-cobbed corn of a yellow dent variety, but with many red kernels interspersed among the yellow on most ears. It might not have been what the judges at a corn show would have called true to type, nor was it a handsome corn. But it was as hard as a rock, well rooted on the cob, and, furthermore, it ground into the finest kind of meal.

"How do you select your seed for this, Mr. Brown?" Hiram asked the farmer.

"I just throw aside what look to me like good ears as the boys bring the corn up from the fields and I count the baskets. I don't try to select ears in the field as I hear they do on the agricultural college farm. That's all flapdoodle," said the old fellow, with evident confidence in his own opinion.

"When I'm ready to get my seed, Mr. Strong, just before planting time, I go over the ears I've saved, and what the rats have left me—"

"So you are a friend of the rats, too?"

"What d'you mean—a friend of the rats? I feel about as friendly to them as I do to potato bugs or polecats. Not any!"

"But you feed them—and, what's worse, on your seed corn."

"Like to see you keep rats out of anything that you have to keep corn in," said Daniel Brown energetically. "Not any!"

"We'll take that up at some future time," Hiram said seriously. "I don't believe in letting rats or mice have the run of my seed corn. I think too much of it. Besides, they often nibble the germ of the corn and that particular grain never comes up."

"Well, I count on the planter dropping enough in the hill to overcome that."

"And then you have to go tediously over the field and pull up the superfluous sprouts, don't you?"

"Who don't?"

"I hate to," confessed Hiram.

"Lots of things about farming, young man, that we hate to do. And you'll find it out as you get older."

"I don't doubt it. I'm learning things—both good and bad—every day. Don't you test your corn, Mr. Brown?"

"What d'you mean? In the silly little boxes they tell about at the agriculturoolarulal college?" chuckled the old hard-shell farmer. "Not any! And I raise the very best corn in this section."

"Don't you believe in scientific farming?"

"Science is all right for city folks that need it when they come out on to the land and mess around, raising crops," declared the old man in good natured disgust. "But experience counts for more than book-learning, and don't you forget it."

"But just think what you might do, Mr. Brown, with all your experience and just a little science."

"Rats!" chuckled the old man.

"That is much to the point," Hiram said gravely. "'Rats.' A little science properly applied would free your cribs of rats. I am going to send you a Government pamphlet on that matter."

"I usually roll them into pipe-spills, young man," replied Brown. "I ain't never cultivated a taste for fiction."

But from the looks of the farms, the outbuildings, and the well rolled fields and machine sheds he passed in driving through the country, Hiram did not believe that there were many farmers in the vicinity as stubborn as Mr. Brown. However, he had obtained two baskets of Mr. Brown's seed corn, paying two dollars for it, and he was sure he had the foundation for a good crop.

He did not intend to plant the corn haphazard, as Brown himself did. He stopped at the store just beyond the Pringleton station and bought some yards of canton flannel.

Hiram drove back to Sunnyside Farm. Just as he reached the gate the rural delivery mail wagon stopped.

"Are you the new man on Sunnyside Farm?" the postman asked Hiram.

"Yes."

"Your name's Strong?"

"Hiram Strong," he admitted, going closer to the wagon.

"Here you are, then."

The postman thrust out a letter and Hiram accepted it. Instantly he knew it was from home—for Scoville was still "home" to Hiram Strong. The letter was from Mother Atterson, and as soon as the postman had gone his way Hiram tore open the envelope and read its contents:

"Dear Hiram:

"We got your letter that you had arrived at that Sunnyside place and was sleeping in the henhouse and cooking your own meals. That is pretty hard going, I do allow; but Mr. Bronson is paying you big wages (I wish I could afford to pay you as well and had kept you here on the Atterson place) so you can put up with some inconvenience. For money is a good thing and that brings me to the great news about Sister. That child certainly has got money coming to her. We have heard from a lawyer that says her grandmother, who must have been a pretty harsh old lady, on her father's side, named Cheltenham, has died and left a lot of money to be divided between Sister and—What do you know about Sister having a brother? Ain't it surprising? But it seems the children were parted when they was small, one going one way and the other the other, and the boy has to be found according to the terms of Mrs. Cheltenham's will before the money can be divided. It is going to cost something to find the boy who ran away from a reform school and ain't been heard of since. And that's got to be paid out of the money the lawyer says. But he seems like an honest man and Mr. Strickland says he knows him. And I am glad for Sister's sake for now she's got folks and knows who they are."

Mother Atterson's letter continued in this strain and to great length. But Hiram was very glad to hear the particulars of Sister's good fortune. For there would always be in Hiram Strong's heart a very tender place devoted to Sister. The little slavey of the boarding house was developing now into an intelligent and attractive girl.

Of course, Hiram told himself, she would never be like Lettie Bronson or the other girls who attended St. Beris, for instance. But there was something very sweet about Sister's character that Hiram felt and liked. She was almost like a real sister, and more.

Hiram went on to his living quarters and made his seed testing boxes, using the canton flannel instead of earth in which to germinate the corn selected from the ears he had bought of Daniel Brown. He made his boxes two inches deep and about thirteen inches wide, allowing for the width of the flannel, which was twenty-seven inches, folded once and taking into consideration the slight shrinkage of the cloth.

Hiram considered the flannel better in the seed boxes than either sand, soil, or sawdust. Three or four thicknesses of cloth in the bottom of the box and two thicknesses over the seed, all well dampened, makes the ideal seed testing bed.

He washed the new cloth thoroughly and after it was dried and folded in the box as a bed, he marked it off into checkers of two inches each with an indelible pencil. He then soaked the cloth and replaced it in the box.

Shelling off and discarding the small and irregular grains from the tips and butts of the ears he intended to test, he selected the kernels to be germinated and placed those from ear number one in the first square on the canton flannel, germ side up, from ear number two in the second square, and so on. Wetting the other strip of flannel he covered the corn, and on top of the box laid a pane of glass that fitted tightly.

This method of testing seed enables one to examine the seed at any time without injury to it; the amount of water condensed upon the under side of the glass will usually show whether the cloths are drying out or not.

The numbered ears Hiram stacked upon a hanging shelf in one of the laying houses, confident that neither rats nor mice would reach the seed corn in that place.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BLUEBIRD

Lettie Bronson did not come to Sunnyside again that spring, but her father, of course, came frequently during the first weeks of Hiram's incumbency as superintendent of the hillside farm.

It had been finally agreed that the shed to be built to house the gang of workmen should be a permanent shelter for certain new farm implements that Hiram and his employer had decided upon. And, in addition, a silo was to be built.

"But go easy on the first cost, Hiram," Mr. Bronson continued. "This farm is for sale. An expensive silo will not help sell it any quicker than an old-fashioned silo."

"I don't know about that. It is altogether according to the man who buys. But I am not opposed to the old-fashioned stave silo, only it soon rots out."

"It will stand five years."

"And maybe for twenty," agreed Hiram quickly. "Just according."

"How about these new all metal ones?"

"They have not been tried out long enough for the reports of their usefulness to be verified."

"My gang of carpenters can put up the stave silo," Mr. Bronson said.

"All right, sir. But buy iron hoops for supports, Mr. Bronson, and use wire stays or one of these big winds they tell about around here will blow your silo over—especially before it is filled."

"Oh, yes, we'll do that, of course."

The lumber began to arrive, truck load after truck load. The first drivers to arrive at Sunnyside were very curious about the identity of the boy from the East.

"Where's the boss, son?" Hiram was asked again and again as he met strangers.

"I guess you will have to get along with me as boss," he was wont to say quietly.

"You don't mean it! Bronson hasn't hired you to run this farm?"

"Yes. I'm going to try to run it."

"Well, I always did say that Bronson was crazy," was one frank statement. "More money than brains—more money than brains! Ridiculous to give a boy like you such a job!"

"That is to be seen," Hiram said coolly. "It does not always take frost on the hair to ripen brains."

At this the man grinned and replied:

"You've got a tongue, at any rate, young fellow."

One incident did not pass off so pleasantly. A hulking young fellow turned in at the gateway of Sunnyside and hailed Hiram:

"Where's your dad?"

"Unfortunately he has been dead for some years," Hiram told him. "Won't I do?"

"Huh! Where's Mr. Bronson?"

"You'll find him at his home in Plympton."

"Well, when's he here?"

"I could not say for sure when he is to be here. Hadn't you better tell me your business?"

"I hear he wants to hire men for work here; but I want to do my business with the boss."

"Then you can talk with me, for anybody who works on this farm will have to look upon me as the boss," Hiram told him, smiling.

"You ain't got charge of this farm?"

"Yes. Mr. Bronson has hired me in that capacity."

"Well, I'll be switched!"

"I want some men to ditch and for other heavy work for a few weeks," Hiram said calmly. "After that I shall need plowmen at better pay. You are a farmer, I presume?"

"I presume I am," said the fellow scornfully. "But I don't want to hire out to any kid. I want a man for a boss."

"I'm afraid I would not suit you then," sighed Hiram, with perfect gravity. "Come around in a couple of years, when I am older, and perhaps we can make a dicker."

The fellow went away muttering. Later Hiram chanced to pass the Pringle cottage and the owner came to the gate to hail him.

"Did Adam Banks come to see you, Mr. Strong?"

"The big fellow with the mop of yellow hair? Yes, Miss Pringle; he said he was looking for a job. But I doubt if he loses his eyesight looking for it."

"You said something," declared Miss Pringle. "And he just said to me he wouldn't be caught working at Sunnyside if you were going to run the farm."

"No?"

"He said he should think Mr. Bronson could find enough men in the neighborhood to do his work without sending off for a—a——"

"For a boy?" laughed Hiram. "If I can't make good in my job there will soon be a chance for somebody else to take my place."

"For the land's sake! I do hope you will stop here, Mr. Strong. I shouldn't want to see Mr. Bronson put a fellow like Ad Banks in charge at Sunnyside. He'd be worse than that Jim Brandenburg that made me so much trouble—burning everything all up."

"I hope your house that was burned was insured, Miss Pringle," Hiram said.

"Yes, 'twas, Mr. Strong. But that piece of pine timber across the road wasn't. The sparks flew from the house and caught that, and you can see quite a patch of it was burned—completely ruined for any purpose, even firewood. Who wants to handle wood that smuts you all up? I had a log or two dragged up to the house and sawed and split; but Abigail can't abide it. Says she won't have it in her kitchen. And I can't blame her."

"So you have no use for that burned timber?" asked Hiram thoughtfully.

"No more'n a cat has for two tails."

"Are you just going to let it stand there and be blown down by the wind?"

"I've told some folks that haven't much firewood that they can have it for the cutting and hauling."

"I don't know that Mr. Bronson would be willing to have me make just that kind of a bargain," said Hiram smiling. "But I can make use of some of those dead trees."

"You can? Remember they are fire-killed, Mr. Strong."

"I'll give you ten cents apiece for them, and I will have them cut and hauled, of course."

"For the land's sake!" ejaculated Miss Pringle, her bargaining instincts coming immediately to the fore, "I think that is an awful small price."

The young fellow laughed. "That is just ten cents apiece more than you had any expectation of getting for the burned trees, Miss Pringle."

"That may very well be," she argued. "But this is a bargain now. Money is money. If you think the trees are worth ten cents apiece to you, like enough they are worth a quarter each. I don't like to feel I've done myself in any deal."

"I'm afraid you will own the timber a long while at that price."

"For the land's sake, you can raise me a little, can't you?"

"I don't see how I can," replied Hiram gravely.

"I have heard that you Down East Yankees are as sharp at bargaining as can be. It does seem as though I ought to get fifteen cents apiece."

"The longer those blackened trees stand on your land, the longer the land will be worth just nothing to you, Miss Pringle."

"Land isn't worth much to a lone woman like me, Mr. Strong," she simpered. "Unless a body's got a man—"

When Miss Pringle got on this tack Hiram always felt embarrassed. He started to break off negotiations at once.

"Oh, well, never mind. It was just an idea I had. Nothing much in it, I guess."

He started on, but she got hold of his sleeve and held him tightly. Hiram blushed, and he was sorry he had spoken about the timber. At any rate he was very glad that Lettie Bronson did not see him now!

"For the land's sake!" cried Miss Pringle, "you're so sudden, Mr. Strong. Won't you split the difference and give me twelve and a half cents?"

A bargain was a bargain, and it was up to Hiram to do the best he could for his employer. Besides, the use of the half-charred tree trunks was at best an experiment.

"Ten cents is my best offer, Miss Pringle. I can use a hundred of the burned trees; maybe two hundred."

"And only the charred ones, Mr. Strong?"

"You can keep tally on them," he said.

"All right. Seeing it is you, Mr. Strong," she concluded, her head on one side and looking languishingly at him. "We're such friends, you know."

Hiram groaned inwardly. But he went in with her then and there and wrote out the agreement in duplicate, both signing the papers.

"Seems like a lot of folderol for ten or twenty dollars, Hiram," Miss Pringle whispered. "But, of course, I understand you have to have everything in writing to show Mr. Bronson. Mr. Bronson is a widower, and they do say widowers are awful strict and stern."

But Hiram did not immediately tell Mr. Bronson of the bargain he had made with Miss Pringle for the half-charred timber. However, he planned to start certain activities at Sunnyside the very next day, and he drove down to Pringleton to see if Mr. Oakley, the stationmaster, knew of any laborers in the neighborhood who wished work.

Coming back, he saw Mr. Yancey Battick leaning upon his sagging front gate. He had not seen the odd man to more than hail him since the time he had sojourned with him over night.

"Looks like spring now, doesn't it, Mr. Battick?" Hiram suggested, stopping his horse.

"I guess. And there's the first harbinger—a bluebird," and Battick pointed up the road.

"What's that? Bluebird?" Then Hiram laughed, seeing the individual to whom Battick referred. "The first tramp of the season?"

"Yes. And full as a tick, if I'm any judge," Battick said, with disgust.

The fellow up ahead was staggering as he walked, and there was reason for thinking that he was intoxicated.

"He won't get far in that shape," Hiram said.

"He'll get far enough, perhaps," muttered Battick, turning away. "Look out he doesn't get into your barn, Mr. Strong, and set the mow on fire."

The two chatted a few moments longer about the weather and neighborhood affairs, and then Hiram started his horse and drove on toward Sunnyside Farm.

CHAPTER IX

ORRIN POST

This was the fifth day since Hiram had started his test boxes, and he was so much interested in this matter on his arrival at Sunnyside that he did not think again of Mr. Battick's first "bluebird," or harbinger of spring. In fact, he had not seen the fellow along the road and presumed the tramp had crept into a thicket somewhere to sleep off his intoxication.

He bedded down Jerry, the horse, and fed him, for it was early twilight. He locked the barn and went up to the incubator shed where he lodged. He always kept a fire here, and the temperature of the seed boxes had never fallen below 65°, and he usually managed to keep the heat at about 70°. He knew that a drop below 55° would seriously affect the germination of the corn, and at night Hiram wrapped bags about the boxes and covered them well.

The conditions under which he had made his tests of Mr. Brown's corn had been ideal. When he uncovered the boxes he saw at once that all the ears he had selected kernels from were not strong and vigorous. Any kernel of corn that does not send out vigorous sprouts of both root and stem within four or five days is too weak to germinate properly under ordinary field conditions.

Hiram discarded promptly all of twenty ears in this lot—feeding some of the discarded ones to Jerry the next morning for his breakfast.

"They look all right," Hiram observed to himself. "But looks are sometimes deceiving. I have an idea that Mr. Brown plants a whole lot of seed that either does not come up at all, or does not improve his general crop. I wonder if I am going to beat him at his own game and with his own corn."

He immediately selected more of the Brown corn for testing and filled the squares of the seed boxes again. Later he proposed to test some of the seed corn he had bought from other farmers.

Some of the seed boxes were in far from a good condition, and the young farmer spent the best part of half an hour in fixing them. A smile of satisfaction crossed his features as he surveyed his work.

"They can't say that I haven't tried to do this right," he thought to himself. Then he gave a long stretch. "My! but there's a lot to this farm work," he murmured.

By the time the work on the boxes had been completed Hiram felt hungry. It was growing dark, and he concluded that he had better get something to eat before doing anything else.

There was a dishful of cold potatoes on the shelf, and these he sliced for frying. Then he brought out what was left of some cold meat; he next prepared to make himself something hot to drink.

The young farmer was working around the stove when he heard an unusual noise outside. He listened for a few seconds, and then went to the door and threw it open.

"Not a soul in sight," he murmured to himself. "That's queer. I thought I heard somebody coming. I wonder if it can be some stray animal?"

He walked outside and gave another look around. Neither man nor beast was in sight, and, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, he returned to the shed.

Hiram cooked his supper and then lit a lantern to make his usual turn about the premises before going to bed. The barn doors were padlocked, but there were small sheds into which wayfarers might crawl and, as Yancey Battick had suggested, the tramp who smokes is the farmer's deadly enemy.

It was a dark night and a chill wind was whining through the burned pines across the road. Hiram's custom was to go around the barn, try all the doors, and flash his lantern into the calf-pens and the old wagon shed. It was when he got down the slant beside the barn to the door which he had recently locked in putting Jerry in his stall, that he got a whiff of tobacco smoke.

"That bluebird!" muttered Hiram. "Where is the scamp?"

It was but a faint odor Hiram smelled—the sickish-sweet odor of a dead pipe; it led to the nearest calf-shelter.

He had been getting the pens ready for the young stock Mr. Bronson would send up to Sunnyside in a day or two. He had torn one of the fodder stacks to pieces, and scattered the broken and half-rotted bundles of fodder over the floor of the shed and pen to dry out and to be picked over and trampled by the cattle.

There had been nobody on the place this day to his knowledge—certainly not before he had driven to Pringleton. And what would bring any proper visitor down here to the sheds? But the tobacco smell was stronger as he approached the arched opening. A whiff of it was blown directly into his nostrils.

He reached up to the beam inside the opening and ran his hand along it—the very place an habitual smoker would be likely to place his pipe on entering the shed, sober or otherwise. Habit is strong.

There it was. Although it was cold, Hiram was sure it had not long been so. He held up his lantern the better to see it. There was a "heel" of half-burned tobacco in the pipe. That was what he had smelled.

The wabbly ray of the lantern flashed across the shed. Hiram, suddenly startled, saw a huddled form lying on the fodder-strewn floor.

The young farmer did not fancy handling any individual who was half intoxicated, as this person probably was. He was no friend to the drunkard in any case.

But the fellow might have matches in his pocket. In his drunken state he might do some damage with them. Besides, it was blowing up cold, and Hiram felt that he could not sleep warm himself if he knew this fellow-creature lay here with so little shelter.

He crossed the shed and stooped over the stranger. He placed a tentative hand on the shoulder nearest him. The touch elicited nothing but a groan.

"Pretty far gone," muttered Hiram. "Well, nothing to do but to roll him over more comfortably and bring one of Jerry's blankets—"

Fitting the deed to the words, he moved the man slightly. There was an impatient exclamation from the stranger; then, for an instant, his face came into the radiance of the lantern as he arose upon his elbow.

It was a wild looking and much flushed face. The eyes, seemingly half-filmed with sleep, rolled about but fastened their gaze neither on Hiram nor on anything else. It was a delirious look.

"Hey! Wake up!" urged the young farmer. "What are you doing here? Who are you?"

"Orrin Post—that's me! Orrin Post," said the stranger, loudly and promptly. Then he sank back upon the fodder again, and his mind seemed to sink, too. He only muttered impatiently when Hiram touched him again.

"Here's a pretty kettle of fish!" gasped Hiram. "What shall I do with Orrin Post? That is what I should like to be told."

He had suddenly made another discovery. There was no smell of liquor about the fellow. His breath was feverish, but not alcoholic. The man most certainly was not drunk.

This was no case of leaving the man covered up in the calf shed to "sleep it off." Whatever was the matter, Hiram was quite sure the stranger needed more attention than that. If this was the fellow Yancey Battick had pointed out to him staggering along the road to Sunnyside Farm, he should have had help right then and there—a doctor, perhaps.

First of all, Hiram decided, the sick man must be removed to the nearest comfortable place; and that place was the incubator house where he had made himself so much at home. He rolled the stranger over again and stretched out his limbs. He was quite as tall as Hiram, if not taller; but there was little flesh on his frame, and the young farmer was positive the man weighed considerably less than he did.

Hiram knelt down and lifted the sick man across his shoulder, holding both wrists as he again staggered to his feet. He picked up the lantern and started up the path beside the barn. The stranger seemed sunk in complete unconsciousness, only muttering a word now and then.

In a few minutes the young farmer had brought his burden to the shack which he had made his home since coming to Sunnyside. He laid Orrin Post—if that was his name—in the bunk and began removing his shoes and outer clothing. His garments were shabby, but of fair quality, and his underclothes were clean. He was evidently a fellow who respected himself. Perhaps he was not a tramp at all.

However, it was not so much who he was as what he was. Hiram, stripping off the man's clothing, made a discovery that startled him—then actually frightened him.

The fellow's body was burning up with fever—face, hands, chest. What was this? His hand, lightly touching the chest of the victim, revealed an eruption under the skin. It felt almost like small shot—the beginnings of deep-seated postules, perhaps.

Hiram Strong was staggered by the discovery. For a moment he fell back from the bunk. He even turned his gaze on the door, and it is true that he thought of escape.

The highly inflammatory fever; the eruption on the chest. That it was a malignant disease of some kind he knew, and he believed he recognized the symptoms as those of the most deadly of all diseases that ever becomes epidemic in a temperate climate.

"Smallpox!" the young farmer muttered. "This fellow's got it sure enough, and I have exposed myself to it."

CHAPTER X

A FRIEND INDEED

Hiram Strong was not likely to forget the experiences of that night. He did not feel that he was braver than anyone else in remaining with the delirious man and doing what he could for him. Merely, he did not see how he could ever respect himself again if he deserted the stranger.

And to desert the sick man was to desert, as well, Sunnyside Farm and his employment. Hiram could not do that. But he realized that, if this was a case of smallpox as it seemed to be, he had made a pesthouse of the shed in which he had camped for these few weeks, and none of the expected workmen would remain on the place while the case was developing.

However, he plucked up sufficient courage to go back at once to the sick man and complete his preparations for bed. He had already exposed himself to infection, and if he, too, was doomed to the disease, he believed he could do nothing now to prevent it.

Nevertheless, there was something extremely dreadful to him in the thought of smallpox—mainly, perhaps, because of the possible scars to be left on the body.

Hiram neglected the unfortunate man not at all, however. Distasteful as the thought of handling him was, the youth that night did all in his power for the stranger's comfort.

He kept water at boiling temperature on the stove, and made a wash with soda with which he bathed the sick man several times to reduce the fever. The purple face, the puffed eyelids, the drooling lips, altogether made the victim a most unpleasant looking object.

Yet Hiram thought that, in his right mind and free of fever, this fellow who called himself Orrin Post might be a very good looking man indeed. And he judged his age to be not far along in the twenties.

Hiram got no sleep at all. The patient began to thrash about toward morning and was more delirious than before. Occasionally he seemed to be taken with a slight chill, and his nurse kept the temperature of the little room much higher than 70°.

"This might be good for that corn test," Hiram once thought.

But he was not giving much attention to anything but his care of Orrin Post. He harked back to Mother Atterson's recipes for caring for persons who were ill. He found a stone bottle and filled that with hot water and put it to the patient's feet to counteract the chills. He wished he had some medicine to give him. Hiram wondered how he could send for a doctor in the morning. Whom could he get to go? And would a doctor come to attend a smallpox patient—any doctor but the physician for the county's poor?

Occasionally he examined that eruption. It was spreading over the man's chest. If it was smallpox—

What a night that was! At daybreak—a chill and darksome dawn—Hiram went to the door, looked out, and finally stepped out and closed the door behind him. His eyelids were swollen for lack of sleep. He was tired to the bone!

The pale light in the sky grew slowly. Something stirred in the road—toward the Pringle cottage. Miss Pringle and Abigail were always early risers. And here came one of them along the road!

"Hiram Strong! is that you? For the land's sake what have you been havin' a light in your window for the whole live-long night?"

There was no mistaking the energetic voice of his neighbor. She hurried in at the gate, her head and arms wrapped in a shawl.

"Are you sick, or what is it?" pursued Miss Pringle. "I said to Abigail, 'I'm going to find out what that light means if it's the last act of my life—and before I have my breakfast, too!' I declare I waked up a dozen times during the night and saw your light winkin' at me just like a star. What is the matter?"

"Don't come any nearer, please, Miss Pringle," Hiram broke in. "You mustn't."

"Mustn't what?"

"Come any nearer to me."

"What's the matter with you, Hiram Strong? You ain't going to explode like dynamite, are you?"

"It's worse than dynamite."

"For the land's sake! what is it?"

"It is smallpox," said Hiram, his voice on the point of breaking.

"What's that?" gasped the woman. "Smallpox? You haven't got such a thing."

"Perhaps not—not yet," Hiram said. Then he told her about his visitor and how he had found Orrin Post in the calf pen.

"And you've been tending him all night, Hiram! You poor fellow!" exclaimed Miss Pringle, bustling forward again.

"Oh! But you must not come here!" cried Hiram. "You find somebody to send to fetch a doctor. I'll stay and look after the fellow now I've begun the job."

"And you don't really know it's smallpox. I'd took nice getting Dr. Marble up here, tellin' him it was smallpox, and then having it turn out to be nothing of the kind. He'd never let me hear the last of it. Let me see this Orrin Post."

"But, Miss Pringle, you must not!"

"Go along! Do you think I'm afraid, Hiram Strong? I guess I'm just as brave as you are."

She pushed right by him and went into the house. The air was warm and close, and she sniffed it energetically.

"If smallpox was much developed you could smell it, Hiram," she declared. "No mistake about that. The poor fellow! How red he is! Looks more like scarlet fever, if you ask me."

She went to the bunk and placed her soft, cool palm on the patient's forehead. Almost instantly his head stopped weaving from side to side on the pillow. He sighed and murmured, asking for water.

Hiram caught up the pitcher and went out to the pump. When he returned Miss Pringle had been examining the sick man's chest. She straightened up and looked back over her shoulder at Hiram. The grin with which she favored him was the most beautiful smile the young fellow had ever beheld.

"Men certainly are helpless creatures," she said, breaking into a chuckle. "Though I will say you're better than most, Hiram Strong. Put out that lamp. Don't let it shine in his eyes. He wants to be in the dark as much as possible. He's developing as fine a case of measles as I ever saw and that's a fact!"

Relieved? Hiram Strong could have readily and heartily given three cheers.

"I—I've had the measles, Miss Pringle," he said warmly. "How glad I am you came over. I'm not afraid of measles."

"I should hope not! Though I guess this fellow's got 'em pretty hard. It is sometimes serious with folks as old as he is. But we'll pull him through, Hiram—you and me together," she added with her old-time smirk.

But she could not disturb Hiram's equanimity now.

"You are a friend in need, Miss Pringle," he said.

"I should hope so! Those are the only friends to have—especially in the country. We all need to help each other out here on the farms."

"We'll get a doctor for him," said Hiram, promptly. "I'll pay the fee."

"You'll spend your money in no such foolish way," declared Miss Pringle, energetically. "I'd be ashamed to have the neighbors know I sent for Dr. Marble for a case of measles.

"You've treated this poor fellow all right, Hiram, as far as you've gone. After breakfast I'll come back with some medicine I've got to reduce his fever. You'll have enough to do around here daytimes tending to your work. I'll do the nursing for the poor fellow during the day if you'll look after him at night."

"My goodness!" said Hiram, with fervor, "I'll do all I can. It is a relief to know it isn't smallpox."

"You musn't neglect your work," Miss Pringle said, as they both came out of the house again. "You've got some men coming, haven't you?"

"In a day or two."

"That Ad Banks was around yesterday, wasn't he? I guess he's after a job with you, after all, even if you are a mite young for a boss," and she chuckled.

"I did not see him."

"That so? I saw him hanging about the barn and smoking that old pipe of his."

"He can't get into the barn very easily. The doors are all locked," said Hiram. Then, suddenly remembering the pipe he had found, he drew it from his pocket. "Could this be Adam Banks' pipe?" he asked.

"Guess it could—and it is," said Miss Pringle promptly, sniffing at the odorous pipe. "I'd know that old thing anywhere. It's Ad Banks'. Where'd you find it?"

"Where it had no business to be. Inside one of the sheds. Funny it should have been down there, too. I thought it belonged to this Orrin Post. I wonder what that Banks fellow was doing down there?"

Miss Pringle bustled away and Hiram set about getting his own breakfast. The sick man murmured for water occasionally, but otherwise needed little attention until Miss Pringle came back.

"Yancey Battick is all wrong about Delia Pringle," thought Hiram. "She may have her peculiarities, but she has a heart of gold."

CHAPTER XI

FRICTION

The first truck to arrive that day at Sunnyside instead of bringing lumber, bricks, or other building material, brought ten yearling steers that Mr. Bronson had picked up from his other farms; and Hiram turned the blatting, frisky creatures into the pen and shed in which he had found Orrin Post the evening before.

One of the young cattle had a frayed bit of rope about its neck, and Hiram went into the pen to get it off. The yearling ran into the far corner of the shed and while he struggled to remove the rope, the young farmer's eye caught the glint of something on the beams where he had found the pipe that Miss Pringle declared was Adam Banks' property.

He had already looked about the shed for anything the sick man might have dropped. There had been absolutely nothing in his clothes but a little change and a pocketknife—no letter, or paper, or keepsake of any kind. Nor had Hiram seen anything in the fodder where Orrin Post had lain.

He reached up to this beam and out of the far corner, where a thin ray of sunshine entered, he plucked a pint flask half filled with an amber colored liquid, one sniff of which assured him was the probable product of a peach-still somewhere in the neighborhood.

Had it not been for the pipe he had previously found, Hiram might have believed this raw brandy the property of Orrin Post, in spite of the fact that the condition in which the poor fellow had been when he took shelter in the shed seemed to preclude his having hidden the brandy flask.

The sick man was scarcely in his senses all that day. Every time Hiram put his head in at the door of the incubator house, he found Miss Pringle either fixing up the room, giving the patient his medicine, or sitting sewing within reach of the bunk. She made Hiram go over to her house for his dinner, and Abigail Wentworth, a tall, gaunt, elderly woman with spectacles and a neat cap pinned upon her iron-grey hair to hide her bald spot, served him a most satisfying, as well as appetizing meal. He had not eaten many such since coming to Sunnyside Farm.

"I don't wish to seem harsh, Mr. Strong," said Abigail, "but it does seem a blessing that that man came along and was taken sick as he was. It's given Miss Delia something to do besides clutterin' up my kitchen. I am blessed beyond all when some of the neighbors fall sick and will let Miss Delia in to nurse 'em."

"I see she is a wonderful nurse," said Hiram approvingly.

"Well, she'll do less harm that way than most," said Abigail, who seldom was known to approve thoroughly of anything finite. "But that's what made trouble between her and that Yance Battick, I guess."

"Indeed?"

"Yes. He was pretty near down sick—just hobblin' around. Rheumatism and all. That old Pringle house is as damp as the grave. Miss Delia heard how bad off he was and off she marched with her pills and plasters and what-not. But Yance Battick wasn't goin' to let no woman into his house—and he told her so to her face."

"I don't think Mr. Battick understands Miss Pringle's character," said Hiram. "He does not realize how very kind she means to be."

"'Means to be'—yes. That's it. I never could give three cheers for those folks that always mean so much better than they do," sniffed the angular woman, who could not even speak in entire approval of her employer. "But it's wisdom to let fellows like Yance Battick alone. Besides," she added, dropping her voice, "there's dark doin's in that house of Battick's. Ain't no place for a decent, respectable woman."

"You don't mean it!" exclaimed Hiram, rather amused. "I stopped there over night, and I saw nothing much out of the way."

"You weren't let to," said Abigail pursing her lips. "There's those that say Yance Battick is deeper than Sim Paget's well—and it never had no bottom! He's got a power of knowledge that never came out of books. And no man would ever be so crotchety and shy off his fellowmen like Yance Battick does, if he wasn't sold, body and soul, to the devil."

Hiram found no answer to this statement. It was evident that Abigail Wentworth, lineal descendant of Salem Puritans transplanted to this Middle West, possessed superstitions that are popular still in some localities.

The following day Mr. Bronson came up to Sunnyside himself with some more young cattle. He had heard of the "tramp" Hiram had taken in and whom Miss Pringle was nursing. Hiram had had rather a hard night with his patient; but he was freshened up when his employer arrived.

"You are a good chap, Hi," Mr. Bronson said. "But you'll overdo some day, helping all the yellow dogs that come your way."

"Better speak to Miss Pringle about it, too," grinned Hiram. "And we're not altogether sure he is a canine of the breed you mention."

"Well, I'll take him back with me to the Plympton hospital—if you say so."

"I don't think that would be best. Miss Pringle says he is coming along all right. He is pretty measly right now, and he might catch cold if he was moved and then they'd 'strike in,' so she says. Then he'd be worse off. Guess I've got him on my hands for a while."

"It's your funeral," Mr. Bronson said.

"And it might have been Orrin Post's funeral if I hadn't found him as I did. Hello!" he added, as he observed the loutish figure of Adam Banks approaching. "Here's a fellow wants to see you, I guess, Mr. Bronson."

"What about?"

"He says he wants work. But he doesn't want to hire out to me—I'm too young," laughed Hiram.

"Do you want him? I understand you are about ready to put a gang of ditchers to work in that wheat field. But you haven't told me what kind of underdraining you are going to do there. Tile is awfully expensive just now, Hiram."

Adam Banks slouched into hearing before Hiram could reply.

"Well?" asked Mr. Bronson briskly of the newcomer. "Do you wish to see me?"

"I hear you are hiring men for spring work, Mr. Bronson," said Banks respectfully. "I'd like a job."

"I am not hiring anybody at Sunnyside," the farm owner said promptly. "That is all in Mr. Strong's hands. If he likes your looks and can make use of you—"

"That kid!" interrupted Adam Banks, turning red in the face and glaring scornfully at Hiram. "I want work all right, but—"

"You don't act as though you do," Mr. Bronson interposed. "Mr. Strong is in charge here."

"Why don't you get a man to run your farm for you, Mr. Bronson?" asked Banks boldly. "You know my dad owns a good farm, and I've been brought up to work. And I'm a voter. Why don't you give a young man like me a chance to show you what can be done here on Sunnyside?"

"Well, now," Mr. Bronson said, his eyes twinkling, "I really didn't know about you when I was looking about for a farmer. What's your name?"

"Ad Banks. You know my dad."

"I presume so. Well, Mr. Banks, I fear it is too late now. A bargain is a bargain. I have hired Mr. Strong—"

"But that fellow ain't of age. You can see that plain. Your contract ain't binding if he's under age—and he is."

"Indeed? Then you are quite a lawyer as well as a farmer, Mr. Banks. However, I always consider a contract binding, with whomever made."

He turned away; but Adam Banks did not lack persistence. He urged:

"If you ain't found out yet whether this Strong can fill the bill or no, I might be handy if I was working for you here, Mr. Bronson. I could jump right in and take hold when he gets into trouble—as he will. What are you paying for day's work?"

"I am not paying anything. I tell you, young man, Mr. Strong will do all the hiring. And the discharging, too, for that matter. Do you want this fellow, Hiram?" he asked the young farm manager bluntly.

"Say, what use is there askin' him?" broke in Banks, with disgust. "He's heard what I said. He knows what I think of him for a boss. What chance is there of my getting a job on his say-so?"

"I am afraid I cannot make use of Mr. Banks," said Hiram quietly.

"No! Of course you can't. You'd ruther take in tramps. I hear you've begun that. And we don't think much of tramps in these parts."

Mr. Bronson merely smiled, waiting to see how Hiram Strong would handle the situation.

"Just because you made a bid for my job doesn't influence me to refuse your services, Mr. Banks," the boy from the East said. "But I have two things against you."

"What's them?" demanded Banks sneeringly.

"Here they are," Hiram told him, and drew the pipe from one pocket and the flask of peach-brandy from another. "Here is your pipe that you left in one of our sheds day before yesterday, with burning tobacco in it. And the quantity of peach-brandy you had evidently drunk out of this flask made you forget both pipe and bottle. Neither of these things find favor in my sight about a farm, either inside or outside of a man."

"I'll be switched!" ejaculated Adam Banks. "Huh!"

His face blazed up and he gave every indication of having been caught with the goods. He even accepted the pipe and flask. Both Hiram and Mr. Bronson had already smelled liquor upon Adam Banks' breath. At least, he had had something besides ham and eggs for breakfast. But suddenly the loutish fellow decided not to acknowledge the ownership of the articles.

"Here!" he growled. "These ain't mine. What are you trying to put over on me, Strong? More'n likely they were brought on the place by that tramp you've taken up with. I ain't been near your sheds."

"You were seen there," Hiram said sharply. "More than that, your pipe has been identified. There is no use denying either fact. I shall not hire you."

"Are you going to let me be treated like this, Mr. Bronson?" demanded Adam Banks. "Dad's a neighbor. We live right here. That upstart, Strong—"

"That will do," interrupted Mr. Bronson, waving his hand in dismissal. "If Hiram doesn't want you that closes the discussion as far as I am concerned," and he walked away with his young farm manager, leaving Banks in the road.

CHAPTER XII

WORK BEGINS

"I'd keep my eye on that fellow Banks if he continues to hang around here," said Mr. Bronson. "He means you ill."

"And perhaps would do something to cause trouble. Perhaps I should have taken him on," Hiram Strong said thoughtfully.

"I should say not! You did just right. You read him aright. His prime failings are drink and laziness. Just warn him off the premises if he bothers you. He's been in trouble and is not locally liked. Mr. Banks spared the rod in Adam's case, sure enough.

"Now, Hiram, to get back to ditching. You don't mean to leave open ditches through that field, do you? I can't stand a ditch bank—always growing up in wild cherry and poison oak and such worthless trees and vines. Besides, open ditches interfere with tillage most abominably."

"That is farthest from my thought, Mr. Bronson."

"But tiling—"

"I figure to underdrain with something much cheaper than tile," the young farmer declared.

"What are you going to use?"

Hiram pointed across the road at Miss Pringle's patch of scorched woodland. The underbrush and sprouts were beginning to show that faint blur of green that announces the coming of spring growth; but the trees were gaunt looking and black.

"I've bought as many as I can use of those scorched trees at ten cents apiece," Hiram explained.

"For the land's sake!" exclaimed Mr. Bronson, quoting Miss Pringle, but looking puzzled, too.

"Exactly. For the land's sake. For the improvement of that twenty acres—or such of it as needs draining."

"But—Hiram—my dear fellow—"

"I am not starting something that I cannot put over, Mr. Bronson," laughed Hiram. "Nor is it a brand new idea of my own. I have seen timber in the rough employed in underdraining more than once. My father used to do it when the man who owned the farm father worked would not listen to the expense of tiles."

"Ha! I acknowledge the corn," replied Mr. Bronson.

"I am not criticising you, Mr. Bronson. You are preparing this farm for a sale. You wish to put it in as good shape as possible at as small expense as possible."

"Right, young man."

"So we will put in a drain that will answer every purpose of tiling for a few years. In very low, wet ground logs laid in a ditch, and covered, will last twenty years—sometimes forty. On this upland the life of the timber I mean to use will not be so long."

"But it is fire-killed."

"That makes no difference. I've been over there and looked at it. You couldn't knock any of those trees down. The fire went through there only last year. They are not punky."

"I suppose not."

"And we shall be killing two birds with one stone—getting cheap drainage and likewise wiping out a very ugly spot right across the road from your new house."

"That is so. And you are getting the timbers cheap enough, if they are any good. I wouldn't have had the heart to offer Miss Pringle such a price."

"It is more than anybody else would have given her," Hiram declared, smiling. "And it is worth all you are paying for it to have those unsightly sticks chopped down."

"Guess you are right, Hiram."

"The logs will serve the purpose we want them for very well indeed. We'll lay two in the bottom of the ditch, six inches or so apart, and a third log on top to cover the aperture. Earth packed down upon them will soon form a firm culvert into which all the superfluous water will drain.

"I'll put a man into Miss Pringle's patch with an axe and soon knock down everything that is standing. The whole patch will be covered with green by midsummer."

"Smart boy, Hiram!" exclaimed Mr. Bronson. "Will you snake the logs right across the road into the wheat field?"

"As soon as the ditches are begun and you send up that pair of Percherons you promised me. I can't do that work with Jerry."

"You shall have the Percherons in a few days. They are a well mated pair and young. By the way, your disc-plow, harrow, check-row planter, and the mowing machine are on the siding at Pringleton. I'll send a truck over for them tomorrow. We don't want any demurrage charges piling up on us."

"Good! I want to see those things on the big floor of the barn," cried Hiram, his eyes beaming.

"I'd better send up a machinist to help you set them up, hadn't I?"

"No, sir. Leave it to me. I must learn to put together every machine that comes onto the place. There are always instructions sent with the implements from the factory. The time may come, right in the middle of a job of importance, that the machine will balk. I've got to know all about it. Do you see?"

"I see. And you are right, I guess."

"Mr. Bronson, seems to me I'll be just about made when I sit up on that plow and chirrup to those Percherons. I've tramped along in the furrow behind one or two horses for so many years—Well!"

Mr. Bronson laughed. "While I've ridden a plow and other farm tools so much that I hate to get up on one," he said. "They say it's mighty good exercise for a sluggish liver to ride 'em over hobbly ground. Ah, my boy! you've got the best of it, for you are young. You've got enthusiasm."

"Why, so have you, Mr. Bronson," cried Hiram. "Only it is enthusiasm of a different kind from mine. Otherwise you would not buy farms and put them into shape for other men to run."

"Maybe that is merely business."

Before night Orrin Post was quite in his right mind. Abigail had been making broth and porridge for him, for now that his fever was reduced Miss Pringle's idea of nursing seemed to be to stuff the patient with food.

"She will kill me with kindness," the young man said to Hiram. "I hope I shall not have to lie here long."

"Miss Pringle is awfully good," the young farm manager said stoutly. "I do not know what we would have done without her."

"I don't know what I would have done without you, Mr. Strong. She's told me how you thought I had smallpox, and yet picked me up and brought me here."

"You've got the cart before the horse," chuckled Hiram. "I got you up here from that shed before I discovered that you were breaking out in such shape. How did you get to the shed?"

"I haven't a very clear remembrance of it," confessed Orrin Post. "I felt pretty bad."

"Had you traveled far?"

"I had a job with a farmer all winter at Roundspring. But I was taken down with this fever and he told me I had better go because he was afraid his children would catch it. I couldn't blame him—much. So I started west."

"Wasn't there any place they would take you in? No hospital?"

"I didn't happen to stop at a hospital," said Orrin Post dryly.

"And nobody offered to do anything for you?"

"I do not remember that any one did. I was kind of flighty the last day or two, I guess."

"Were you heading for home?" asked Hiram.

"If I was I didn't know it," Post said with a faint laugh.

"But where is your home?"

"Anywhere I hang up my hat."

"Really?"

"I'm giving it to you straight."

"And no friends?"

"You are the best friend I ever had," declared the young man, with sudden emotion. "Nobody ever put himself out for me before that I can remember."

"Oh, don't make too much of what little I have done," Hiram urged. "Where do you go from here?"

"I haven't the first idea. I'll get out as soon as I can—"

"If you say that I'll take your clothes away," declared Hiram promptly. "You've got to eat many a gallon of Miss Pringle's broth and porridge before you get a chance to leave Sunnyside."

"'Sunnyside,'" repeated Orrin Post wistfully. "Is that the name of this farm, Mr. Strong?"

"Yes."

"It must be a pleasant place."

"I don't know that myself yet," laughed Hiram, "I have been here so short a time."

And for the next few days Hiram Strong was so busy that he was not at all sure whether or not he would like it himself at Sunnyside Farm.

He set a gang of a dozen men to ditching in the twenty acre lot. He could have made much better time with a ditching machine; but of course it would not have paid to hire such an implement for this small job.

He had been all over the wheat field and had made a mental plan of what he wished to do before a spadeful of earth was thrown. He proposed running a ditch the entire length of the field, through the middle and parallel with the road on which the twenty-acre piece bordered. On the wetter portion of the piece he proposed having transverse ditches every hundred feet. Where the land seemed naturally better drained he would have the cross ditches dug less frequently.

The county ditch beside the road was deep enough and clean enough to carry off an immense volume of water. The natural drainage of the land was toward the road; therefore nobody could complain of his using the county ditch as he intended.

With a cross-cut saw they fitted the logs to match at the intersection of the ditches and there he laid a cap of heavy planking which chanced to be about the place. Any bit of rough lumber answered this purpose.

As fast as the timbers were laid they covered them, tamping the earth over them firmly and leaving a very slight ridge through the field. Snaking the logs across the field did not damage the wheat much, for Hiram made the driver of the horses follow a single path—that of the main ditch—both coming and going.

The man Hiram had hired to cut the timber was very dexterous with the axe, but after the first day he raised decided objections to working in the half-burned area. He was smutted from head to foot and looked like a charcoal burner.

"I am sorry," the young farm manager told him, "if you find the work different from what you supposed it to be. I told you plainly enough what I wanted you for."

"Let some of the other fellows take their turn in that patch, and I'll do a little digging. That's clean work," said the man.

"No. I hired you because I was told you were a good axman. I hired the other men for ditching. You can chop better than you can ditch, and the others can use a spade better than an axe; I want the most I can get for my money."

"Well, I suppose that's fair enough," agreed the man grudgingly. "But what my wife will say when she sees this jumper will be a plenty."

He was in no better mood the second day; and that afternoon Hiram saw Adam Banks stroll along the road and go upon the burned-over piece to speak to the woodchopper. There was not so much tree cutting done during the next hour, and it vexed the young farm manager.

"It seems, as Mr. Bronson suggested, that I am bound to have trouble with that fellow, whether I hire him or not," Hiram reflected.

CHAPTER XIII

WHEAT

It was about this time that Hiram received his first letter since leaving Scoville from Sister. He was glad to hear personally from her, and about her wonderful fortune as well; but it must be confessed that had the letter been from a certain other girl he would have been equally pleased.

He had heard of Lettie Bronson frequently from her father. She would graduate from St. Beris in June and come home to Plympton. Then, Hiram hoped, he would see her occasionally at Sunnyside Farm.

Secretly the young fellow was particularly pleased with his new position as farm manager because it gave him an opportunity to delegate the heavier and dirtier work to his workmen. If Lettie came on the place he would be able to go to meet her in decent clothes and with clean hands.

Sister's letter was very friendly and newsy; but upon reading it a second time Hiram thought he observed in it a tone that was not like that of the Sister he had previously known. She had been wont to be rather fly-away and careless of speech and act. Now there was a sudden primness in the way she expressed herself which must, Hiram thought, arise from the feeling of responsibility which her new circumstances had brought to her.

But here spoke the old tender-hearted, if imaginative, Sister:

"I wish I could go out myself, Hiram, and find my little brother. Just think of his running away—even from a reform school—into the world all stark alone! I don't know anything more about him than that—not even what his first name is. It seems my Grandmother Cheltenham hired the lawyer to find us both before she died, but she would do nothing for Brother and me until we were both found. So all that I can do is to wait patiently. I hope the poor boy will come to no harm."

She signed the letter: "I-don't-know-my-first-name-yet Cheltenham." But Hiram could imagine how proud and happy Sister was with a real name of her own.

"Bless her dear little heart," he murmured.

The carpenters began to arrive at Sunnyside, and the shack, first to be used for a bunkhouse and kitchen, was soon put up. It would comfortably house twenty men, the bunks being built along the walls and a long table and benches occupying the middle of the room. Hiram took his old bed in the small house after Orrin Post moved in with the other men, and the incubator house was fumigated.

"For as long as you are used to farmwork," Hiram had told Orrin, "why should you not stay here and work for me when you get strong enough?"

"You are a good fellow, Strong!" declared the friendless one. "You won't be sorry that you took me in."

"Oh," Hiram said, his eyes twinkling, "I figure to get all of my money back on you, Orrin."

There was something about Orrin Post that Hiram found very attractive, and yet the fellow was as secretive about his personal history as though his past life was something to be ashamed of.

He proved to be, now that he was convalescent, a good looking young man, rather frail of physique, but manly in every way. Because of his enunciation and judging, also, by little turns of expression in his use of English, Hiram thought Orrin came, too, from New England. He was intelligent and to all appearances well-educated.

But never did the latter drop a word to reveal what his upbringing or his former state had been, save that he had worked on farms. He appeared to have none of the vices of the common tramp; he was polite, clean-mouthed, and an easy and fluent speaker on almost any subject but that of his private affairs.

He read everything there was to read—books, papers, magazines, even a pile of old poultry journals Brandenburg had left in the incubator shed. Miss Pringle pronounced him to be "real nice" and lent him all the books and papers she owned.

Now that Orrin Post was out of danger and there were so many men about Sunnyside Farm, the spinster did not visit them so often. But Hiram and Orrin sometimes called on her in the evening. In numbers there is safety, Hiram thought, while Orrin did not seem to be at all disturbed by any of Delia Pringle's languishing ways.

That he was grateful both to the good-hearted spinster and to Hiram they could not doubt. Orrin began to do light jobs for both very soon. One thing, he relieved Hiram altogether of the care of the more than twenty cattle that the young farm manager was feeding in the pens behind the big barn.

It was Orrin, too, who assisted Hiram in setting up the farm machinery that had arrived. He seemed to have some idea of mechanics, and Hiram always found him of considerable assistance.

The two-disc plow was the first implement they set up. It was a splendidly built machine, one of the newest on the market, and could be pulled by either tractor or horses.

Mr. Bronson did not intend to use a tractor much at Sunnyside; at least, not this first season. When the season's work really commenced he would have all his present tractors could do on his other farms.

"But with these young elephants," Orrin said, admiring the pair of Percherons when they had arrived, "you ought to be able to do almost anything, Mr. Strong."

The horses were really huge fellows, quiet, kindly, and well broken to work. They were not much like the horses Hiram had been used to in the East, it must be confessed. Even Jerry, who was a good cross of Morgan and Canadian stock, looked truly Lilliputian beside these huge fellows.

When the Percherons started one of the largest logs in the burned piece, the driver chanced to steer them wrong at one point and the foot-and-a-half butt of the pine-log rammed a stump. The force of the blow, with the horses leaning against their collars, split the pine-log for half its length.

"Say," said Will Pardee, the driver, "let me tackle them to the corner of that barn, and I bet I could start it. Aside from a steam engine, they are the best pullers I ever saw."

The carpenter gang was now at work and the material for the stave silo had arrived. All but the wire cables with which Hiram had advised that it should be stayed. But those were promised.

It was to be a hundred-and-forty-ton silo—one of the largest of the old-fashioned kind—and its foundation was of masonry. Under proper conditions it would last for years if the walls (the staves were grooved and tongued) were properly erected. The silo was placed at one corner of the barn just where it would be handy to shred and blow the ensilage into the enormous round tank.

Meanwhile, Hiram had continued his corn testing, and to his satisfaction. Having selected the good ears among those he had bought of Mr. Brown, discarding the less vigorous, he shelled the remaining corn off these good ears and mixed the kernels thoroughly. This seed he sacked, tagging it plainly, and hung it where Yancey Battick's dread enemies, the rats, would not get at it.

This bag of corn would not furnish Hiram with all the seed he would need at planting time. He had other corn to test and his testing boxes were busy for some weeks.

In the meantime he had tried out the little handful of wheat he had brought with him from Yancey Battick's place. The vigor and uniformity of that red-streaked wheat was quite remarkable. Never had Hiram Strong seen a wheat that pleased him as much as did this new grain.

He was deeply interested in Yancey Battick's experiment with this wheat; but he did not know how to go about gaining the odd man's confidence. Really, he was on less familiar terms with Battick than with any other neighbors about Sunnyside—save, perhaps, the rascally Adam Banks.

The latter came around occasionally and talked with the men working for Hiram and interfered in a small way with the ditching and the chopping down of the pine trees. But Hiram was determined to have no trouble with the fellow if he could help it.

He had been told that Adam Banks had quarreled with a farmer for whom he had worked, and later, when that farmer's barns were fired, the owner had declared that Adam Banks had done the firing. But nothing could be proved against the fellow.

There had been a few warm days; but the ground was not ready for corn plowing, and Hiram was to raise no oats this year. Nor did he give any attention to potatoes or other truck crops. Primarily his job at Sunnyside was to raise corn—with a proper rotation of clover and grains to keep the soil of the farm in arable condition.

He had mapped the farm and planned his work of seeding for the year, both on the land that had lain fallow over winter and that already in crops.

He did not like the looks of the wheat on the upper twenty acres where the ditching was being done. It had not stooled properly; there were patches where it was winter killed because of the poor drainage. He knew the crop on this piece would scarcely pay for harvesting.

And yet he understood that both lime and commercial fertilizer had been used heavily on this acreage before it was seeded the previous September.

"The standing water has made the land soggy. You can't grow crops on a sponge—at least, not wheat," he told himself. "The fertility put into the soil for this wheat is still here, or it has evaporated or leached away. Surely the lime has not done all its work in releasing the natural fertility which the soil possesses. This piece should not need liming again for three years.

"If I can get this wheat off in time for an ensilage crop—first broadcasting the coarse manure from the cattle pens—I might make a showing on the profit side of the ledger, for this piece, ditching and all, by the next year. Ensilage corn and peas together would make this twenty acres look pretty good."

Thus he dreamed. He walked about the other wheat fields. None of the grain was as seriously injured as was that on the twenty-acre piece bordering this much traveled section of the county road.

Through a rift in the strip of woodland between the Sunnyside fields and Yancey Battick's place, he saw a lovely plain of green. It looked so very different from his own wheatlands that Hiram ventured across the boundary fence to examine the patch more closely.

Here was not more than an acre of level, wheat-covered land. He saw that the grain had been sown very thinly; and yet the plants had stooled so well that, at a little distance, it seemed as though the ground was matted by the grain plants.

If this was the red-streaked wheat it must be wonderfully productive. At least, the plant itself was thrifty and lush—far beyond any wheat Hiram Strong had ever seen. Whether it was of the bearded or smooth variety, the grain from such a plant must make a heavy and paying harvest.

He looked up suddenly to see Yancey Battick—his face inflamed and gun in hand—bearing down upon him with so savage a demeanor that Hiram confessed himself frightened.

CHAPTER XIV

YANCEY BATTICK'S STORY

"What are you doing there?" demanded Battick, with his gun cocked and the muzzle on a level with Hiram Strong's breast. "Have I got to give you a lesson, too?"

"You certainly are teaching me something, Mr. Battick," returned the young farmer with flushed face and angry look. "Put down that gun! What do you mean by threatening to shoot me?"

"I'll more than threaten to do it!" declared the man wildly. "You get away from that wheat! You get off this farm! And you stay off!"

"What is the matter with you, Mr. Battick?" cried Hiram. "Are you crazy? You haven't got your farm posted over there where I entered."

"I can't go to the expense of putting up a 'no trespass' sign every few feet," snarled Battick. "But you, as well as everybody else around here, know that I don't want anybody sneaking around my place. Get out!" and he advanced with the gun again.

The double muzzle of the shotgun was a most unpleasant prospect. Hiram Strong did not fancy being backed through the wood to the boundary fence with the gun against his breast. It was too ignominious a prospect to be borne.

It has always been a mooted question just how far a man may go to protect his property from trespass. In most cases the courts demand that harmful trespass be proved. And certainly Hiram had done no harm, and contemplated none, in coming here to look at his neighbor's wheat.

He did not believe Yancey Battick was altogether sane. But an insane man with a shotgun is a combination as uncertain as a barrel of gunpowder and a match!

Hiram half turned towards the woods path through which he had come. Battick, only eight feet or so away, raised the muzzle of his gun a trifle. Like a flash the young fellow wheeled, stooped, and leaped in to seize the man.

The gun exploded and Hiram's hat went sailing into the air, its brim in front torn to bits. His forehead was blackened by the smoke of the discharge, so near was it.

But he had seized Yancey Battick around the waist and held on. The shotgun fell to the ground under their stamping feet. The young farm manager was more vigorous if not more angry than his antagonist. For half a minute or more they strained and tugged—Hiram to throw the man, the latter to escape from his embrace.

Suddenly they broke apart. Both staggered back a pace. They stared at each other, their visages pale now rather than inflamed. Both realized how near to tragedy the incident had led.

Hiram drew a palm across his blackened and sweating forehead. Battick still glared, panting, at the young fellow.

"I—I might have shot you, Strong. You're a young fool," he muttered.

"If anybody lacks sense it is you," retorted Hiram quickly. "If you had killed me I'd only have been dead. But you would have had to pay the penalty."

"You are on my land—"

"Don't begin that old foolishness," commanded Hiram.

He seized the man's arm and led him toward a log at the edge of the wood. Battick was actually shaking and he stared at Hiram in a way that troubled the latter considerably. Could it be that this strange individual was really insane?

"Sit down here," said the youth, and took a seat beside him on the log. "Now for goodness sake, tell me what the matter is with you. I know you have bred a new wheat. I saw the grain at your house. I suppose this is a field of it. Why act like a madman about it? I can't steal these plants and so breed the wheat in competition."

Battick looked at him solemnly. "You don't know what I have been through, Mr. Strong," he said.

"I can see you are carrying on a regular guerrilla warfare against your neighbors, Mr. Battick. But I cannot imagine why."

"They have hounded me—robbed me!" exclaimed Battick excitedly.

"Who have?"

"People you don't know, perhaps. And perhaps you do! I can never be sure that their agents are not around here. You may be one of them, Mr. Strong."

"I assure you—"

"Or you may be as right as rain. I was too quick just now. But I am suspicious of every person I see trespassing in my fields."

"Who could, or would, do this wheat harm?"

"Let me tell you! When I bred my Mortgage Lifter Oats I was robbed of my seed, my standing grain was burned just before it was ready for the sickle, and cattle were turned in on my young oats, a field like this, and allowed to graze."

"The Mortgage Lifter Oats? The great new oat that Bonsall and Burgess, the seedsmen in Chicago, put out four years ago and which proved such a wonderful cropper?"

"The same."

"You bred that variety, Mr. Battick?"

"Yes. But I do not get the credit for it, nor did I get any of the money—a small fortune—that has been made through its sale. I do not hold Bonsall and Burgess at fault. They honestly bought the new seed of those who robbed me and were themselves aware of no crime having been committed."

"I never!"

"Yes, Mr. Strong. There are mighty mean people in this world. Where I lived before I came to this place there were other men living around me who gave some attention to the selection and breeding of new varieties of seed. You see, that clergyman who years ago made a clear twenty thousand dollars by breeding a famous muskmelon started us all to hunting for new types of vegetables, fruits, and grains.

"Rivalries arose in my neighborhood, of course. But I thought they were friendly rivalries. We even talked over our discoveries at the Grange meetings. I had made a study of plant life, and I gave little lectures—the more fool me!—to the boys and girls who were interested enough to come together at the schoolhouse to listen. I had no idea my neighbors would steal."

"You don't mean to say they did?"

"Exactly. And some of the very boys I had tried to interest and help were the ones who broke down my fence and turned the cattle into my young oats. That was so I should be unable to raise a crop of the new oats that year and so fail to take advantage of the Mortgage Lifter being advertised by the seedsmen. You understand that all big money is made on new seeds in the first and second seasons, don't you?"

"I know that, Mr. Battick," Hiram agreed. "After that everybody has the new strain. It must be a quick clean-up in the seed business."

"That's it. I don't really know to this day just who it was profited by my loss. In the main, I mean. Almost everybody around my place had some of the seed. That held the gang together and made it impossible for me to get any evidence against the real transgressors. You see, the other neighbors were bribed.

"However, my crops had been destroyed, the seed-oats taken out of my granary in the night when I was ill. It was a dirty plot! Bonsall and Burgess were not to be blamed. Nor could they tell me anything. They were bound to secrecy in their contract."

"And could you get no satisfaction?" asked Hiram, in sympathy.

"I could prove nothing. You cannot patent, or copyright, a seed! Those fellows merely beat me to it."

"It was a shame!"

Battick laughed bitterly. "They certainly did me dirt," he said. "I sold out and came here. I may be wrong in telling you this. Nobody else knows what I came here for and why I bought the old Pringle place."

"No," said Hiram smiling. "Some of the neighbors assume you came here to practice the black art."

"Let them! The less they know the better for me. I've chased more of them than you think off the place. That lazy, good-for-nothing Adam Banks—"

"Do you mean to say that he has troubled you?" put in Hiram, with some interest.

"Yes. And I'll surely fill his pants full of rock salt so that he'll prefer eating off the mantel-shelf for a week, if he doesn't keep away. I don't trust anybody, Mr. Strong, and that's a fact. Unless it is you. I believe I have the finest strain of wheat that was ever bred."

He stopped. It was plain that he could not trust Hiram sufficiently to talk intimately about it. He shook his head and looked away.

Hiram glanced at him, scrutinizing the worn, hoop-backed figure from the corner of his eye. Yancey Battick was not an old man. He was worse than that. He was a man worn out before his time.

The young farm manager could understand just how hope and faith had dried up in this unfortunate man and left only a husk. Fate and unkind circumstances, as well as wicked men, had sadly treated Yancey Battick.

His best efforts had gone for nothing. His attempts to win a competence for his old age had been frustrated. Perhaps there were more personal sorrows—heart-breaking sorrows—in Yancey Battick's life that he had not touched upon in his angry and bitter narrative.

Hiram's own heart warmed toward him, unlovely as he was physically. If he could help Yancey Battick he was determined to do so.

"I am mighty sorry for your bad luck, Mr. Battick," Hiram said, rising at last from his seat on the log. "I really did not intend annoying you when I came over here to look at your wheat. It looked so much better than that on Sunnyside that I was curious."

"Un-huh," muttered Battick. "I understand you, Mr. Strong. I presume you are all right."

"Well, good-day!" said Hiram, moving off. "I'll be sure to come around to the front door again if I visit you," and he laughed shortly.

The laugh died on his lips as he went back through the woods path. And for a very strange reason. Through the greenery to the right he caught sudden sight of a figure slinking away from behind the log on which he and Battick had been sitting while the latter told his story.

Hiram recognized this eavesdropper. It was Adam Banks.

CHAPTER XV

THE COUNTRY DANCE

Miss Delia Pringle had an idea and she came to Hiram with it that very day when he returned from his visit to Yancey Battick's patch of wheat.

"I do love a dance, Mr. Strong, don't you?" she began with her head on one side and a languishing look. "We have had very few of them around this neighborhood this winter. The flu, you know—so many unfortunate sicknesses.

"But the winter's well over now and everybody who hasn't died of the flu has recovered. I'd dearly love to have one more dance before haying and grain harvest—before all the young men get too busy."

"Yes. But—"

"Oh, I want your help in getting it up, Mr. Strong," Miss Pringle explained.

"Why, Miss Pringle," he said rather anxiously, "I'm a newcomer. I don't want to put myself forward and act officiously. It might make a bad impression on the minds of the neighbors."

"What nonsense!" cried the lively spinster. "They all like you—of course they do!"

"Not Adam Banks," suggested Hiram, with one of his quick smiles that always made his rather plain face more attractive.

"My goodness! I should hope not," exclaimed Miss Pringle. "If he did I certainly wouldn't."

"And I think Terry Crane is getting to dislike me, too," added Hiram speaking of the man whom he had put into the burned-over patch of woodland to chop down trees. "I understand that Crane's wife thinks I'm quite a terrible fellow because I make her washing so hard."

Miss Pringle laughed. "It would be a good thing, I should think, if these folks got together and learned more about you, Mr. Strong—got really to know you and how nice you are," and her smile would—when he first knew her—have made Hiram blush to the very tips of his ears.

"You flatter me, Miss Pringle," was what he said. "And I don't believe I would know how to go about getting up a dance."

"Oh, that's all right. You leave that to me," she said promptly. "What I want of you, Mr. Strong, is to get Mr. Bronson to let us dance on his floor."

"Dance on his floor?" repeated Hiram. "At Plympton?"

"Of course not!"

"Where, then? What floor? His barn floor here at Sunnyside?"

"No, no! Of his new house. Don't you know how Dolan and MacComb are going to put up the house after your silo is done? They often build 'em so around here. They do not raise the whole frame at once, but lay the floor on the sills and then put up the scantlings for the frame, story by story—the outside walls first."

"I see. That is a common practice in some localities."

"It is here," returned Miss Pringle, "for we have a good many high winds. Come along one of those baby tornadoes, as they call 'em, and a regular house-frame would be torn all to pieces, unless it was well boarded in."

"I believe you!"

"Well. If it's nice weather, as it is likely to be in June when the floor's laid, we always try to have a dance. Christen the floor, as it were. In this Pringleton district we don't get to have a real good dance once in a dog's age. Carpet dances are nothing, and barn floors are so rough. So's the schoolhouse floor. There isn't a real hall nearer than Plympton."

"I see your idea, Miss Pringle," Hiram said; "and if I can get Mr. Bronson to agree—and I presume he will—I don't see why we shouldn't have a nice time. Miss Bronson will be home early in June, and I shouldn't wonder but that she would help."

"Little Lettie Bronson? Of course she will. We'll have a regular party," declared the enthusiastic Delia. "And I hope you'll ask me to dance, Mr. Strong."

"I promise to," laughed Hiram. "I ask you right now for at least two dances, and there's Orrin. I bet he can dance."

"Oh, I've already promised him three, Mr. Strong," declared the fore-thoughtful spinster, in high fettle.

This was a bit of pleasure to look forward to; and all work and no play does make Jack a dull boy. It was something to write Sister about, too; and Sister (who wrote more frequently now that she had discovered Hiram would answer her letters) became very much interested in "Hiram's house raising party," as Mother Atterson called it.

"Mrs. Atterson remembers going to a barn raising party when she was a girl in the country and there she met Mr. Atterson for the first time," Sister wrote in her very next letter. "She thinks she never had such a nice time as she did at that party. I wish I was going to be at your house raising party, Hiram.

"Miss Lettie Bronson has been here and says she expects to be home for the party. She says Miss Pringle—the lady you write so much about—has writ (is that right, Hiram? Mrs. Atterson says it is) her all about it and how fine you are getting along with your spring work. I would dearly love to see you riding your double-disc plow behind those Percherons. They must be as big as elephants.

"I am most of all interested in that Orrin Post. To think of his coming to your place sick, and all, and then turning out to be such a nice fellow and such good help! Mrs. Atterson says it was a leading. You were led to go down into the calf shed that night to find the poor fellow."

There was considerable more to the letter for Sister was a voluminous writer when once she got started. Hiram's epistles, however, had soon to be of the briefest description, for the work was piling up on him enormously. Spring had opened with a bang!

Had it not been for Orrin Post the young farm manager would actually have been swamped with the details of the farmwork. As he gained strength (and Orrin did that rapidly) he relieved Hiram of many petty duties that had begun greatly to try the latter.

Helpful and pleasant as Orrin Post always was, he did not grow any more communicative about himself as their intimacy increased. His past was a sealed book to everybody about Sunnyside. Even Miss Delia Pringle confessed to the young farm manager that she had never met such a close-mouthed person.

"A dentist's forceps wouldn't pull anything out of that Post—no more than as though he was a post," she declared. "But he is a mighty nice fellow."

The workmen at Sunnyside and the other neighbors had at first referred to the stranger as "that tramp," but after a time they warmed up to Orrin. He was friendly, and was always willing to bear a hand at any job.

The ditching was completed and the logs laid in the drains and covered. Miss Pringle's burned-over patch was certainly improved in appearance. The sprouts and bushes were growing rapidly green and would soon completely hide the unsightly stumps. Even the most critical neighbors owned to the improvement. But some of them carped at Hiram's underdraining scheme. That twenty acres never had amounted to much and it never would, according to these people.

"Digging the drains was all right, Mr. Strong," said Turner, who held the farm back of Miss Pringle's. "That is, the ditches would have been all right, except they'd have been in the way of plowing and tilling.

"But when you threw in the logs and covered them up you did a fool's trick, if you'll allow me, who was farming, it's likely, when your daddy was born, to say so. A fool trick—yes, sir!"

But Hiram only laughed pleasantly at the grizzled old farmer's criticism, saying:

"I cannot say I believe you are right and I am wrong, Mr. Turner; but there is one thing that will settle the question."

"What is that, young man?"

"Time," replied Hiram, quietly.

"Ha! I guess that is so," agreed the aged farmer. "Maybe you ain't so big a fool as you appear."

Criticism did not bother Hiram Strong, and as he told Mr. Turner he could afford to wait for time to prove him right. He knew that even the owner of Sunnyside Farm, Mr. Bronson, felt some doubt regarding the value of the kind of underdraining his young farm manager had done. And it had cost a pretty penny!

But now came the plowing for corn and Hiram had four weeks of steady plowing and raking to get the fallow land into shape for his corn crop. And he did most of the plowing with the Percherons and the double-disc plow himself. There being little culch on the land, this make of plow worked remarkably well.

This land on which he proposed to grow his main crop was limed heavily before it was raked, and he determined to fertilize well with a special corn fertilizer at planting time. Mr. Bronson mixed his own fertilizers. Early in the season Hiram had secured specimens of the soil on which he was to plant the corn, and had sent them to the State Agricultural College for examination.

Therefore, he expected his employer to supply him with a chemical compound which would have in it just the needed ingredients to fertilize the soil in question for the growth of corn. But he knew these acres of Sunnyside had already been heavily cropped; and in spite of their having lain fallow for a year he did not look for any big crop. The long-tenanted farm was hungry for humus—something the chemicals could not put into it.

"But at the last cultivation of the corn," he told Mr. Bronson, "we will sow crimson clover. Well limed as the land now is, we should get a good catch of clover. We'll cut it for hay in June—and cut it at the right time. I shouldn't want it to ball up in the stomachs of these splendid Percherons, for instance, and kill them, as many a good horse has been killed by crimson clover."

"We usually plant wheat and clover together for hay," Mr. Bronson said. "I have had an unfortunate experience with crimson clover cut at the wrong time."

"My father showed me the time to cut and cure it. It is safe as a church if handled right," declared Hiram vigorously. "But it should not be fed steadily without other hay. It would be like trying to bring up a child on sugar only. The youngster would like it all right—until he was made sick. So with the horses.

"Now, we ought to get a good crop of hay off this corn land by June of next year. Then if we can broadcast the sod with compost or cattle manure we shall have an ideal soil for corn."

"But, I say! you're figuring on following corn with corn and only clover between," exclaimed the farm owner.

"Sure enough. And with the broadcasting of manure and a good, sharp fertilizer in the drill, I guarantee to make a fifty per cent. better crop on this same land next year than I can this, although next year's crop will have to be planted a month later than this, and I shall have to have help in the plowing."

"All right! All right! Go ahead, Hiram," cried Mr. Bronson, literally throwing up his hands. "You are the most convincing talker for a young chap that I ever heard. But on my other farms I usually plant potatoes on clover sod."

"Yes, the old and standard rotation of crops—corn, clover, potatoes. But Sunnyside is not potato raising soil. Nor are the marketing conditions right for going in heavily for such a crop. To make money here I thought we had agreed, Mr. Bronson, that nothing should be sold off Sunnyside save what can walk, outside of the wheat and corn?"

"That's right. We did. And you are correct, my boy. But the old Irish Cobbler has made me so much money on my lower land around Plympton, on a three crop rotation, that I cannot get it out of my mind that it ought to work up here."

"On Sunnyside we've got to raise corn, we've got to raise silage, and a part of the land should be excellent for grain if properly tilled."

"I hear from Miss Pringle that for the last few years the wheat has not been much."

"And the crop now in the ground will not be much," grumbled Hiram. "But believe me, Mr. Bronson, I won't put a grain of wheat in the ground next September unless I am pretty positive of a thirty bushel crop."

"Sh! Don't let any of these old hardshells around here hear you say that or they'll think you are crazy. They don't average over twenty bushels to the acre, if they do that."

"There's one man around here who is going to do better than that unless all signs fail," said Hiram quickly.

"Who is he?"

"Yancey Battick."

"What? Why, that wet, sour land of his isn't fit to grow wheat."

"That's all right; but wait a while. Maybe he'll show you something. That is, barring the weather or the Hessian fly."

"The weather we cannot control. We can only pray about that," said Mr. Bronson smiling. "But how about the Hessian fly and other insect pests?"

"Luck. It's good luck if you don't have 'em and bad if you do," answered Hiram.

"Do you know anything about this new one—what they call the English wheat louse?"

"Only that he's 'bad medicine,'" Hiram replied. "But I do have faith in one thing to help overcome the ravages of all pests on wheat."

"What is that?"

"The use of a fertilizer in which nitrate of soda is prominent. The nitrate forces the growth and sometimes that puts the crop ahead of the fly or other vermin. There is not much fast-growing wheat on Sunnyside to-day, Mr. Bronson. Here it is corn-planting time and the wheat is not yet two feet high."

"I've seen richer land, Hiram," rejoined the farm owner. "But I don't expect to see much richer around here than Sunnyside will have after a couple of years of your work. I'll supply the money, my boy, if you will supply the brains."

"That swells me all up, Mr. Bronson," laughed Hiram, "But I never did claim that all the farm knowledge in the world is under my cap."

"No one man or boy ever had too much of that, I can assure you," Mr. Bronson agreed. "But you must feel your responsibility. If Sunnyside is going to be a well tilled and profitable farm, it will come through your personal effort, more than by any other way, Hiram."

Hiram Strong felt all this. He had taken a big contract on his shoulders, and he did not overlook that fact for a single waking hour.

Mr. Bronson sent another corn planter from one of his other farms and the two teams cleaned up the Sunnyside corn patch in a week. It was the biggest acreage of corn Hiram had ever had anything to do with, and he looked over the great brown field from the altitude of the knoll on which the new farmhouse was being built with no little pride and satisfaction.

The two teams cleaned up the Sunnyside cornpatch in a week.

Miss Delia Pringle had proved a true prophetess. The silo was finished, all but two of the hoops and the wire stays, and the carpenters were well at work on the new house. The lower floor was laid and the framework for the outer walls raised as high as the second story, and the back and sides were boarded in.

Lettie Bronson arrived home on the eighth of June, and it was the evening of that day that had been set for the "house raising dance" at Sunnyside.

CHAPTER XVI

TROUBLE WITH TURNER'S BULL

The hard scrubby looking red and yellow corn that Hiram had got from Mr. Brown and tested so carefully, had planted a goodly patch of the Sunnyside cornland. Mr. Bronson looked at some of it as Hiram filled the two cylinders of the cornplanter, running several handfuls through his hand.

"That's kind of scrubby looking stuff, Hiram," he observed doubtfully. "I sent you up better looking seed."

"Yes, sir. Your seed certainly is well selected and graded," agreed the youth. "But I am not going to plant it on this lowland; not much of it, anyway. That big corn grows tall, I imagine, and takes plenty of time to grow, doesn't it?"

"From a hundred and ten to a hundred and twenty days. But you are planting plenty early."

"Yes. Only we may get frost on this lowland early in September. The farmers about here tell me they do, some years. And June frosts, too, once in a bad while. I am afraid, if we had a set-back in corn planting in June, that long-growing variety of yours would get scarcely glazed down here, before the September frost hit it. And it is not the sort of corn I want for silage."

"I see. You always do have an answer ready, Hiram; and usually it's a good one. Though, truth to tell, an early September frost here is almost as unlikely as a July snow."

"Just the same," his young employee said, "this corn that you think is so scrubby is due to make you a big crop. I am planting a specially prepared strip on that far side toward Battick's for seed."

"No!"

"Yes, sir."

"But it isn't even pure breed, Hiram. There will be a dozen red ears to the bushel, I am certain."

"Did you ever see a horse or a mule refuse a red ear of corn?" laughed Hiram. "I don't ever remember of seeing smut on an ear that turned out to be red—though that doesn't prove anything. And red ears make just as good meal as yellow."

"I suppose you are right. But this looks like scrub."

"If it comes right, when it is cured you can knock a steer down with an ear of it without knocking a kernel off the cob."

"That will be some corn, boy!" chuckled Mr. Bronson.

Hiram came up from the first raking of this seed corn patch at noontime of this beautiful June day to find Miss Pringle and some of the younger girls transforming the first floor of the new house at Sunnyside into a ballroom. Busy as they were at this time on the farm, both Hiram and Orrin gave the girls a helping hand during the afternoon.

The carpenters built a small platform at the back of the house for the musicians. There was to be the piano brought over from Miss Pringle's, a violin, and a horn. Mr. Bronson had sent up a lot of Japanese lanterns, and these the boys strung as they were directed about the big, open floor and overhead. Chairs and benches were brought from the schoolhouse, half a mile or more away.

The veranda flooring had likewise been laid, and the carpenters had built wide, rough steps by which the veranda could easily be reached.

The girls swept out all the shavings and other litter, and the well-laid floor presented an attractive appearance to the eye of anybody who was fond of dancing. Just as the place was pronounced ready by Delia Pringle, and the girls and boys were retiring from the cleanly swept floor, Adam Banks appeared at the back door and coolly scrambled into the house.

"Let's see how it is laid," he said, grinning, and beginning to clog clumsily with his heavy boots.

He had been walking in muddy places, and every step he took on the clean boards rattled gravel and mud off his boots.

"You get out of here, Ad Banks," commanded Miss Pringle, starting after him with broom and dust pan. "You are the biggest nuisance that ever was."

"Aw, Delia, don't be harsh with a fellow," said Banks, grinning broadly. "You going to promise me a dance to-night?"

"And you probably coming here half drunk!" announced the spinster, frankly. "I guess not!" announced the spinster, frankly. "I guess not! No indeed!"

"You'd better. You'll be a wall-flower enough, Delia—you know you will."

At that Miss Pringle flushed very red and her eyes fairly snapped.

"If I never danced at all I wouldn't take on any such makeshift of a man as you, Ad Banks! Get out of here!" she commanded, "shooing" him with the broom.

He grappled with her, still laughing in his lubberly way, and wrenched the broom from Miss Pringle's hands.

"Oh, Delia," he sing-songed, "how I love you! You're the prettiest girl I know. Come on and give us a dance. No? Then I'll dance with the broom," and he proceeded to do a grotesque dance over the clean floor with the broomstick for a partner.

"Now just look at what you've done, Ad Banks!" cried Miss Pringle almost in tears. "See that!"

Broken cakes of mud were scattered about the floor wherever the fellow clogged while Miss Pringle looked on angrily.

"That fellow needs a good licking," Orrin Post said to Hiram, while the girls loudly expressed their vexation at what Banks was doing.

Hiram had quite made up his mind not to begin any personal violence with Adam Banks. The man had time and again sought to coax the young farm manager into a fight.

Banks was half a head taller than Hiram and much bulkier in appearance. He could easily have overcome Orrin, who was slight and still suffering from the effects of the attack of measles.

But when Orrin leaped back upon the veranda and started to enter the house, Hiram could not allow the matter to go farther without interference. He would not see Orrin attack a man plainly so much stronger than himself.

"Hold on!" the young farm manager commanded. "You stay out of this," and he caught the angry Orrin by the arm. "If anybody is going to make Adam Banks walk French, it has to be me. Really, nobody else has a right to throw him out, I presume, as I am the representative of the owner of the farm."

"Hurry up and do something, then," growled Orrin. "I'm not going to stand around and see Delia abused."

Hiram pushed ahead of his friend, and as Banks, still dodging and laughing at Miss Pringle, gyrated nearer, Hiram stepped quickly forward and seized him by his shirt collar and the waistband of his trousers.

"Hi! Hey!" bawled Banks. "What are you trying to do?"

He dropped the broom. He struggled mightily to break away. But all he could do was to kick and paw the air.

Hiram had him right on the tips of his toes, and propelled him across the floor in a most undignified way and at great speed. Doubtless the young fellow's success arose from the unexpectedness of his attack; but Hiram was likewise very strong.

He shot Banks out of the front door of the new house, across the veranda and down the steps, and thence across the front yard to the road.