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.