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.