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.