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.