CHAPTER XXVI
THE FIGHT FOR THE WHEAT
"What's the matter now, Hiram Strong?" demanded Miss Pringle, urging her pony nearer. "For the land's sake! is that Battick man completely crazy?"
"Oh, Hiram! what has happened?" called Sister.
She jumped over the wheel and ran to greet the young farmer. A year previous Hiram would certainly have met Sister with a hug and a kiss! But this tall, pretty, almost grown-up girl was an entirely different person from the child he had known and first remembered as the boarding-house slavey in Crawberry. She was almost a stranger to him.
"Sister! What a surprise! How nice you look!" he cried, seizing both her hands and gazing into her glowing eyes with fully as much delight as she herself displayed. "What a surprise!" he repeated.
"Oh, Hiram, I'm so glad you're glad to see me!"
"Of course I am! And Mother Atterson?"
"She is fine. And so is Mr. Camp. And Henry Pollock. And everybody!"
"How did you ever come out here without letting me know?"
"Miss Pringle did it all. I am going to stay with her. You'll have to thank her if you are glad to see me, Hiram."
"I should say I am! Delia, you are a darling!" cried Hiram, laughing up into the good but homely face of the spinster.
At this juncture the almost breathless Battick reached the roadside.
"Here! What's the matter with you, Strong?" he demanded, shaking the handful of wheatstraw at the young farm manager. "Do you hear what I say—or have you gone crazy over those women? That wheat is being eaten alive."
"Oh!" exclaimed Sister looking wonderingly at the excited Yancey Battick.
Miss Pringle scrambled down from the carriage. They gathered about the young farmer while he examined the affected heads of wheat.
These heads were now about half developed. The straw was already three feet and a half tall, and the bearded, three-sided heads had been most promising only a day or two before.
Now the tiny green bugs (and occasionally a long fly into which the insect develops) were evidently sucking the life of the plant. The presence of both the louse-like insect and the adult fly on the same staff of wheat proved to Hiram's mind at once that the creatures were of a single species and that their growth and development was very rapid—like that of hard-shell from soft-shell potato beetles.
"What do you call those things?" demanded Miss Pringle looking askance at the green insects.
"It is the English grain louse," Hiram announced with conviction. "I have been reading about the pest this winter. The louse did considerable damage in grain last year in New Jersey and other parts of the East. But how did it get into our wheat?"
"Ah-h!" groaned Yancey Battick. "You can easily answer that. It was put here by those that mean to ruin our crop. And between two days, too."
"Do you really think that possible?" Hiram said. "And yet, what I have read about this pest suggests that it does not come suddenly into a new field of wheat in this way, unless it has already been a scourge in some near-by patch of grain the winter before. In such an open winter as we have had it might have hybernated on the plants. Then, in April, it begins really to reproduce. But we have watched this wheat so closely—"
"I tell you the lice have been brought here," Battick cried almost wildly. "It did not just happen."
"You'd surely think so," Delia Pringle said. "I never saw those things before. But I heard the other day that some pest had attacked wheat fields over back of the hill—to the north of us."
"Which farms?" Hiram asked quickly.
"Seems to me they said Wilson Banks' wheat was the worst affected."
"Adam's father?"
"Ah-h!" ejaculated Yancey Battick. "What did I tell you?"
Of course, this gossip proved nothing, and Hiram very well knew it. But both Battick and Miss Pringle seemed so sure!
"Let's go and look at the affected patch," Hiram said slowly, and, of course, Sister trailed along with him to the far corner of the field. She clung to his arm and chattered away at a great rate, giving Hiram all the news of Scoville and the Atterson farm neighborhood. Naturally this forced Miss Pringle and Battick into each other's company for the walk. They did not make a very friendly looking pair, however, for Battick's gaze was fixed on the ground while Miss Pringle had her head in the air and did not vouchsafe him a glance!
The party came to the corner of the field where Battick had found the specimens of the grain louse. A patch several yards square was turning yellow.
"These lice," Hiram observed thoughtfully, "feed on the leaves of the wheat plant until the grain commences to head. Then they assemble on the heads among the ripening kernels. When the grain ripens they migrate to various grasses, the book says, and manage to live until fall when the new wheat is sown and appears. But we had nothing like them here on Sunnyside last year."
"Nor did I see any on my patch," muttered Battick. "I tell you they were sown here recently."
"Oh!" exclaimed the sharp-eyed girl from Scoville. "What is this?"
She sprang forward and picked out of the tall and robust wheat several withered wheat-straws that were about half developed. She gave them to Hiram.
"Did you pull up any plants besides those you brought to me, Mr. Battick?" asked the young farm manager, curiously examining the wilted plants.
"No. And, say, those are not my wheat! Don't you see, Strong? The straw is entirely different, nor is it as well developed as the straw standing on this piece."
"That is what I saw," Sister said softly. "It is not the same plant as this handsome wheat."
"You've got sharp eyes, Sister Cheltenham," declared Miss Pringle. "Hasn't she, Hiram?"
"Never mind all that!" snapped Battick, interrupting crossly. "What do you think about this, Strong? Somebody brought those straws with the living insects on them and tossed them in among this wheat."
"It would seem so," Hiram admitted.
"The villains! It is no more than what I have expected all along. And you and Bronson would not believe me. Now what do you think?"
"I think somebody has it in for us," Hiram frankly said. "This was deliberately a malicious act."
"If it was any of those Bankses they ought to be horsewhipped!" declared Miss Pringle.
"Has Adam been home of late?" asked Hiram.
"I don't know," replied the spinster. "But I bet he has."
"We shall have to watch this field night and day now till the grain is ripe," Battick declared moodily.
"But first of all we must get rid of this pest."
"Can you do that?" asked Sister.
"Never was anything so bad that it could not be worse," declared the young manager of Sunnyside Farm sententiously. "These flies have only just begun their nefarious work. There must be some way of stopping them."
"How will you do that, Hiram?" Miss Pringle demanded. "When the striped bugs get on my melon vines they're gone, and that's all there is to it!"
"Every blade and ear on which the louse has fastened itself must be destroyed. We must be ruthless in rooting the plague out."
Battick groaned aloud. He hated to think of losing a single grain of the new wheat. "How are you going to do it?" he asked.
"It must be pulled up and burned. And this may not be the only spot where the pest was thrown."
"I'll look all around the field," Battick said eagerly. "You don't see any place where the scoundrel has walked into the wheat to spread the pest, do you?"
"No. He probably did nothing to trample down the wheat and so reveal to us where he had worked.
"I would make sure how wide the area of affection is before pulling up any wheat, Mr. Battick," said Hiram. "I'll bring the boys down here and we'll burn a wide enough area to surely put the louse out of business in this field. No use cutting off the dog's tail half an inch at a time."
Battick understood this homely saying, and only groaned again.
Hiram and the girls returned to the road, and Miss Pringle and Sister climbed into the buggy. Hiram walked beside the vehicle to the Pringle cottage, and remained there for supper.
The change in Sister in the time since Hiram had last seen her seemed marvelous. Not having seen a picture of her in all that time, the surprise Hiram felt was even greater that it otherwise would have been. Sister positively had become a pretty girl.
Battick came up to report after supper. He had found but that one place where the grain louse was at work. Hiram took Orrin and Jim Larry and one of the new men and went down with Battick to burn the affected wheat.
He slashed into that corner with a scythe and cut out almost a quarter of an acre of the wheat. Meanwhile the other boys had been smearing oily sacks over the condemned patch, and when the fire was put to it even in its green state, the grain blazed up hotly. They forked what Hiram had cut down on to the fire and made sure of burning every spear of wheat that could possibly be affected.
It was furthermore arranged that a night watch should be kept upon this end of the twenty acre wheat field. Hiram, as well as Yancey Battick, was confident that the pest had not come here by chance. An enemy that would try such a despicable trick once, might try to repeat it.
"I tell you I have felt all along that we shall have to fight to get a decent harvest of this wheat," said Battick.
"Then we'll fight!" returned Hiram grimly. "Go ahead, Mr. Battick, and get your gun and watch here until midnight. Then either Orrin or I will come down and relieve you. I don't mean to let our enemies beat us, no matter who they may be."
The young farm manager had an interest in the success of this new wheat matched only by Yancey Battick's own.