Hiram in the Middle West

by Burbank L. Todd

CHAPTER XXX

KING CORN

Hiram Strong had grown taller corn with bigger ears on it in the East than any of the now ripening crop on Sunnyside Farm. But in bulk of shelled corn he knew he had never equaled this present crop.

One small field he had prepared especially for his seed corn. By this time he had come strongly to believe in the yellow-red strain of corn he had originally obtained from Daniel Brown, and this special field had been planted to that variety exclusively.

Hiram had from the very start prepared this field in a particular way. It had been a fallow piece on which had been thrown with the manure spreader during the winter about ten tons of fertilizer to the acre.

As soon as he could get on the field with his heavy horses he disked the piece both ways. This enabled him to plow at least eight inches deep, and he put three of the Percherons on the plow.

Hiram disked the field again after plowing, and harrowed it twice, making the soil as loose in the end as a garden plot. With this preparation, the bottom of the seed bed was as loose as the top and the plant roots when they got to growing, found plenty of room to develop.

Hiram did not put this corn in until the first of May. He planted it one grain to the hill, sixteen inches apart in the row, and the seed had been so carefully selected that he had an almost perfect stand all over the field. Hiram was no friend to replanting in any case.

At the time he put the corn in he sowed in the row fifty pounds of commercial fertilizer to the acre. When the corn was up a few inches and the root system began to develop, the young manager of Sunnyside Farm sowed a hundred pounds to the acre of a special forcing fertilizer—straddling the row with the cornplanter and sowing this special fertilizer in rows down the middle.

One day, about the time the bulk of Hiram's crop was hardening, Mr. Brown drove along and Hiram hailed him and asked him to walk with him through this field of seed corn. The grizzled old fellow noted the strong stalks, the wide blades, and the heavy ears with brightening visage. He loved corn! On Hiram's invitation to do so, he tore the husk away from several ears.

"By gum!" exclaimed the old man, "I thought I raised good corn. I always have raised good corn—the best in this county, if I say it who shouldn't. But you've got me beat, Mr. Strong—you've got me beat.

"This variety here, wherever you got it, is better than my best, and how even it runs! I never saw the like before. Where'd you get it? I thought you were raising corn from seed you bought of me?"

"I am," Hiram told him with a smile.

"Where'd you get it? I'd like to compare this new variety with my kind of corn," went on the farmer, not heeding Hiram's assurance.

"This is your corn you've got hold of, Mr. Brown," Hiram said.

"You don't tell me!"

"I certainly do. I consider it the best corn for this soil that I could find. It is only better than yours because I take more pains in selecting and testing the seed than you do."

"By gum! I can't believe it."

"Every hill of this corn, and the main part of my crop, came from the two baskets of corn I bought of you a year ago last March. Half of that I discarded. Probably two-thirds of this whole field I shall feed to the cattle. Out of the rest I will sell you what you may need for six dollars a basket, Mr. Brown."

"By gum! I want it," exclaimed the old fellow. "Some of it, anyway."

"It takes but about fourteen ears of corn, you know, to plant an acre. I'll sell you the same quantity I bought of you, if you like, at the price stated. I think it is worth that to raise seed like this, don't you, Mr. Brown?"

"Boy, if what you tell me is true—if this is my corn—then I don't know much about corn growing, after all."

"I guess you know about all there is to know about corn growing to date," laughed Hiram. "But you certainly do not know how to select and test your seed. And then, as I told you back there when I bought of you, you were too good to the rats and the mice. Many a kernel of corn is planted the germ of which the sharp little teeth of the rodents have emasculated."

Daniel Brown was not the only enthusiastic spectator of Hiram's corn. And the harvest bore out the promise, in spite of a heavy wind-storm that knocked down some of it. This that was blown down had glazed and was well matured. Hiram harvested it at once and sold it to fatten hogs at the market price.

This was a small loss compared to the value of the entire crop. This year Sunnyside followed the methods of big corn growers, and most of the corn was husked on the standing stalk, the eager cattle being turned in to graze on the fodder.

Fifty head of cattle marched off the farm that fall, stuffed with the cheapest kind of foods, and brought just as good a price as they would had they been winter-fattened with corn.

It was agreed that only the new wheat should be raised on Sunnyside the coming year. The partnership in the Staff of Life Wheat still continued, and they expected to sell the crop for seed as high as ten dollars a bushel to the big wheat growers. Hiram's share of the profits of the first crop had been a little over four thousand dollars. He felt that he was actually a wealthy man!

But he was thinking larger, and his mental view was much wider than when he had arrived at Sunnyside Farm. He wrote Sister that no small contract would ever satisfy him again. He heard of and saw farmers all through this corn belt making thirty and forty thousand dollars on a single crop.

At the County Fair he met and talked with a young man no older than Orrin Post who had cleared that season more than ten thousand dollars from raising corn on shares!

"If a man can get hold of a thousand acres, work it with tractors and have ordinary good luck, in one season he can pay for his land," Hiram wrote to his friends in the East. "It sounds big. It almost staggers one to think of it. It is a gamble!

"But I feel that I have in me the pluck to take that gambler's chance. I am going to bide my time, but have my money ready. The money is in the great wheat fields of the Northwest. America must feed the world, and I want to do my part. Ten years of raising wheat in a big way will enable me to retire, if I wish to.

"My father worked for other men all his life. I am going to be my own man before I get through. To this I set my hand and seal,

"Hiram Strong."

There was a wee note of anxiety, if not sorrow, in the return letter which Sister wrote. Those on the Atterson Eighty feared that Hiram Strong was getting altogether too far away from them.

But there was something else in Sister's letter that struck Hiram much more sharply. It suggested a possibility that startled him, to say the least, and roused in his mind again much suspicion regarding the bewhiskered farmer, whose name, he believed, was "Orrin Post," and his own Orrin's connection with this man.

Sister wrote:

"What do you think, Hiram? My lawyer wrote me from Boston that perhaps I might have been near to my dear little lost brother when I was out there to see you and Miss Pringle. He writes that he traced poor little Marvin (or whatever his name may be) to the Middle West, and that a correspondent of his, whom he put on the case, writes that he believes the boy has been in your neighborhood. The western lawyer is named Eben Craddock."