They next day opened a season of work even more strenuous than that which had gone before. The cultivating of the corn crop had to be carried on every day now unless it rained. Mr. Bronson had furnished Hiram a second small horse, and that, with Jerry, kept the cultivators and rake busy. The Percherons were too big and clumsy to use in the cornfield after the planting, and there was, too, plenty of other work for them to do.
Such hay as there was on Sunnyside had to be harvested, and then came wheat harvest. Most of this crop—especially that on the twenty acre piece which had been underdrained—was rather thin. Sunnyside had not grown heavy crops for years—if it ever had—and Hiram felt somewhat doubtful about the final outcome of this attempt to make the old farm productive when he saw how slim the wheat crop was.
They cut and stacked it, however, trusting that it would pay for thrashing later. Hiram went to the expense of removing the sheaves from the field entirely and building the stacks on a lot near the barns. Immediately he put the Percherons to work plowing the twenty acres along the county road.
He had no stable manure to broadcast here; yet he desired to help fill his silo from this very piece of ground as well as to put the soil in better condition for winter wheat.
The Percherons certainly earned their keep that week. It was dry, with the ground getting harder and more baked every day. Yet Hiram ploughed the piece deep and raked it well before setting out to broadcast a good dressing of bone meal.
Turner came along and stopped to watch Hiram, who was himself riding the harrow which, in this case, pulverized the soil better than the disc machine.
"I don't know why it is," the aged farmer said, as Hiram stopped near the road fence in a cloud of dust, "but this soil fines up, seems to me, after such late plowing, better than I ever remember its doing before. Why do you suppose that is, Mr. Strong?"
Hiram smiled across the fence at him: "I never saw the piece plowed before, you know, Mr. Turner. I don't think much of it even now. But if there has been any change in the condition of the soil I am inclined to lay it to that foolish job of underdraining I did."
"Pshaw! Nonsense! Couldn't be that!" exclaimed the old fellow, driving on. "We ain't had no rain to amount to anything yet. When I see the water pouring out o' those log drains of yours into the county ditch I'll take back all that I said about that foolishness."
"Mighty hard work to convince some people they are wrong," chuckled Hiram to himself, as he started the Percherons again. "But it looks as if we would get enough rain pretty soon to prove one of us—either Mr. Turner or me—in the wrong."