"Well, she did not take it," muttered Battick.
"No wonder I met her just now going up the road crying. Is that all the sense you have? Or gratitude? Or anything?" completed Hiram with great disgust.
"Hoity-toity, young man!" Battick said weakly. "Do you realize that I am much older than you are?"
"You don't act so," snapped the young farm manager. "I can't respect anybody who throws away the very heart of the nut and eats the husk. You are determined, it seems, to make all your neighbors dislike you. If I were Delia Pringle I'd never step inside your house again!"
"Well, I don't know that I shall ask her," muttered Battick.
At that Hiram marched out himself. He knew very well that the man did not mean what he said; he was still sick and weak enough to quarrel with everybody—even his best friends.
Hiram was too busy just then to give the crotchety man much attention; and thereafter he knew that Miss Pringle sent a neighbor's boy down to Battick's with the dainties she cooked for him. She did not go near the old homestead.
Another team of Percherons and a double plow came to Sunnyside to help in the plowing and oat sowing. They got on the land just as soon as the horses would not mire. But there was much of even the higher fields that Hiram wished might be tiled properly to make the soil more friable.
They drilled the oats and then went about the other spring work—cleaning the stables and calf pens and drawing out all the fertilizer the cattle had made to the early corn land. There was now more than sixty head of young stock on the farm and Hiram intended to grain a dozen or more for market.
But the silo was empty and most of the corn fodder had been picked over and trampled in the cattle yards. What hay he had left Hiram needed for the horses. It was still three months and a half till haying time, and Sunnyside did not yield any too much hay, in any case.