"You needn't be jealous, Strong," he said. "She is only practising on me. She thinks you are not ripe for such nonsense yet."
"Humph!" thought Hiram. "Do I appear to be such an awful kid?"
Comparisons are odious, however. Hiram did not propose to judge Lettie by the same standard by which he judged Sister. They were two very different girls.
The work of threshing went on apace. Hiram had arranged his wagons as he had the year before in harvesting the ensilage for the silo—putting the small wheels in the rear and the big wheels in front. They thus brought enormous loads of the golden sheaves on the racks to the threshing machine, merely dumping the load. Men stood on both sides of the heap and forked the sheaves into the chute. This was a modern threshing machine which automatically cut the bands as the sheaves were fed into the maw of the roaring monster.
The straw was blown into a huge pile at one side of the barn, later to be baled; for good wheat straw is valuable. The straw from the oats Hiram used for bedding.
Mr. Bronson or Hiram stood by the men bagging the grain, keeping tally. The ordinary wheat averaged thirty-two and a half bushels to the acre—almost twice the average of the year before, and better by several bushels than the average on the neighboring farms. Still, this was no great yield.
The threshing machine was then run in between the oat stacks and the bundles of oats were pitched by crews of four men into the chute. The oats yielded a fair average—nothing great. But, then, they had been raised more as a preparatory crop than anything else. All the oat land had grown a heavy crop of cowpeas for soiling, and now the corn stood rank, black, and knee high upon all those oat fields.
The oats were run through the threshing machine before the new wheat was brought up from the lower end of the twenty-acre piece which lay along the road. The oats had swept every kernel of the ordinary wheat out of the machine. The Staff of Life Wheat, as Hiram had dubbed it, was the handsomest grain anybody working on the threshing crew had ever seen.
And how it did yield! It was a marvel considering how thinly the seed had been sowed. Still, Battick was not satisfied, and almost wept whenever he thought of the quarter acre that had been burned. From the remaining three-and-three-quarters acres was threshed a hundred and sixty-eight bushels and a peck of grain—the biggest yield that had ever been known in the neighborhood of Sunnyside within the memory of the oldest living farmers.
Hiram, flushed and excited, felt like shouting in his happiness, self-contained though he usually was.