"Oh! Didn't you love her, Orrin?"
"Very much indeed." He spoke in a low voice and turned away his head so that she might not read the expression in his face. "I never talk about her," he added in a tone that precluded further questioning on the girl's part.
This single reference to his past life was practically all Hiram had ever heard Orrin make. Sometimes curiosity burned so hotly in Hiram's thoughts that he was tempted to demand of Orrin who he was and what his real name was. Was he the "Theodore Chester" the bewhiskered farmer from the other side of Pringleton and the lawyer, Eben Craddock, were searching for back there in the winter?
There was one thing Hiram did not want to do, however; he did not wish to say or do anything to offend Orrin, so that the latter would leave him. More and more had the young farm manager come to depend on this helper who had been with him so long. He was paying Orrin bigger wages than anybody else on the place. But, as he told Mr. Bronson, if anything happened, he could depend upon Orrin to go ahead with the work and carry out the plans already formulated for the improvement of Sunnyside.
Nothing did happen—of any unlucky nature, at least—not even to Yancey Battick's wheat. Battick had watched the grain from the threshing with quite as keen apprehension as before.
However, if Adam Banks—or any other ill-disposed person—wished to ruin the yield of seed wheat, he did not succeed in such plans. The new wheat was spread upon the floor of the attic of the new house at Sunnyside, and that dwelling had been built mouse and rat proof!
Samples sent to various experimental farmers and agricultural stations with the well-written claims for the new wheat prepared by Yancey Battick attracted wide attention. Photographs of the growing wheat which Mr. Bronson had had taken were reproduced and printed in some of the farm papers. Every wheat grower who saw the grain and heard of its development was enthusiastic.
But the partners in the Staff of Life Wheat determined to sell none of the surplus of this present crop in large lots. Battick got up a catchy advertisement headed: "Grow it in Your Garden," showing how any farmer might develop seed enough from one fifty-cent packet to plant an acre of the new wheat in a year's time and so, in two years, gain a forty-acre crop.
The advertisement brought almost immediate returns, and the orders grew in number daily. At this packet rate the partners were getting for the seed wheat a hundred and twenty-eight dollars per bushel!
"Oh, no! there is no money in the seed business is there?" said Mr. Bronson, widely smiling.