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.