"I will keep on the blind side of both parties," Hiram Strong told himself. "It is well to have friends in both camps. One thing I surely want—that is, to keep on good terms with everybody about Sunnyside. I don't want to have any such difficulty here as I had with the Dickersons at first, back there at Scoville," he added, remembering very poignantly a neighborhood feud that had hampered him when he first went to work on the Atterson Eighty.
When Miss Pringle had gone back to her neat little cottage across the road, Hiram began examining the buildings left standing on the Sunnyside premises. Nothing of importance but the dwelling itself had been destroyed by the fire.
The barn had a basement with swinging stanchions for ten cows and stalls for several horses. The mows were filled with a good quality of hay, and some oats in the straw—a feed that Hiram did not much approve of. For a horse or mule has to be very hungry indeed to eat oat-straw, and fed in this way a large proportion of the grain is wasted and trampled underfoot with the roughage.
"It looks to me," Hiram decided, after coming out of the barn, "that somebody tried to run a small dairy here without a silo. There are stacks of corn fodder, half of it winter-spoiled, and not a beast on the place to eat it up. It would pay Mr. Bronson to buy some young stock right now and turn it into the paddock back of the barn, and feed up all this roughage.
"Even if there is little pasture on the farm, it would pay to do this, and if the stock is not fattened by May, hire pasture for them on neighboring farms. I hate to see fodder go to waste, for it is the most expensive feed a farmer can raise."
Many an older farmer would have called in question the young fellow's statement. But Hiram was thinking no longer as a "one-horse farmer." He had got out of that class now. Here at Sunnyside, if he made a profit at all, it must be through much bigger agricultural activities than he had ever been able to compass before.
He went on to the row of poultry houses and entered the first one. This was the incubator house of which Mr. Battick had told him. It was a well-built and comfortable place. There was a good-sized pot stove and a bunk to sleep in. There was a cupboard, too, and a table and a chair.
"Guess I can make out here for a while, at any rate," he thought as he came out-of-doors again. "Of course, later I shan't have time to get my own meals; but at first—Ah! here comes an automobile. I wonder if this is not Mr. Bronson now?" and he started for the gate to meet the machine.
CHAPTER VI
FARMING AND FURBELOWS