Miss Pringle bustled away and Hiram set about getting his own breakfast. The sick man murmured for water occasionally, but otherwise needed little attention until Miss Pringle came back.
"Yancey Battick is all wrong about Delia Pringle," thought Hiram. "She may have her peculiarities, but she has a heart of gold."
CHAPTER XI
FRICTION
The first truck to arrive that day at Sunnyside instead of bringing lumber, bricks, or other building material, brought ten yearling steers that Mr. Bronson had picked up from his other farms; and Hiram turned the blatting, frisky creatures into the pen and shed in which he had found Orrin Post the evening before.
One of the young cattle had a frayed bit of rope about its neck, and Hiram went into the pen to get it off. The yearling ran into the far corner of the shed and while he struggled to remove the rope, the young farmer's eye caught the glint of something on the beams where he had found the pipe that Miss Pringle declared was Adam Banks' property.
He had already looked about the shed for anything the sick man might have dropped. There had been absolutely nothing in his clothes but a little change and a pocketknife—no letter, or paper, or keepsake of any kind. Nor had Hiram seen anything in the fodder where Orrin Post had lain.
He reached up to this beam and out of the far corner, where a thin ray of sunshine entered, he plucked a pint flask half filled with an amber colored liquid, one sniff of which assured him was the probable product of a peach-still somewhere in the neighborhood.
Had it not been for the pipe he had previously found, Hiram might have believed this raw brandy the property of Orrin Post, in spite of the fact that the condition in which the poor fellow had been when he took shelter in the shed seemed to preclude his having hidden the brandy flask.
The sick man was scarcely in his senses all that day. Every time Hiram put his head in at the door of the incubator house, he found Miss Pringle either fixing up the room, giving the patient his medicine, or sitting sewing within reach of the bunk. She made Hiram go over to her house for his dinner, and Abigail Wentworth, a tall, gaunt, elderly woman with spectacles and a neat cap pinned upon her iron-grey hair to hide her bald spot, served him a most satisfying, as well as appetizing meal. He had not eaten many such since coming to Sunnyside Farm.