He was deeply interested in Yancey Battick's experiment with this wheat; but he did not know how to go about gaining the odd man's confidence. Really, he was on less familiar terms with Battick than with any other neighbors about Sunnyside—save, perhaps, the rascally Adam Banks.
The latter came around occasionally and talked with the men working for Hiram and interfered in a small way with the ditching and the chopping down of the pine trees. But Hiram was determined to have no trouble with the fellow if he could help it.
He had been told that Adam Banks had quarreled with a farmer for whom he had worked, and later, when that farmer's barns were fired, the owner had declared that Adam Banks had done the firing. But nothing could be proved against the fellow.
There had been a few warm days; but the ground was not ready for corn plowing, and Hiram was to raise no oats this year. Nor did he give any attention to potatoes or other truck crops. Primarily his job at Sunnyside was to raise corn—with a proper rotation of clover and grains to keep the soil of the farm in arable condition.
He had mapped the farm and planned his work of seeding for the year, both on the land that had lain fallow over winter and that already in crops.
He did not like the looks of the wheat on the upper twenty acres where the ditching was being done. It had not stooled properly; there were patches where it was winter killed because of the poor drainage. He knew the crop on this piece would scarcely pay for harvesting.
And yet he understood that both lime and commercial fertilizer had been used heavily on this acreage before it was seeded the previous September.
"The standing water has made the land soggy. You can't grow crops on a sponge—at least, not wheat," he told himself. "The fertility put into the soil for this wheat is still here, or it has evaporated or leached away. Surely the lime has not done all its work in releasing the natural fertility which the soil possesses. This piece should not need liming again for three years.
"If I can get this wheat off in time for an ensilage crop—first broadcasting the coarse manure from the cattle pens—I might make a showing on the profit side of the ledger, for this piece, ditching and all, by the next year. Ensilage corn and peas together would make this twenty acres look pretty good."
Thus he dreamed. He walked about the other wheat fields. None of the grain was as seriously injured as was that on the twenty-acre piece bordering this much traveled section of the county road.