“But if the railroad board should change its mind again,” added the lawyer, “sixteen hundred dollars would not be a speculative price to pay for your farm—and well Pepper knows it.”
“Then Mr. Damocles's sword has got to hang over us, has it?” demanded the old lady.
“I am afraid so,” admitted the lawyer, smiling.
Mrs. Atterson could not be more troubled than was Hiram himself. Youth feels the sting of such arrows of fortune more keenly than does age. We get “case-hardened” to trouble as the years bend our shoulders.
The thought that he might, after all, get nothing but a hundred dollars and his board for all the work he had done in preparation for the second year's crop sometimes embittered Hiram's thoughts.
Once, when he spoke to Pepper, and the snaky man sneered at him and laughed, the young farmer came near attacking him then and there in the street.
“I certainly could have given that Pepper as good a thrashing as ever he got,” muttered Hiram. “And even Pete Dickerson never deserved one more than Pepper.”
Pete fought shy of Hiram these days, and as the summer waned the young farmer gradually became less watchful and expectant of trouble from the direction of the west boundary of the Atterson Eighty.
But there was little breathing spell for him in the work of the farm.
“When we lay by the corn, you bet dad an' me goes fishing!” Henry Pollock told Hiram, one day.