“Why, you see, I’d plumb forgot about the alfalfa hay, but the horses had remembered, and they nosed through the fruit until they come to it, and they hadn’t lost a minute’s time, either. When the hay’d given out in one place they’d worked through at another until they struck bed rock again. The whole load was just a mass of tomato jam; the juice was running out of the box in a stream, and the horses were red with it from hoof to forelock. There wasn’t a bushel of whole fruit left. I jerked out the tailboard and dumped the mess on the ground, while about forty men stood around just yellin’ and hootin’ with delight. They got more pleasure out of it than they could possibly ’a’ got from eatin’ the tomatoes. The cook came out of his little tent alongside the big dining tent, to see what the racket was about, and when he got his eyes on the fruit he was powerful mad. He said he’d ’a’ given a dollar and a half a bushel for the load. He wanted me to promise to come with another load the next day, but I’d had enough of fruit raisin’—’specially when the horses did the heft of the raisin’—I wouldn’t ’a’ faced that yellin’ crowd again for a hundred dollars. No, sir! I come right straight home, and I sent word ’round among the neighbors to come and help themselves to all the tomatoes they could lug home; what they didn’t take the frost did, and that was the end of my experiment in fruit raising.”
“It was just too bad!” I exclaimed, feeling that I ought to say something sympathetic.
“Oh, I don’t know,” returned our neighbor, in his comfortable way. “It was all my fault. A man’s got to keep his wits about him, no matter what he undertakes to do, and I left mine at home that day. My wife’ll think I’m lost, wits and all, if I stay much longer, that’s a fact.”
He rose to his feet, and, after bidding us a cordial farewell, started for the door. Then the pail on the floor caught his eye to remind him that his intractable wits had again strayed. “Well, I declare for it! I come nigh forgetting what I stopped for. Seems like a good way to come for milk, doesn’t it? We had company come unexpected, and nothing would do Sarah but I must ride over here and ask you for some milk. Condensed milk is good enough for us, but Sarah says it ain’t good enough for company.”
Jessie had already taken the pail and started for the pantry; when she re-appeared with it filled, she said, demurely:
“I thought that you said you were a cattleman, Mr. Wilson.”
“Oh, bless you! Don’t you know the old saying about a shoemaker’s wife? Lots of folks that can count their cattle by the thousand head would be glad if they could be sure of as much nice milk and butter as you girls get off your two cows, Miss Jessie. It’s management, you see.”
“You mean want of management, don’t you?” returned Jessie, smiling.
Mr. Wilson’s jolly laugh floated back to us as he went down the walk toward the horse that was waiting for him at the gate, and then I roused myself to observe that Joe was again hunting for his tools. He presently rescued them from Ralph’s destructive little hands, and set to work, only pausing the while to remark:
“I reckons dat ar watah sto’age camp gwine be a ’mighty good place fur to sell we all’s melon crap at.”