Stooping, he picked up a straw, and began biting it meditatively, while we two pondered his plain interpretation of a very plain text. Suddenly he dropped the straw, and looked at us with a brightening face:
“Why, say, you can give a mortgage on your own land, when you get your title, and your father, nor the Bible, nor nobody else, would say there was anything wrong in your neighbor’s helping you out, if so be that you couldn’t lift the mortgage when the time come. Not that there’ll be any danger of that, with the price that wheat always brings in this grazing country.”
He went away shortly after, leaving us much comforted. Joe had housed the un-needed reaper in the shed and was examining the plow before he had been gone an hour. Some bolts needed tightening and Jessie offered her services as assistant.
“We’ll get ahead of Mr. Horton yet!” she exclaimed, hammering away at the head of the bolt that she was manipulating, under Joe’s direction, as vigorously as though it might have been the head of the gentleman in question.
CHAPTER XII
ON THE TRAIL OF A WILDCAT
Joe went at the plowing the next morning and kept at it with dogged perseverance for several days. Jessie and I, busy with the sewing, at first paid little attention to him, but after a few days the look of settled exasperation on his sable countenance, as he returned to the house at the close of his day’s work, drew my attention.