A passionate hunger for the land possessed him. Beyond the pine-covered hills lay the place he had set his heart on. It would take a long time to work it into the Eldorado it promised, and his restive young muscles ached to get at it. There would be two or three years of the grindingest kind of work, then returns would begin to come in. The quaint Swiss chalet with its low stone wall and chimney would go up among the
trees, and its light blink down through their shelter on the highway at night as he had pictured it for years. There would still be an abundance of man-size tasks to do, and worries to handle, and debts to meet; the same fields would call him to work every day, but there would be the cabin to come back to at night to dream and to love.
As usual his arguments brought him back in a circle. Of course Jimmy had been right in thinking the farm was the loneliest place in the world to go to alone, and of course, whatever Jimmy or anyone else thought, the dreams of the little house were all inspired by a vision that had hovered never far from the surface of his consciousness since it startled him out of his boyhood a few years before. As is usual with idealistic natures, he had endowed his idol with every grace he worshipped; it was strengthened and purified as his experience broadened, until no one else would ever have recognized it as belonging to the silky little kitten of a maid who handled her playthings with such soft-pawed heartlessness. The longer he stayed away from her the more she seemed set apart in a world of other interests and other friends. Now the opportunity had come to live in the same community, and while there were moments when the prospect rather terrified him, it never occurred to him to let it pass. He still wanted the farm,
but the farm could wait; the human, jealous fear of losing her stamped out every other ambition. So it came about that the next few weeks found him moving into the county agricultural office.
The work habit is a powerful saving force to tide us sanely over periods of distracting interests. When Billy took on the robes of his office he was not by any means indifferent. He owed enough personally to the Representative in his home county to appreciate the bigness of the job, and his brief experience as assistant made it easy for him to go ahead with the general routine. Against this there was a troublesome undercurrent of dissatisfaction working, a half-ashamed feeling that he was making the position a means to an end. But because he had worked all his life he began at once to dig up something to do. The more he investigated the more he found to do, and the more he found to do the more he became fired with the possibilities of achievement.
For the first week he drove all day from one school to another, distributing settings of eggs and seed potatoes, and leaving with the children such scientific information as they might apply in directing the increase thereof. In the evenings he talked late with labor-harassed farmers who came to get him to negotiate for hired men, and remained to discuss other less urgent matters. As soon as he could see a free evening
ahead, he phoned Miss Evison to ask if he might call.
He heard a dozen receivers come down while someone went to bring her, and when her voice did come over the wires the clear, smooth staccato was not reassuring. It had the ring of a woman with much business to despatch, but who hadn’t yet learned the art of handling each case whole-heartedly.
“Mr. Withers?” she repeated with doubtful inflection, then, “Oh, yes, I do remember. I believe I had you confused with someone else.”
This was less complimentary than puzzling, since the local papers had advertised widely the coming of the new Agricultural Representative, in one case, by some strange accident, directly following an account of Miss Evison’s card party in the “society column.”