“I think it could.” She was looking away and the tone did not sound at all impulsive. Desperately he tried again.
“Do you think a man would be a downright piker to ask a girl who has always had everything she wanted to come to a place like this?”
“No.” The answer was very frank, and the girl bolted directly into a rapid, and not very comprehensive review of plans she had seen
developed in less promising places. For some reason she seemed confused.
CHAPTER X.
From the day when he took the farmers of his county to see how another man had harnessed the creek which ran wild through his pastures, setting it to work to cut the wood, and grind the grain and to run every hand machine from the fanning-mill to the grindstone, the Agricultural Representative began to see visions.
“Did you ever see anything like it?” one man exclaimed when they were going over the details afterwards. “There wasn’t a darned crank on the place. The thing must do more than one man’s work, and the most soul-aggravatin’ part of the work at that. Now at our place there’s just the boy and me to do everything, and we’re prowlin’ around the barn with a lantern till nine o’clock most nights. We get a man for a month or two sometimes, but the wife isn’t strong and it makes more work for her. Besides, as wages go now it doesn’t pay. I know Jim gets discouraged sometimes. He has a fair schooling and the wages he could get in town must look pretty good compared with what we turn in in actual cash from the farm; a boy doesn’t see what capital’s being laid away in the place every year. If he’s half alive he knows he’s living the
best part of his life now; and he isn’t going to waste it all laying up something for a time when he can’t enjoy it.
“I’ve tried to keep Jim at home by giving him a calf or a colt once in a while, like my father used to do, but if a boy has to feed calves and curry colts long after the hour when every other working man has hung up his overalls, he gets sick of them. I never saw a boy sick of tinkerin’ around a gasoline engine or a motor, though. If Jim goes his mother and I might as well go too, and we’re so used to the old place now that I guess we’d never get over being homesick if we left it. I wish you’d come up and measure the flow of our creek.”
Another evening one of the young men who had taken the junior farmers’ course in the winter came into the agricultural office looking rather embarrassed.