“But a paying trick,” Mrs. Mortimer interrupted, her eyes dancing and vivacious behind the glasses.
“Yes, and no,” Billy said stubbornly, speaking in his slow, deliberate fashion. “If every farmer was to mix flowers an' vegetables, then every farmer would get double the market price, an' then there wouldn't be any double market price. Everything'd be as it was before.”
“You are opposing a theory to a fact,” Mrs. Mortimer stated. “The fact is that all the farmers do not do it. The fact is that I do receive double the price. You can't get away from that.”
Billy was unconvinced, though unable to reply.
“Just the same,” he muttered, with a slow shake of the head, “I don't get the hang of it. There's something wrong so far as we're concerned—my wife an' me, I mean. Maybe I'll get hold of it after a while.”
“And in the meantime, we'll look around,” Mrs. Mortimer invited. “I want to show you everything, and tell you how I make it go. Afterward, we'll sit down, and I'll tell you about the beginning. You see—” she bent her gaze on Saxon—“I want you thoroughly to understand that you can succeed in the country if you go about it right. I didn't know a thing about it when I began, and I didn't have a fine big man like yours. I was all alone. But I'll tell you about that.”
For the next hour, among vegetables, berry-bushes and fruit trees, Saxon stored her brain with a huge mass of information to be digested at her leisure. Billy, too, was interested, but he left the talking to Saxon, himself rarely asking a question. At the rear of the bungalow, where everything was as clean and orderly as the front, they were shown through the chicken yard. Here, in different runs, were kept several hundred small and snow-white hens.
“White Leghorns,” said Mrs. Mortimer. “You have no idea what they netted me this year. I never keep a hen a moment past the prime of her laying period—”
“Just what I was tellin' you, Saxon, about horses,” Billy broke in.
“And by the simplest method of hatching them at the right time, which not one farmer in ten thousand ever dreams of doing, I have them laying in the winter when most hens stop laying and when eggs are highest. Another thing: I have my special customers. They pay me ten cents a dozen more than the market price, because my specialty is one-day eggs.”