“But try as we would,” confessed Ralph, “we’ve never been very successful in raising many of those birds. Father thinks they are not suited to the climate, even up here in the mountains, where it never gets as hot as down your way. You see, they flourish best in a country like England, where the winters are mild, and summers fairly decent. So we just keep that stock for show purposes. Father lost money in his investment; but it taught us both a lesson. We go in now for the best native stock of all sorts.”
Breakfast even raised the good opinion Tubby already entertained toward the woman who did the cooking. When he found that she was a genuine Southern “mammy,” for the Jeffords originally used to be slave-owners down in South Carolina, he could understand how she made such jolly cornbread, and why they had hominy on the table every morning of their stay.
Now they had the first day before them, and there would be much to interest them.
“First thing you want to watch,” Ralph went on to say as they still sat around the table, though no one could eat another mouthful of food, “is the way we smash our big stumps up here. It’s always well worth seeing to a novice, though long ago we became so accustomed of harnessing dynamite, and making it do our work for us, that we take things as a matter of course.”
“I suppose,” said Andy Bowles, reflectively, “it’s just like folks who have electricity, and use it for cooking, ironing, making toast, heating water in a hurry, and a thousand-and-one other things; so before long they look on it as a servant in the house, always to be started working by the touch of a button.”
Once outside and the boys were led to a distant part of the farm, where the wood lot still remained. Here several men were busily engaged in blasting out stumps of trees that had previously been cut down, and carted away in one shape or other.
The dynamite cartridge was placed properly, being connected by a wire with a battery at some little distance away. Then at a signal the operator made his connection, there would follow a sharp report quite different from a powder explosion or the roar of big guns over on the battle lines in Europe. After that the stump would be lifted bodily from its lodgings and could be carted away, either whole or, as usually happened, in fragments.
Rob was particularly interested in the operation. He examined everything connected with the simple apparatus, and asked a number of questions concerning the outfit. No one dreamed how valuable the information he thus received was going to prove before a great time had elapsed.
“Of course, if you are doing all these stunts with dynamite, Ralph,” he finally remarked, “you must keep quite a stock of the explosive on hand all the time?”
“We have to,” he was told, without hesitation. “It is kept locked up in that little stone house we passed coming up here, and father himself doles out the day’s supply. The stuff is a little too dangerous, and costly, too, to be left around loose.”