"Don't you think we ought to have a man of our own, Uncle Joe, rather than take one of his? No doubt, Brady's honest, but he's human. Suppose he'd forget once in a while to give us some tickets."
"Oh, well, we wouldn't miss a load or two of sand."
"No," said Bob, "but it might get to be a habit with him, and you know, according to Aunt Bettie's figures, the sand is going to help a lot in getting our loan paid off quickly at the bank."
"Well, the next time I go to town, I'll see who I can find," he replied.
"You know, Uncle Joe, if we had a telephone we could call up this morning and probably have a man out here by noon. Don't you think Aunt Bettie was right in wanting to have a 'phone?"
"Oh, that's been taken care of," said his uncle. "I told Bettie to go ahead and have it put in. I thought it would be nice to be able to call up our friends in town and talk to them on rainy days and Sundays when we didn't want to drive in. Besides, as you say, it will be useful at times to save trips."
They spent the morning repairing the fences, which, under their persistent work, were beginning to look like real fences again.
There was one thing about Joe Williams—whatever he did, he did thoroughly, and the undergrowth was cut from both sides, heaped into piles and burned.
"Do you know, Uncle Joe, if we had wire fences, on concrete posts, we'd never have any work like this to do each spring. The plows would keep the sides clean. Think of what it would mean, Uncle Joe, to get rid of fence rows and repairing old rail fences. Then there's the wasted land that the fence takes up; that's a dead loss."
"Yes, I can easily see that," replied his uncle. "Bettie was talking about that last night."