“Six quarters,” Asher replied. “I’ve added piece by piece. Mortgaged one quarter to buy another. There’s a good deal of it under mortgage now.”
“You seem to know what’s ahead pretty well,” Jacobs remarked.
“I know what’s in the prairie soil pretty well. I know that crops will fail sometimes and boom sometimes, and I know if I live I mean to own three times what I have now; that I’ll have a grove a mile square on it, and a lake in the middle, and a farmhouse of colonial style up on the swell where we are living now and that neither John Jacobs nor the First National Bank of Careyville will hold any mortgage on it.” Asher’s face was bright with anticipation.
“You are a dreamer, Aydelot.”
“No, Jim Shirley’s a dreamer,” Asher insisted. “Mrs. Aydelot and I planned our home the first night she came a 183 bride to our little one-roomed soddy. There are cottonwoods and elms and locust trees shading our house now where there was only a bunch of sunflowers then, and except for Jim’s little corn patch and mine, not a furrow turned in the Grass River Valley. We have accomplished something since then. Why not the whole thing?”
“You have reason for your faith, I admit. But you are right, Shirley is a dreamer. What’s the matter with him?”
“An artistic temperament, more heart than head, a neglected home life in his boyhood, and a fight for health to do his work. He’ll die mortgaged, but he has helped so many other fellows to lift theirs, I envy Jim’s ‘abundant entrance’ by and by. But now he dreams of a thousand things and realizes none. Poor fellow! His dooryard is a picture, while the weeds sometimes choke his garden.”
“Yes, he’ll die mortgaged. He’s never paid me interest nor principal on my little loan, yet I’d increase it tomorrow if he asked me to do it,” John Jacobs declared.
“You are a blood-sucking Shylock, sure enough,” Asher said with a smile. “I wish Jim would take advantage of you and quit his talking about the boom and his dreams of what it might do for him.”
“How soon will you be platting your Sunflower Ranch into town lots for the new town that I hear is to be started down your way?” John Jacobs inquired.