Asher Aydelot was standing before the big barn doors when Darley Champers turned from the main road and drove into the barnyard. It was a delicious April morning, with all the level prairie lands smiling back at the skies above them, and every breath of the morning breeze bearing new vigor and inspiration in its caressing touch.
“Good morning, Champers; fine morning to live,” Asher called out cheerily.
“Mornin’, Aydelot; fine day, fine! Miss Shirley told me last fall she got her first inspiration for buyin’ a quarter of land with nothin’ and faith, and makin’ it pay for itself, out of one of Coburn’s Agricultural Reports. I reckon if a book like that could inspire a woman, they’s plenty in a mornin’ like this to inspire old Satan to a more uprighteous line of goods than he generally carries. I never see the country look better. Your wheat is 333 tremendous. How’s the country look to you?” Champers responded.
“I can remember when it looked a good deal worse,” Asher replied. “The Coburn Reports must have helped to turn bare prairie and weedy boom lots into harvest fields.”
The two men had seated themselves on the sloping driveway before the barn doors. Asher was chewing the tender joint of a spear of foxtail grass, and Champers had lighted a heavy cigar.
“You don’t smoke, I believe,” he said cordially, “or I’d insist on offering the mate.”
“No, I just chew,” Asher replied, as he bent the foxtail thoughtfully in his fingers and looked out toward the wheat fields already rippling like waves under the morning breeze.
“Say, Aydelot, do you remember the day I come down this valley and tried my danged best to get you to sell out for a song? I’ve done some pretty scaly things, all inside the letter of the law, since then, but never anything that’s stuck in my craw like that. I guess you ain’t forgot it, neither?”
“I remember more of those first years than of these later ones, and I haven’t forgotten when you came to the Grass River schoolhouse one hot Sunday about grasshopper time, but I don’t believe anybody holds it against you. You were out for business just as we were,” Asher replied with a genial smile.
“Say! D’recollect what you said to me when I invited you to cast your glims over this very country, a burnt-up old prairie that day, so scorched it was too dry and hot to cut up into town lots for an addition to Hades?” 334