“I supposed you would use a tractor.”
“Not this time. I can admire a piece of machinery, but I can’t love it. I can love horses.”
“You’ll be housing them in the whim-room,” Linder remarked dryly, and had to jump to escape the hammer which his chief shied at him.
But the plowing was really a great experience. Grant had an eye for horse-flesh, and the four dapple-greys which pressed their fine shoulders into the harness of his breaking plow might have delighted the heart of any teamster. As he sat on his steel seat and watched the colter cut the firm sod with brittle cracking sound as it snapped the tough roots of the wild roses, or looking back saw the regular terraces of shiny black mould which marked his progress, he felt that he was engaged in a rite of almost sacramental significance.
“To take a substance straight from the hand of the Creator and be the first in all the world to impose a human will upon it is surely an occasion for solemnity and thanksgiving,” he soliloquized. “How can anyone be so gross as to see only materialism in such work as this? Surely it has something of fundamental religion in it! Just as from the soil springs all physical life, may it not be that deep down in the soil are, some way, the roots of the spiritual? The soil feeds the city in two ways; it fills its belly with material food, and it is continually re-vitalizing its spirit with fresh streams of energy which can come only from the land. Up from the soil comes all life, all progress, all development—”
At that moment Grant’s plowshare struck a submerged boulder, and he was dumped precipitately into that element which he had been so generously apostrophizing. The well-trained horses came to a stop as he gathered himself up, none the worse, and regained his seat.
“That WAS a spill,” he commented. “Ditched not only myself, but my whole train of thought. Never mind; perhaps I was dangerously close to the development of a new whim, and I am well supplied in that particular already. Hello, whom have we here?”
The horses had come to a stop a short distance before the end of the furrow, and Grant, glancing ahead, saw immediately in front of them a little chap of four or five obstructing the way. He stood astride of the furrow with widespread legs bridging the distance from the virgin prairie to the upturned sod. He was hatless, and curls of silky yellow hair fell about his round, bright face. His hands were stuck obtrusively in his trouser pockets.
“Well, son, what’s the news?” said Grant, when the two had measured each other for a moment.
“I got braces,” the boy replied proudly. “Don’t you see?”