“No,” said Mrs. Swenson, quite emphatically. “Not tomatoes. You’ll get huge vines and blossoms, beautiful blossoms, that’s all.”
“Tomatoes,” Mark repeated with a slow, dreamy smile. “Bushels and bushels of tomatoes.”
Mrs. Swenson stared at him in hurt surprise. “No tomatoes,” she said again.
Florence favored Mark with a sidewise glance. She had seen that look on his face before two or three times and always something had come of it, something worth while. Like a song at sunrise, it warmed her heart.
Then, quite suddenly, the subject was changed. “I don’t see what’s the good of a market. Not just now,” Bill Vale drawled. “The government’s willing to provide us everything we need to eat or wear, and a lot of things besides. Mother and I are getting a gasoline motor to run the washing machine and a buzz-saw. No freezing at twenty below sawing wood for me.”
“Nor me,” laughed Dave McQueen. “I aim to work too fast on our old cross-cut saw to have time to freeze.”
“Fact is, Bill,” Mark put in, “in the end we’ve got to pay for all these things.”
“Yes,” Bill laughed lightly. “Got thirty years to pay, start in five years.”
“Well,” the older McQueen drawled. “Five years have rolled round a dozen times in my lifetime. They all seemed strangely short. And when the payments start, they’ll be coming round with ominous regularity. Mark and Florence here have the right idea—keep debts down and get proceeds rolling in at the earliest possible moment.”
“Tomatoes,” Mark said dreamily. “Bushels and bush—”