As for myself, I made the acquaintance of the farmer’s son, a lad my own age, and we decided to go squirrel hunting in the near-by woods. “You wait ’til father drives down into the new clearing. He’s going to bring up some fence posts. Then we’ll take the gun and cut out. If he gets onto us he’ll give me some job, make me wheel out manure, or whitewash the henhouse, or something like that.”
We spent the morning and early afternoon tramping through muddy fields to visit the wood lots on neighboring farms and came home too late for the noon meal, but my new-found friend managed to get some sandwiches, made of huge slices of bread and cold meat, and bring them to the barn.
We were tired and wet and had got no squirrels and so we crawled up into the hay loft and burrowed down into the warm hay.
When we had finished eating our lunch and had got ourselves comfortably warm my companion, a fat boy of perhaps sixteen, wanted to talk.
We talked as young males do, of hunting and what naturally good shots we were but that we were not used to just the kind of gun we had been handling. Then we spoke of riding horses and how nice it would have been had we both been cowboys, and finally of the girls we had known. What was a fellow to do? How was he to get close to some girl who wasn’t too hoity-toity. The fat boy had a sister of about his own age that I wanted to ask about but didn’t dare. What was she like? Was she too hoity-toity?
We spoke vaguely of other girls we had been seated near at school, or had met at boy-and-girl parties. “Did you ever kiss a girl? I did once,” said the fat boy. “Kiss, eh? Is that all you’ve done?” I answered, feeling the necessity of maintaining a kind of advantage, due to my position as a town boy.
The hay into which we had burrowed deeply, so that just our heads were in the outer air, was sweet to the nostrils and warm and we began to grow sleepy. What was the use of talking of girls? They were silly things and had in some queer way the power to unman a boy, to make a fellow act and feel nervous and uneasy.
We lay in silence, thinking each his own thoughts, and presently the fat boy closed his eyes and slept.
Father came upon the floor of the stable with his employer the farmer, and the two men pulled boxes to the door looking out into the barnyard and began to talk.
The farmer explained that he had come into our country from New England, from Vermont, when he was a young man, and had gone into debt for two hundred acres of land, when land could be had cheap. He had worked and he had achieved. In time the farm had been paid for and fifty additional acres bought. It had taken time, patience, and hard labor. Much of the land had to be cleared. A man worked day and night, that’s how he managed to get on.