Would Amasa Flagg advise him to dig a mine—Millia's thoughts were couched in familiar words—and wear a candle in his hat, and burrow round in the earth in unsafe places? My goodness me!—would there be real miners round the place, perhaps wanting to board right in the family?
In the midst of things Millia fell asleep.
Nathan came home at night rather sobered, but still confident. There was gold there; how much nobody could prophesy till it could be looked into systematically, and that took money. There was no money on the Thacher place, and Nathan scorned any suggestion of borrowing.
So the money must be earned. When that was done, he would sink a shaft and find his gold. When that was done—the money earned! Well, it looked a little appalling just at first; but Nathan Thacher had his grandfather Thacher's courage, once aroused, and he set his teeth for the struggle.
"Crops," Amasa Flagg had said, succinctly.
Nathan had thought of his barren waste fields, and gasped inwardly. Well, crops, then, if crops it must be; but what?
"Corn," the oracle had declared. "There's money in sweet-corn, now 't them factories are runnin full tilt over to Easton. They want all they can git. You won't make no mistake if you plant your fields full of it, an' I calc'late you'll find that the nighest road to your gold-mine. I calc'late so. But you'll have to hustle considerable, an' make your hoe fly real stiddy. You can't make a corn crop payin' without you do everything thorough. You've got to hustle, my boy, early 'n' late!"
And how Nathan Thacher hustled those long hot summer days! How, from daylight to sunsetting, he delved and toiled in his fields, working miracles in them with slow stubborn courage! He lost courage once or twice, but Millia never knew it. She watched his eager determined face steadily, and always read quiet resolution in it, and, as the weeks multiplied to months, a new expression of self-respect that delighted her soul.
"Thanny's losing his old down-spirited looks," she would muse happily over her work. "He holds up his head straight and kind of proud now; but, my goodness me, how he is working!"
And Millia, too, worked. She hurried through with her house duties, and went out to the fields with Nathan to do whatever lighter work he would let her do out there. Side by side the brother and sister toiled, seeing the waste places bloom under their eyes, and gradually the rough acres smooth out into beautiful thrifty corn rows.