The summer's work was very hard and very hot. The rich land produced weeds as well as cotton, and Ned remarked that "weeds never go to picnics or take Saturday afternoons off."
In this the boys imitated the weeds, working early and late in their crop, barely giving themselves time to hoe out their kitchen-garden occasionally. They had distinctly overcropped themselves, but that was better than the opposite mistake. In August the bolls began to open, and the boys to pick cotton. It was not long before they discovered that they had grown more cotton than they could pick, and that they must either have help or lose a part of their crop. So one day Ned mounted the mule, and rode across the Yalabusha River, and out of the swamp into the poor hill country. There the scanty crops were easily picked, and as he was able to offer money wages, he easily secured some half-grown negro boys as pickers. Their wages amounted to comparatively little, and their help secured the whole of the boys' crop.
Bob had no gin or cotton-press, but there were both on the plantation twelve miles down the river; and when the picking was over, the boys built a raft, and loading their whole crop of cotton on it, floated it down to this neighbor's gin.
They had not made the three bales per acre which the land was said to be capable of producing under good cultivation, but they had made twelve bales, worth—at the high price which cotton at that time commanded—somewhat more than one thousand dollars.
Bob and Ned now closed their hut, turned the mule out to browse, and took passage for Vicksburg on the boat that carried their cotton.
One morning the rumor ran through their native village that "Bob and Ned Towne had come home, ragged, and looking like tramps."
But there was one woman and there were three little girls in that town in whose eyes Bob and Ned looked like anything but tramps. Their clothes were worn, indeed, but they were hugged and kissed by their mother and sisters just as heartily as if they had been the best-dressed youths in the village.
"Now you'll stay at home, won't you, you naughty runaway boys?" said their proud and happy mother when they had fully recounted their fifteen months' experiences. "I want my boys."
"We can't, mother," said Bob. "We're the two heads of this family, you know. I'm one head, and Ned has fairly earned the right to be the other; and we've got property interests now. We stopped at Major Singer's on the way home, and have made a new bargain with him. We've bought a plantation."
Then Bob explained that the Major had agreed that they should mark off a tract of four hundred acres where their hut stood, and take it at five dollars an acre—quite all that it would sell for then, because of the difficulty of getting labor for clearing land. They were to have their own time in which to pay for the tract, but they meant to work the debt off within a year or two by hiring one or two hands for their crop, and thus increasing their force and their earnings.