Old man Bacon, the hardest-working man in the county, laid it to Burns’ lack of management. Jim Butler, who owned a dozen farms (which he had taken on mortgages), and who had got rich by buying land at government price and holding for a rise, laid all such cases as Burns to “lack of enterprise, foresight.”
But the larger number feeling themselves “in the same boat” with Burns, said:—
“I’d know. Seems as if things got worse an’ worse. Corn an’ wheat gittin’ cheaper ‘n’ cheaper. Machinery eatin’ up profits—got to have machinery to harvest the cheap grain, an’ then the machinery eats up profits. Taxes goin’ up. Devil to pay all round; I’d know what ‘n thunder is the matter.”
The democrats said protection was killing the farmers, the republicans said no. The grangers growled about the middle-men, the green-backers said there wasn’t circulating medium enough, and in the midst of it all, hard-working discouraged farmers, like Simeon Burns, worked on, unable to find out what really was the matter.
And there on this beautiful Sabbath morning, Sim sat and thought and thought, till he rose with an oath, and gave it up.
III.
It was hot and brilliant again the next morning as Douglass Radbourn drove up the road with Lily Graham, the teacher of the school in the little white schoolhouse. It was blazing hot, even though not yet nine o’clock, and the young farmers plowing beside the fence looked longingly and somewhat bitterly at Radbourn seated in a fine top-buggy beside a beautiful creature in lace and cambric.
Very beautiful the town-bred “schoolma’am” looked to those grimy, sweaty fellows, superb fellows physically, too, with bare red arms and leather-colored faces. She was as if builded of the pink and white clouds soaring far up there in the morning sky. So cool, and sweet, and dainty.
As she came in sight, their dusty and sweaty shirts grew biting as the poisoned shirt of the Norse myth, their bare feet in the brown dirt grew distressingly flat and hoof-like, and their huge, dirty, brown, chapped, and swollen hands grew so repulsive that the mere remote possibility of some time in the far future “standing a chance” of having an introduction to her, caused them to wipe them on their trousers’ leg stealthily.
Lycurgus Banks, “Ly” Banks, swore when he saw Radbourn. “That cuss thinks he’s ol’ hell this morning. He don’t earn his living. But he’s jest the kind of cuss to get holt of all the purty girls.”