“Find him, Mike?” one of them asked, as he came up.
“No, bad luck to it; but I’ve been hot on his thrail these two hours past, ’n have nearly run the legs uv me off intirely. The little devil is as hard to catch now as he was thirty years ago, when he was riding that old gray horse,” he answered, as he threw himself down in the shade with a grunt of disgust.
There was a general laugh, but my heart was in my throat, and I did not join in until the others had ceased. In an instant he was on his feet. “I would know that laugh in a thousand,” he exclaimed, looking eagerly around. I pushed my way through and stood before him.
The steel-gray eyes I had so often seen flash defiance in the face of death were dim with tears as his hand clasped mine, and when I felt his arm around my shoulder, his bearded cheek against mine, there were drops that were not perspiration falling from my own face.
Maudlin sentiment of two old men, you say? Yes, if you choose to call it such; but a sentiment formed and welded together over and over and over again in the fiery crucible of battle and one that death alone can break.
Crop Residue and Its Benefit to the Soil
By William Dennison, Fargo, N. D.
How varied, great and wonderful are the blessings which a beneficent Creator showers universally upon this cosmos of ours for the benefit of mankind, and is it not strange that a majority of us fail to see these blessings, which are everywhere before our eyes? One of these blessings which the tillers of the soil are the recipients thereof, and which very few of them recognize, is the beneficial results derived therefrom. That is the importance of crop residue as a help in maintaining the fertility of the soil. Nature is a great economist—she allows nothing to go to waste. Everything is turned to some account in the grand, economic plan. Even the stubble which is left after the grain is harvested, there is a use for it. Yet many of our farmers fail to see it. The farmers in the great wheat-raising states of the Northwest burn up their straw stacks when they want to plow the land for another wheat crop. This ought not to be. Nature has an important use for this crop residue. It ought to be returned to the land as manure. It was prodigality on their part to have sold the fertility of their land in the wheat. But it was compounding the offense when they burned up their crop residue. Because the axiom is, the more crop, the more crop residue, and the more crop residue the more dead vegetable matter to be oxidized. But for this wise provision made by an all-wise Creator, humanity would long since have perished with hunger from off the face of the earth. We do not wish to give out the impression that crop residue alone will maintain the fertility of the land, but to convey the idea of the importance of crop residue as a help in delaying the period when land which has been under cultivation for years, without manure (which is the rule in the United States) ceases to be profitable to cultivate.
“It is a fact both of scientific interest and of great practical importance, that the enrichment of a soil with nitrogen is confined to certain limits, which can, with great difficulty, be exceeded. The limit varies according to the conditions in which the soil is placed. A familiar instance of the limit is afforded by a pasture.