In town Alwyn went to all the chief merchants one after another and received to his great surprise practically the same estimate. He could not understand it. He had estimated the current market prices according to the Montgomery paper, yet the prices in Toomsville were fifty to a hundred and fifty per cent higher. The merchant to whom he went last, laughed.
"Don't you know we're not going to interfere with Colonel Cresswell's tenants?" He stated the dealers' attitude, and Alwyn saw light. He went home and told Zora, and she listened without surprise.
"Now to business," she said briskly. "Miss Smith," turning to the teacher, "as I told you, they're combined against us in town and we must buy in Montgomery. I was sure it was coming, but I wanted to give Colonel Cresswell every chance. Bles starts for Montgomery—"
Alwyn looked up. "Does he?" he asked, smiling.
"Yes," said Zora, smiling in turn. "We must lose no further time."
"But there's no train from Toomsville tonight."
"But there's one from Barton in the morning and Barton is only twenty miles away."
"It is a long walk." Alwyn thought a while, silently. Then he rose. "I'm going," he said. "Good-bye."
In less than a week the storehouse was full, and tenants were at work. The twenty acres of cleared swamp land, attended to by the voluntary labor of all the tenants, was soon bearing a magnificent crop. Colonel Cresswell inspected all the crops daily with a proprietary air that would have been natural had these folk been simply tenants, and as such he persisted in regarding them.
The cotton now growing was perhaps not so uniformly fine as the first acre of Silver Fleece, but it was of unusual height and thickness.