But Hiram was not at all sure that he would ever see a celery crop in
this bottom-land. Pepper still “hung fire” and he would not go to Mr.
Strickland with his option.
“I don't hafter,” he told Hiram. “When I git ready I'll let ye know, be
sure o' that.”
The fact was that the railroad had made no further move. Mr. Strickland
admitted to Mrs. Atterson that if the strip along the east boundary
of the farm was condemned by the railroad, she ought to get a thousand
dollars for it.
“But if the railroad board should change its mind again,” added the
lawyer, “sixteen hundred dollars would not be a speculative price to pay
for your farm--and well Pepper knows it.”
“Then Mr. Damocles's sword has got to hang over us, has it?” demanded
the old lady.
“I am afraid so,” admitted the lawyer, smiling.
Mrs. Atterson could not be more troubled than was Hiram himself. Youth
feels the sting of such arrows of fortune more keenly than does age. We
get “case-hardened” to trouble as the years bend our shoulders.
The thought that he might, after all, get nothing but a hundred dollars
and his board for all the work he had done in preparation for the second
year's crop sometimes embittered Hiram's thoughts.
Once, when he spoke to Pepper, and the snaky man sneered at him and
laughed, the young farmer came near attacking him then and there in the
street.
“I certainly could have given that Pepper as good a thrashing as ever he
got,” muttered Hiram. “And even Pete Dickerson never deserved one more
than Pepper.”
Pete fought shy of Hiram these days, and as the summer waned the young
farmer gradually became less watchful and expectant of trouble from the
direction of the west boundary of the Atterson Eighty.
But there was little breathing spell for him in the work of the farm.
“When we lay by the corn, you bet dad an' me goes fishing!” Henry
Pollock told Hiram, one day.
But it wasn't often that the young farmer could take half a day off for
any such pleasure.
“You've bit off more'n you kin chaw,” observed Henry.
“That's all right; I'll keep chewing at it, just the same,” returned
Hiram cheerfully.
For the truck crop was bringing them in a bigger sum of money than even
Hiram had expected. The season had been very favorable, indeed; Hiram's
vegetables had come along in good time, and even the barrels of sweet
corn he shipped to Crawberry brought a fair price--much better than he
could have got at the local cannery.
When the tomato pack came on, however, he did sell many baskets of his
“seconds” to the cannery. But the selected tomatoes he continued to ship
to Crawberry, and having established a reputation with his produce man
for handsome and evenly ripened fruit, the prices received were good all
through the season.
He saw the sum for tomatoes pass the hundred and fifty dollar mark
before frost struck the vines. Even then he was not satisfied. There was
a small cellar under the Atterson house, and when the frosty nights of
October came, Hiram dragged up the vines still bearing fruit, by the
roots, and hung them in the cellar, where the tomatoes continued to
ripen slowly nearly up to Thanksgiving.
Other crops did almost as well in proportion. He had put in no late
potatoes; but in September he harvested the balance of his early crop
and, as they were a good keeping variety, he knew there would be enough
to keep the family supplied until the next season.
Of other roots, including a patch of well-grown mangels for Mrs.
Atterson's handsome flock of chickens, there were plenty to carry the
family over the winter.
As the frosts became harder Hiram dug his root pits in the high, light
soil of the garden, drew pinetags to cover them, and, gradually, as the
winter advanced, heaped the earth over the various piles of roots to
keep them through the winter.
Meanwhile, in September, corn harvest had come on. The four acres Hiram
had planted below the stables yielded a fair crop, that part of the
land he had been able to enrich with coarse manure showing a much better
average than the remainder.
The four acres yielded them something over one hundred and sixty baskets
of sound corn which, as corn was then selling for fifty cents per
bushel, meant that the crop was worth about forty dollars.
As near as Hiram could figure it had cost about fifteen dollars to raise
the crop; therefore the profit to Mrs. Atterson was some twenty-five
dollars.
Besides the profit from some of the garden crops, this was very small
indeed; as Hiram said, it did not pay well enough to plant small patches
of corn for them to fool with it much.
“The only way to make a good profit out of corn corn a place like this,”
he said to Henry, who would not be convinced, “is to have a big drove of
hogs and turn them into the field to fatten on the standing corn.”
“But that would be wasteful!” cried Henry, shocked at the suggestion.
“Big pork producers do not find it so,” returned Hiram, confidently. “Or
else one wants a drove of cattle to fatten, and cuts the corn green and
shreds it, blowing it into a silo.
“The idea is to get the cost of the corn crop back through the price
paid by the butcher for your stock, or hogs.”
“Nobody ever did that around here,” declared young Pollock.
“And that's why nobody gets ahead very fast around here. Henry, why
don't you strike out and do something new--just to surprise 'em?
“Stop selling a little tad of this, and a little tad of that off the
farm and stick to the good farmer's rule: 'Never sell anything off the
place that can't walk off.'”
“I've heard that before,” said Henry, sighing.
“And even then just so much fertility goes with every yoke of steers
or pair of fat hogs. But it is less loss, in proportion, than when the
corn, or oats, or wheat itself is sold.”