"CORN THAT'S CORN"
Hiram caught sight of Pepper in town one day and went after him. He knew the real estate man had returned from his business trip, and the fact that the matter of the option was hanging fire, and troubling Mrs. Atterson exceedingly, urged Hiram go counter to Mr. Strickland's advice.
The lawyer had said: " Let sleeping dogs lie." Pepper had made no move, however, and the uncertainty was very trying both for the young farmer and his employer.
"How about that option you talked about, Mr. Pepper?" asked the "youth. Are you going to exercise it?""I've got time enough, ain't I?" returned the real estate man, eyeing Hiram in his very slyest way.
"I expect you have--if it really runs a year." "You seen it, didn't you?" demanded Pepper. "But we'd like Mr. Strickland to see it.""He's goin' to act for Mrs. Atterson?" queried the man, with a scowl. "Oh, yes.""Well, he'll see it-when I'm ready to take it up. Don't you fret," retorted Pepper, and turned away.
This did not encourage the young farmer, nor was there anything in the man's manner to yield hope to Mrs. Atterson that she could feel secure in her title to the farm. So Hiram said nothing to her about meeting the man.
But the youth was very much puzzled. It really did seem as though Pepper was afraid to show that paper to Mr. Strickland.
"There's something queer about it, I believe," declared the youth to himself. "Somewhere there is a trick. He's afraid of being tripped up on it. But, why does he wait, if he knows the railroad is going to demand a strip of the farm and he can get a good price for it?
"Perhaps he is waiting to make sure that the railroad will condemn a piece of Mrs. Atterson's farm. If the board should change the route again, Pepper would have a farm on his hands that he might not be able to sell immediately at a profit.
"For we must confess, that sixteen hundred dollars, as farms have sold in the past around here, is a good price for the Atterson place. That's why Uncle Jeptha was willing to give an option for a month--if that was, in the beginning, the understanding the old man had of his agreement with Pepper.
"However, we might as well go ahead with the work, and take what comes to us in the end. I know no other way to do," quoth Hiram, with a sigh.
For he could not be very cheerful with the prospect of making only a single crop on the place. His profit was to have come out of the second year's crop--and, he felt, out of that bottom land which had so charmed him on the day he and Henry Pollock had gone over the Atterson Place.
Riches lay buried in that six acres of bottom. Hiram had read up on onion culture, and he believed that, if he planted his seed in hot beds, and transplanted the young onions to the rich soil in this bottom, he could raise fully as large onions as they did in either Texas or the Bermudas.
"Of course, they have the advantage of a longer season down there," thought Hiram, "and cheap labor. But maybe I can get cheap labor right around here. The children of these farmers are used to working in the fields. I ought to be able to get help pretty cheap.
"And when it comes to the market--why, I've got the Texas growers, at least, skinned a little! I can reach either the Philadelphia or New York market in a day. Yes; given the right conditions, onions ought to pay big down there on that lowland."But this was not the only crop possibility be turned over in his mind. There were other vegetables that would grow luxuriantly on that bottom land--providing, always, the flood did not come and fulfill Henry Pollock's prophecy.
"Two feet of water on that meadow, eh?" thought Hiram. "Well, that certainly would be bad. I wouldn't want that to happen after the ground was plowed this year, even. It would tear up the land, and sour it, and spoil it for a corn-crop, indeed."So he was down a good deal to the river's edge, watching the ebb and flow of the stream. A heavy rain would, over night, fill the river to its verybrim and the open field, even beyond the marshy spot, would be a-slop with standing water.
"It sure wouldn't grow alfalfa," chuckled Hiram to himself one day. "For the water rises here a good deal closer to the surface than four feet, and alfalfa farmers declare that if the springs rise that high, there is no use in putting in alfalfa. Why! I reckon just now the water is within four inches of the top of the ground."If the river remained so high, and the low ground so saturated with water, he knew, too, that he could not get the six acres plowed in time to put in corn this year. And it was this year's crop he must think about first.
Even if Pepper did not exercise his option, and turn Mrs. Atterson out of the place, a big commercial crop of onions, or any other better-paying crop, could only be tried the second year.
Hiram had got his seed corn for the upland piece of the man who raised the best corn in the community. He had tried the fertility of each ear, discarded those which proved weakly, or infertile, and his stand of corn for the four acres, which was now half hand high, was the best of any farmer between the Atterson place and town.
But this corn was a hundred-and-ten-day variety. The farmer he got it of told him that he had raised a crop from a piece planted the day before the Fourth of July; but it was safer to get it in at least by June fifteenth.
And here it was past June first, and the meadow land had not yet been plowed.
