“Ain’t ve all poor like Yob’s turkey around here? And our big boys, ain’t ve got to have ’em home most all de time for vorkin’ if ve’re going to hang on to our land? And don’t dat make us feel mighty bad, not to give our big boys no shance?
“Veil, de Ag teacher say after football he don’t vant to be athletics coach no more. He vant to run a short Ag course for our big boys in de dull farm season, four months, November to a little in March, all day at de high school. In de mornings he vill teach ’em agriculture and farm shop; in de afternoons udder teachers vill teach ’em English so dey can speak and write good, and Civics to make ’em good citizens. Even Hoskins can’t beat down dat good idea, so ve vote back dat teacher.”
“Hoskins’ll sure be loving you for that, Hansen.”
“Vat vould I vant,” again the monotonous voice broke into that irresistible chuckle, “vid Hoskins loving me?”
At this point, with Sayre leaning forward, her mind a sudden whirl of new ideas—in came Dad again. She knew at once that whatever his errand had been, it had not been successful. He came out of his dejection for just one flash of cheerfulness on their way home.
“Sayre, I met that Mr. Hoskins in town. Knew me at once. Was most cordial. I had not the heart to tell him the truth about our situation, even though Sam Parsons said he was always so helpful to everybody around here.”
“Oh, Dad, surely you can’t believe Mr. Parsons’ ideas about people or things out here, any more?”
Her father sighed. “I can’t bring myself to believe that Parsons sent us out here under intentionally false pretenses.”
“That land agent certainly believes it! The queerest look came into his eyes, kind of sharp, it was, when you said Mr. Parsons thought he might come to visit us next summer.”
“But what could Parsons’ object have been if he knew the land was too worthless for me to want it? And that they wouldn’t let me have it anyway? Sayre!” The sudden tightening in Mr. Morgan’s tones implied one of those flashes of insight he sometimes had, always as an aftermath of disillusioning experience. “Parsons must want to hold on to that land! We’re out here to work it for him the way the Government requires a homesteader to do. It requires him to live on it, too. That’s what he’ll tell the Government he’s doing when he comes to visit us. To think that a man I had such faith in could be so underhanded!”
So Dad saw it at last, and she didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. But her mind was by now busying itself over something more important. This afternoon’s experience had been valuable, in spite of the distress it had brought, for out of it there was slowly emerging a plan; she spelled it Plan in her mind, with a capital. As she turned it from side to side during their journey homeward, trying to see what it involved, and all that it might mean to the Morgans, she made up her mind that she would keep it a secret. No use of talking about it yet, not even to Charley; but tomorrow she must get at the first steps. The thought of Charley made her wonder what effect the news that she and Dad were taking home would have on him. Start him off again on some crazy notion, joining the Navy, like as not! Yet without Charley she could not hope to carry her Plan through, however persistent she herself might be. Hang on to her brother she must.
As they pulled up at the “crate” her father asked her what she was smiling about, but she only shook her head. Really, she was smiling a little ruefully at herself, remembering some of the things that Aunt Mehitable had so often said to her; that however changeable—sometimes even undependable—Charley might be, she could hardly sit in judgment on him as long as she kept her childhood impulsiveness, her impatience with other people that was often actual crossness, her insistence on having her own way, her “bossiness,” Aunt Mehitable called it! All right, maybe she was bossy; somebody had to be, in the Morgan family!
2
Sayre’s Plan Is Started
If Sayre could keep a secret, so also could Charley. For the result of the evening’s dismayed discussion among the three of them was his announced decision to go straight to town next morning, on what errand he would not say. Sayre contented herself with asking to be driven in with him; if she showed herself inquisitive about his reason for going, he might insist on knowing hers. So, while he was parking the ‘Shake, she slipped away to the Upham Consolidated School building.
“The Ag teacher’s office is at the head of the stairs,” the janitor told her when she sought him out to inquire. “Go right up and in. Mr. Kitchell’s there; he stays on the job all summer.”
Sayre’s step slackened as she climbed. Not that she was backing out. Only, even enthusiasm and determination have moments of misgiving. She had expected to find this Mr. Kitchell alone. Those voices upstairs proved he had company.
She recognized one voice, little as she had heard it. It belonged to Mr. Hoskins, smooth and pleasant, yet “awfully cocky.” That other voice was nicer, it must be the Ag teacher’s.
Sayre mounted four more steps. She could hear every word. Yet those men weren’t talking loud! That distinctness must come from their being so awfully polite to each other.
Alfalfa. Was it always alfalfa people were talking about on this Pawaukee Project? The voices rose higher.
Why, this was a scrap! Those polite words were really blows. Ought she to go right in? She’d wait a little first, standing just outside the open doorway so that they would know she was there.
The nice voice was speaking. “I have never discouraged alfalfa projects among my pupils, Mr. Hoskins. Alfalfa is essential to this country as a first crop, to be plowed under to give this light soil the humus it must have to grow other things. But I have used, and I shall continue to use, all my influence against this steady wholesale marketing of alfalfa hay for ready cash. Such a procedure is ruination to our farmers. Our present circumstances prove that.”
“Our present circumstances,” rejoined Mr. Hoskins a little sharply, “prove that our farmers have to sell for cash anything they can get cash for! Men in such straits can’t live on your hazy ‘future prospects,’ Mr. Kitchell. We will dismiss the subject for the present, however, and get down to the matter that brought me here.
“I’m in the alfalfa business. I want my son Frank to learn that business, all of it, the growing side as well as the marketing. That is why he is enrolled in your regular four-year high school vocational agriculture course. Nowhere, I knew,” the voice settled into a purr, “could he learn the growing part better than under your efficient instructorship.”
The other man made no attempt to break the ensuing pause.
“Mr. Hoskins can’t jolly that teacher,” thought Sayre with delight. She was growing uncomfortable. Yet she was not eavesdropping; she was within plain sight of both those men.
“But Frank”—censure slid slyly into the smooth tones—“is not so much interested as he should be. So I propose to stimulate his interest by offering a prize for a contest. All your agriculture pupils will be eligible, Mr. Kitchell, those who will enroll in your part-time class as well as those in the regular high school course. It will cost no pupil anything to enter. I shall provide the seed.”
Sayre stepped nearer, her personal interest pricked for the moment to the point of unselfconsciousness.
“I shall offer a prize of one hundred and fifty dollars to that pupil who by the end of the next growing season shall have received the highest market returns from five new acres of alfalfa, either of fall or of spring planting.”
Sayre’s eyes grew big. A contest open to both groups of high school Ag students. Could anything fit better into her plan? And one hundred and fifty dollars—a magnificent sum!
Then her attention centered again upon those men. The silence within that room was growing uncomfortably long.
“This is, of course, Mr. Hoskins”—my, but that teacher was chilly!—“an attempt on your part to destroy my influence among my pupils—to undermine my teaching.”
“Not at all, Mr. Kitchell. Not at all.” The teacher’s increased aloofness was a
s nothing compared to the other man’s increased pleasantness. “Not for a moment would I have you or anyone else put such an interpretation upon my offer. My sole object is to induce my boy to learn the complete alfalfa business.”
Another silence, longer than the previous one. “I do not see how I can refuse your offer,” came at last without any thawing in the teacher’s tones. “I make one condition. It must be understood this prize contest of yours is a private affair, offered without my personal or professional sanction. Under that condition I shall do all I can to help the alfalfa growers.” The emphasis on the last word was unmistakable. The teacher stood up. Was it because he wanted his visitor to leave? He was still talking. “But I shall advise against the selling. For unless this locality’s farmers go in before long on a bigger scale for something besides market hay, they’re done for. I cannot believe that a man of your intelligence fails to realize that fact as well as I.”
Sayre’s indecision was over. She was not going to hear any more; but she wasn’t going away, either. She stepped forward and knocked, well aware that the hard, dry sounds her knuckles made were puncturing an atmosphere taut with tension and constraint.
Another intrusion was at hand, however, in the approach of a big lad who lumbered up the stairs to brush past Sayre into the office. It was the boy whom she had seen two days earlier talking with Mr. Hoskins, evidently “my son Frank” arriving by appointment to meet his father. He gave a surly nod toward Mr. Kitchell and stood by, indifferent to the point of ungraciousness, while the older man made a stiff farewell to the teacher. Then both were gone.
“So that’s the Hoskins boy,” Sayre thought. “Why didn’t he say something? Not be so rude! He doesn’t look like his father, but he’s just as horrid.”
Yet there had been something impressive about that boy. He was finely built, a little overgrown, but muscular, not fat; and his dark, brooding eyes had caught the girl’s attention and held it.
Mr. Hoskins, meanwhile, had given Sayre just one glance. What was in it? Not resentment exactly; she was not important enough for that. Just the same she knew he had not liked her overhearing Mr. Kitchell “get the best of him.” Sayre did not care. For no reason at all, she had drifted into the spirit of that overheard scrap entirely on Mr. Kitchell’s side.
She moved expectantly forward to the chair Mr. Kitchell had indicated. How big the teacher looked as he turned toward her, so broad, and tall, and a little clumsy in a way that was nice. How pleasant, too, his face was, firm and very decided, yet quiet and kind. Oh, she could trust this young man! She began to pour forth her story.
He listened with an interest that made her feel as if a lot of his thoughts were really reaching back of the Morgans themselves.
“So we’re here,” she concluded. “And I am determined about one thing. We are going to learn to farm. If you could persuade my brother to go back to high school in the fall and take your regular course in vocational agriculture—”
“He’s interested in farming?”
“Not the way he ought to be,” replied Sayre with characteristic candor. “But he won’t hate studying it the way he did some of the things he used to have to take in school. It’s football, though, you’ll have to get him with. He’s an awfully good player. It’s his legs.”
“What about his legs?”
“They’re football legs, halfback’s. Hard to tackle; have to be tackled so low down that the other team’s men are afraid of them. They’re short, you see, below the knee, and strong. Yet Charley’s awfully quick.”
“He’s played before?”
“Oh, my, yes! He was star halfback last year on West End High School team. In Chicago, you know, where we lived last. But he quit school at Christmas. Dad felt dreadfully, he’d always hoped one of us at least could get an education. But Charley said that even for football he couldn’t stick some of the stuff they made him take. Yet he isn’t stupid. When he wants to be, Charley’s smart. Like building over that old Ford he got for twenty dollars’ worth of work so that we all came out here in it without a bit of trouble.”
“I’ll certainly look the boy up and see what I can do.”
Sayre moved to the edge of her chair, alight with gratitude. “If you can just get him interested,” she breathed. “When Charley’s interested, he can do anything. And how he will work! But”—Sayre’s intensity broke—“it isn’t easy to keep him staying interested.
“I can try.” The teacher’s slow smile was “nice.”
“And you won’t let him know about my coming to you? He’d be furious. He hates my managing him!”
“Never. Trust me for that. As for that Parsons eighty you’re on, there are twenty acres of alfalfa on that farm that are better than almost anything else in that locality; and a lot of the alkali on the rest is the result of overwatering. In time, when the Government completes its new drainage system—”
But Sayre was nerving herself to her next question. “That—that part-time agriculture class you’re going to start in November. Could a girl join it?”
The teacher stared at her in what was plainly astonishment. “Oh, I shouldn’t think so,” he said quickly. “At least, it’s never been done—never even been asked for.”
“But,” the girl put in eagerly, “there’s no rule against it?”
“Not that I ever heard. You see, the course has never been given here before. But my plan, the one I laid before the school board, didn’t take girls into consideration at all, I’m afraid!” And he laughed a little apologetically. “It never occurred to me that any girl would want to join the group. There’s too much physical labor involved, in the first place, in what we agricultural people call ‘projects.’ They are genuine farm enterprises on a big enough scale to be real business undertakings. The pupils will have to do practically all the work themselves: plowing, planting, cultivating, harvesting, and marketing or feeding, in a crops project like, say, five acres of field peas. Or all the care of the stock: breeding, rationing, marketing, raising the feed, and perhaps even providing quarters if necessary, in an animal project, like a dozen beef steers. You see, a lot of that sort of work would be much too hard for a girl!”
But even as she watched and listened, Sayre was conscious of a curious new look coming into Mr. Kitchell’s eyes—as if, almost, he were sizing her up, and wondering.… She leaned forward as he paused, her eager face with its big eyes, deep Celtic blue in color, radiant with self-confidence. “Please, I could try. Even if I’m not big. I’m strong, and I’m used to hard work. All my life I’ve wanted so much to live in the country and work out of doors!”
“Oh, I’m sure you would do your best,” he returned courteously. “Still, no girl I’ve ever heard of even thought of tackling such work.”
“But nowadays,” she broke in, “there isn’t anything a boy does that a girl can’t do. You know that!”
“We–e–e–ll”—was he giving in?—“personally I should have no objection. And I suppose that I could make it all right with the board. You yourself might put in a word with Mr. Nels Hansen. He’s a neighbor of yours, and one of the board members. There’s no better natural farmer on the whole Pawaukee.”
A little later a buoyant Sayre awaited her brother’s coming in the old Rattleshake, one who strove to keep Charley from detecting her mood as they chugged homeward side by side.
“Isn’t this country a fade-out, Sayre? Small wonder more’n half the claims out our way from town are abandoned. Turn your goggles towards that specimen.”
Reluctantly Sayre’s glance followed Charley’s gesture toward a miserable, isolated clutter of tarpaper shacks, by no means unique in the outlying landscape. Under the desert sun they seemed visibly shriveling into ruin. Around them swept dead acres, not only bare of any green spear of a cultivated crop, but now so white with encrusted alkali that even the original dwarf sagebrush and scrub cactus had vanished.
“They’re not all like that,” Sayre protested. “Out the other side of Upham there are some m
ighty nice-looking farms, with alfalfa fields, and beans, and field peas, and even a little wheat.”
Sayre’s quickness at having learned the local crops brought no approval from Charley. “And who owns ’em? Men like that Mr. Hoskins, who earn their living in town. And talk about getting them free! When the Government’s got to be paid back for all the cost of building the big dam and the canals and the ditches and the headgates and the flumes and all the rest of the whole irrigation system that brings the water here? Sounds easy because the paying has to be done only little by little every year for forty years. But do you know, Sayre, there’s hardly a farmer around who’s been able yet to pay the Government anything at all? Even that Hoskins can’t pay on the land he owns, and he’s the biggest man in Upham. Some folks say, though, that he can’t pay just because he’s so good to the settlers about store credit and lending money.”
Sayre tried not to show how hard she was listening. Charley sounded so superiorly informed that she did not want to flatter him with too much interest. He never even noticed her attitude. “But it’s none of our worries,” he concluded. “I’ve got something better to think about. I’ve landed a job. Two of them, if you want to know.”
“A job? What kind?” Not on a farm. She knew that by the way he told of it.
Charley ignored the metallic quality in Sayre’s tone. “General handy man in a garage at a dollar and a half a day. Washing tourist cars, mostly, for a while, I suppose. But I’ll soon work up to being a mechanic. Showed the boss this junk pile. Told him how I’d rebuilt it to bring the Morgan tribe out to this Paradise.”
“Of course you told him it brought you out here to be a farmer?”
Charley ignored his sister’s sarcasm. “Grubbing out my days on these cactus flats? Not Charley. Now, a garage in a town like Upham—so near to Yellowstone Park, with tourists going through all the time—is a live place. Before long, when I’ve worked up—”
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 103