All that first day at school Sayre had been much impressed by the difference in spirit between the serious part-time pupils and the light-hearted youngsters of the regular four-year courses. She watched the latter darting in and out and everywhere about the school building in an irresponsible casual goodfellowship which she secretly envied. She began to understand how Charley felt about this new school venture of hers. When school was out at four o’clock a thin, red-haired girl opened her eyes more fully.
“You’re Charley Morgan’s sister, aren’t you? I’m Irene Osgood. Rene for short. Wouldn’t you like to go and watch football practice for a while?”
Sayre accepted gratefully. She would not go back in the bus of the morning. There were beans and a custard cooked for supper; Dad had Hitty; she would wait for Dad and Charley and they could all go home together in the ‘Shake.
Together Sayre and her companion walked toward the big athletic field. It felt good to Sayre to have some girl companionship. There had been so little time for it in her life these last three years.
“I think it’s simply horrid,” the other girl burst out suddenly, “The way the regular pupils feel about you part-time ones! I don’t see what there is about us to make us feel so superior. I think you’re perfectly splendid to do what you’re doing.” (Sayre began to feel uncomfortable. Whatever this girl was, she was a gusher, and she had absolutely no tact!) “I told Charley he ought to be ashamed to mind about your coming in. The fellows’ll just razz him all the more if he shows so plain that he’s sensitive. What I say is, he’s only an Ag himself, if he is a full-time regular. But, of course, he can play football. And with Frank Hoskins in the Ag bunch, it’s got social standing.”
Sayre tried not to betray her distaste for this silly speech. The two girls were moving in the wake of several boys in football uniform, who were clumping along with that peculiar gait that is imposed by spiked shoes on uncongenial ground. Sayre suspected her companion of deliberately keeping close to these boys. Presently the short boy near the lead swung his head back toward the powerful fellow at his heels. Yes, that short fellow was Charley. Sayre could never be quite sure of his identity in those type-leveling togs. But the face framed by that dingy helmet was not Charley’s usual one. This face had a glower. Sayre was suddenly glad that Charley’s face could look like that. She saw him eye the big, burly lad behind him in unmistakable contempt. Then he spoke, making each syllable so distinct that even above the sounds of hurrying pupils thronged all around, Sayre caught every word.
“Once and for all, Frank Hoskins, never-you-mind-about-my-sister! Understand?”
Sayre could not hear whether the other fellow answered, but as he lagged back to join the boys at the rear, she had a glimpse of the face that his helmet encircled. It was sullen to vindictiveness, and it belonged to the first boy she had laid eyes on in Upham.
Meanwhile the girl at Sayre’s side was prattling on. “Look, that’s Frank Hoskins. Isn’t he powerful? Not many high school teams can show a fellow as strong as that. He just about makes the team. He’s full-back, you know, and by far the best player on it.”
Sayre smiled. She was beginning to wonder whether this sharp-featured girl was as artless as she seemed.
The practice that afternoon was a scrimmage between two extemporized teams the coach had made up for a purpose which Sayre learned later. It seemed that the high school to be played the following Saturday had a half-back much like Charley in build, whose famed dodging Frank Hoskins would have to block. So today Charley was to play on one team and Frank Hoskins on the other. One play occurred often: it was Charley, carrying the ball, going through the line on an off-tackle play. Go through it he did again and again, his compact, darting, twisting form evading with swift adaptation and elusiveness Frank’s dogged, determined lunging.
The coach kept shouting reprimands to Frank. “Lower! Lower, didn’t I tell you? Nothing but a ground tackle’ll get a fellow like Morgan!”
At last Frank did “get” Morgan in a play that was farther away from the rest of the teams than it should have been. Charley was downed at the side lines right at the spot behind which the girls were standing. That was how Sayre saw so plainly. It was a quick action for one of Frank’s bulk—the way in which his big foot swung up to jam its kick straight into Charley’s side as Charley lay screened from the other players’ view by Frank’s own big body.
Sayre’s blue eyes flashed black. She leaned forward. “You—you c-contemptible c-c-coward!”
Instantly there jerked itself up to meet hers a heavy, sullen face; in it she read the leap of fear. The sight steadied her anger and her voice. “You needn’t be so scared,” she scoffed. “Nobody saw you but two girls. Charley won’t tell. He’s a game sport!”
But from a vantage point some distance away somebody else had seen. A moment later the coach’s hand gripped Frank’s shoulder with a power which twirled the big fellow around in the direction facing the school’s gymnasium door. “March. Straight back to the dressing room, and take off that suit.”
Surprised, cowed, and sullen, the boy stumbled forward in angry obedience out from the silent circle of boys which by this time had gathered thick about the scene.
Sayre heard the girl at her side mutter something about its being “mean to humiliate a boy like that right before everybody.” But she did not address Sayre directly; nor did Sayre speak. Soon it appeared that Rene had lost interest in the practice, and she made an excuse to get away. Sayre wandered toward the Hoskins store, got Hitty, settled the child and herself in the ‘Shake, and tried to study. Getting down to study was going to be a little hard for her, she realized, even when Hitty’s restlessness and chatter were not close at hand.
At home that evening while Dad read Little Black Sambo aloud to Hitty, who was curled in his lap, Charley wiped the supper dishes for Sayre. All trace of the morning’s feeling between the twins had vanished. Careful though both were not to speak of the matter, both were conscious that each, that afternoon had had sure proof of the other’s loyalty.
“Saw you chumming with Frank Hoskins’ girl.”
“Frank Hoskins!” Sayre was concentrated scorn. “I hope the coach meant that that brute had to hand in his suit for good. Did he?”
“Aw—not exactly. You see, the fellow’s a darn good player, and he’s worked hard. And the coach sure gave him one bawling out after practice right before the whole squad about being jealous of me, and working too much for his own glory, and all that kind of stuff. Hoskins is a queer kid, you know. Always has to be ‘it’ at anything he’s in. Usually is, too, I guess, ’cause he’s smart. And—”
The reason for Charley’s sudden volubility did not escape Sayre. Plunging both arms deep into the soapsuds and resting the palms of her hands on the dishpan’s bottom, she faced her brother. “Charley Morgan,” she divined, “you begged off for him.”
Charley avoided his sister’s gaze like a culprit. “Aw, well, we wouldn’t have had a chance in the game next Saturday without him. And besides—”
“I knew it!” Sayre vigorously resumed her dishwashing. “All I’ve got to say is, I hope he appreciates what you’ve done for him.”
Charley laughed. “Hoskins isn’t exactly the sort to ‘appreciate’ favors from a fellow who’s crowding him a little. Guess likely he’s got it in for me worse’n ever.”
Dish-water slopped and dishes clinked and rattled. “You see,” Charley’s big hands clumsily manipulated a towel around the edge of a cup, “it isn’t only football between Hoskins and me. I guess he’s sore at my telling the other Ag fellows that they won’t catch me in that alfalfa contest of Hoskins’ father, not considering the way Mr. Hansen says Mr. Kitchell really feels about it.”
“Isn’t Mr. Kitchell nice?” Sayre murmured cordially.
“Nice!” Charley scoffed at the ineffective word. “He’s a prince, that fellow. Made of the right stuff all over and clear through, every darn inch of him.”
Sayre poured the dish-water into
a pail; then she swirled the dishcloth around the pan in happy content. If this hero-worship of Charley’s only kept up, where might it not lead him?
Charley picked the pail up and carried it outside.
“Sayre.” (So Dad had not been completely absorbed in Hitty and Black Sambo.) “Hadn’t you and Charley better not be too independent? Remember that the father of this boy that Charley seems to be having trouble with, the man who offers that prize in the alfalfa contest, happens to be my employer.”
Did Dad mean he wanted them to enter that contest? Sayre did not ask. “It’s that Mr. Hoskins,” she said to herself. “He’s been hinting to Dad about our going into it.” What luck that they had no five acres of land fit for a new alfalfa planting. Even a greenhorn like her knew that.
4
Projects
In spite of the friction between its two best players, Upham High School won the next Saturday’s football game, and the two games that followed. Then the season ended. Sayre was glad. Charley would not see so much of Frank Hoskins now, and also, he would have more time for his Ag work.
Nevertheless she sat up for Charley’s homecoming on the night of the closing football banquet, at which next season’s officials were to be chosen. “They elected you,” she cried when he came in. She knew by the glow in his eyes.
“You see before you, Miss Morgan, next year’s captain of the Upham High School football team!” How Charley did love making this announcement!
But Sayre’s heart skipped a beat. Well, he deserved it, she supposed. Had not his playing brought the school the most successful season of its history? There was another comforting thought in the situation, too: it would take a good deal now to make Charley quit school. Yet it was true, also, that he was a newcomer, whereas Frank Hoskins had given the school three years of hard service. Queer, what a jumble of satisfaction and misgiving a person could get out of exactly the same happening!
Suddenly the misgiving dominated. “And Frank? How did he take it?” Sayre knew only too well after a month of school contacts that the failure of a Hoskins to attain a set desire was no trifling matter in that community.
Charley laughed in the way he always did of late when Sayre spoke of Frank Hoskins. “Well, he didn’t congratulate me personally. But he made a speech. Said all the right things, in public, anyway. Some of the fellows say his father wrote it for him. Told him he’d got to make it if he lost the election. It sure sounded fine. Mr. Kitchell used a big word about it. Said it showed magnanimity.”
Magnanimity! Sayre was to hear that characterization repeated often during the next few days; and she scoffed inwardly every time she heard it. For as the days went by she caught the reflection of Frank’s real feeling from Rene Osgood’s remarks. And she also saw Frank and Charley together without other witnesses.
Football interests began to recede into the background, however, and the girl became too absorbed in study and plans for projects to bother her head much about Frank Hoskins. Projects, in the sense in which Mr. Kitchell had explained them to Sayre on that first visit of hers to the school house, were now ever on the tongues of the vocational agriculture pupils of both part-time and full-time groups.
Dad was really the first Morgan to start a project. He was attending, chiefly for sociability, a series of ten evening classes on hog production which Mr. Kitchell was offering to adult farmers in the community. Much to Charley’s and Sayre’s amusement, he came home one night with a Hampshire sow in the back of the ‘Shake.
“Where’d you get it?” Sayre queried.
“Bought it. On credit, of course. Mr. Hoskins very kindly endorsed my note.”
The girl’s mood hardened. “How much?”
“Well, it’s a purebred; they’re expensive, you know. Ei-eighty dollars.”
“Eighty dollars!” Sayre was stunned.
She trusted to Mr. Hansen to do the chiding, as she knew he would when he heard of it. “I vould not let dat man Hoskins get no more rights on me, Meester Morgan. He likes dat too much.”
“He isn’t going to keep any rights on us,” Sayre resolved. “We’ll pay for that sow with its next season’s litters, and that’s the last we’ll ever owe him. Charley and I must finance our projects some other way.”
At last Sayre decided what her own projects were to be. The biggest was to be turkeys. This dry tableland was natural turkey country. Mr. Hansen was already beginning to develop substantial turkey markets for this section of the Pawaukee Project, so that now was just the time to go into the turkey business.
She would try chickens too, setting all her available hens and buying a lot of baby chicks. She would have summer and fall fries, with a lot of pullets held over for winter egg-laying, and a few roosters to assure a good continuation project next year.
She would have to enlarge and lighten that dark old chicken house of Sam Parsons’ a lot, and build a separate shelter for the turkeys. Separate yards, too. Well, she could manage with a little assistance from Dad. Dear old Dad was such a help these days. He was really housekeeper a lot of the time. Lucky he had his mornings free. Alone, she could never have accomplished as much as she did.
She meant, too, if she could manage the money part, to plant potatoes on two acres of the alfalfa land, with the early spring growth plowed under. Mr. Hansen and one or two of his friends hoped to ship several carloads of potatoes next year. And, of course, she’d have to raise all she could of her poultry feed. Her head fairly buzzed with plans, and soon she was flying around from morning to night.
Charley would have to come in for his share of everything. He had not said much about his projects yet, but Sayre was not worrying, in view of the way he continued to feel about Mr. Kitchell. “He won’t fall down on anything he has to do for that man,” she assured herself. So the days went by.
Sayre, coming out of the house one Saturday morning in December to throw the breakfast scraps to the chickens, saw Charley with an indefinite-looking object attached to the back of the ‘Shake. “What have you got there, Chuck?”
“Project. Farm shop.”
“Project? I’d call it a pile of old junk.”
“So did the junk dealer. Offered Mr. Hoskins fifty cents for it. I outbid him. Paid a dollar. Mr. Hoskins wasn’t any too anxious to let me have it, either. But the junk dealer would have sold it to me if Mr. Hoskins had held out.”
“What’s Mr. Hoskins got to do with it?”
“Owned it. At least, it was lying on a canal bank of the last poor fellow’s proved-up homestead that Mr. Hoskins has taken over on a mortgage.”
“What is it, anyhow?”
“Manure spreader. Was once, that is. And is going to be again.”
Sayre laughed, “Maybe,” she doubted.
“Bet you don’t even know what a manure spreader looks like,” Charley challenged.
“Don’t I? I’ve watched the very same one work that you have. I went out to Mr. Hoskins’ place last fall on purpose, on the day after Mr. Hansen told us that Mr. Hoskins was the only farmer around here who had one now and that he never lent nor rented it; and that he used it, himself, on the quiet as far as he could.”
Mr. Hansen had told them, too, that however much Mr. Hoskins might veto plowing under alfalfa as green manure to supply humus to the Pawaukee’s light soil, he was shrewd enough to supply his own land with humus by buying up all the barnyard manure he could from every poor farmer who would sell anything for a cash dollar.
It was pretty clever of Charley, Sayre suddenly realized with delight, to think of getting hold of a manure spreader for himself.
“I’d recognize a manure spreader now anywhere by that noise it keeps right on making when it’s going, especially when it turns. You know, that funny, long-drawn-out squeak. The ratchet on the wheel makes it when it’s keeping its wheel from going around as fast as another one.” Sayre was finding highly stimulating the shift from challenge to admiration in Charley’s bright eyes. She’d show him a girl wasn’t so dumb.
The w
hole picture of the machine she had seen at work flashed through her memory. Late yellow sunlight over a remote, level field of the Hoskins place, across to which she had plodded. Dust haze hovering over the horizon. Thicker dust in the air about the team. Young Ole Larsen, Mr. Hoskins’ “hired man,” slowly driving that beautiful work span. The spreader itself moving steadily, first up, then down the big field, ever to its nerve-scraping accompaniment. Its approach near to her observation point where its aroma had been pretty overwhelming, but where she had been able to see into its wagon-box when it was almost empty, and watch for a moment the slow movement of the box’s revolving bottom, carrying the manure to the back where discs cut it up into small chunks. Her longer watching of the way those chunks and their surrounding haloes sprayed up into that funny, circular brown cloud at the wagon’s end, and then out to spread finely and evenly over the soil it was to enrich.
“Mr. Hoskins’ spreader,” the girl motioned toward Charley’s dilapidated wreck with a giggle, “certainly didn’t look much like this. This hasn’t any wagon-box bottom at all, revolving or otherwise. Nor much of any sides, not to mention chains, or discs, or—Still,” she hastened to add, “if Mr. Kitchell thinks you can rebuild it—”
“He doesn’t exactly,” her brother’s honesty admitted. “But he’s said I could try.” Charley waxed enthusiastic. “Do you know, Sayre, that thing, new, cost one hundred and ninety dollars. And it’s hardly been used. Just fallen to pieces from being neglected and left out in the weather.”
“What good’ll it do you to rebuild it? You haven’t any manure to spread.” It was Sayre’s turn to challenge.
“As we sure ought to. Never mind that now. You’ve just been pointing out yourself why I want to rebuild it. Some farmers who haven’t any spreader have quite a lot of manure. Nels Hansen, for instance. When I’ve a piece of machinery to lend, I can borrow something else I need. Or I can hire out with my machine. Or I can rent it. I know what I’m doing. Work like this comes natural to me. When I’m through with this spreader I’m going to attack the ‘Shake again. Turn it into a half-ton truck. I’m keeping my eye on the junk dealer’s pile right along to get hold of some parts I want. And when—”
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