“That’s where you showed sense. And he sent—”
“Don’t travel so fast. You’ve always got to jump at things, Sayre. He didn’t say much, of course. You know how he is, does things, doesn’t talk about them. Took me right out to that Cowan place and had some conversation with that Mr. Cowan before I did. Seems they got acquainted at the exhibit and found they had some of the same friends—at the Colorado Agricultural College where Mr. Kitchell went to school.
“Well, anyway, Mr. Cowan came out here for his health. Has to live pretty quiet. Isn’t dependent on his place for a living. Just interested to see what he can do with it because he’s an engineer who used to work on these irrigation projects for the Government. Nobody knows him much. He’s an awful quiet kind. But not sissy quiet, you bet.”
“He’s a perfect dear. He must be.”
Charley laughed indulgently. “If he is, he’s a pretty fussy one. Would only give me the job with strings tied to it. Seems he’s had a man working for him a long time that he’s promised to give the job back to whenever the fellow wants it. The man’s wife’s sick. He’s had to take her out of the altitude. Maybe he’ll be back, though, and there’s no telling when. And maybe he won’t. But the boss said if I worked as well for him as I did on the spreader, he’d see I got some kind of a job somewhere else any time he had to lay me off. Anyway, those ten acres are mine for the season, and he’s willing to get along with me on part-time till school’s out. So I’m darn lucky.”
“I should say you are.” Sayre, who had poised her expectant, excited self on the edge of a chair across the table from Charley as he ate, now drew a long, relaxing sigh.
“I’ve been planning all the way home,” Charley was talking between bites. “How does this layout strike you?” He pulled an old envelope from his pocket and drew two diagrams on it, carrying it around to his sister’s side. “Here’s my ten. I’ll put that five in peas. It’s a peach of a field, too. And these two in rutabagas. On these three I’ll raise all the small grain I can. I’ll sell you some, but we’ll both have to buy other places, too, I guess.”
He flipped the dingy envelope over. “As for our five acres here, these two are your potatoes, of course. Those back two, off the big field, we’d better keep for our own alfalfa, don’t you think? Then there’s our other acre. Doesn’t it strike you Dad had better put it all into garden? To stock us next winter, you know. I’ll try to get home once in a while if the work here, especially the irrigating, gets too heavy for Dad. But if Sam Parsons is going to live off us, he can just work his own—”
“Sam Parsons won’t work,” Sayre retorted. “He’ll be just as much a floorwalker on this good-for-nothing homestead as he is in the hardware aisle in Reeves & Beebe’s basement. He’ll treat us as if he were bowing politely to customers asking where to buy pie tins, and as if we were the clerks he was calling to wait on them!”
Sayre’s prediction, however, did not prove true. After he had gained his one point, Mr. Parsons interfered not at all that summer with the twins’ affairs.
Although his favorite pastime was loafing in the rear of the Hoskins store, he managed to do much of the work with his own alfalfa in a dispirited, half-competent way which by degrees made him become almost pitiful in the eyes of energetic, executive Sayre. For in some respects, she soon saw, he was not unlike her own father. He lacked Dad’s unselfishness, and fine, disinterested sense of fair dealing, of course. Still he was really only an inoffensive, unfortunate little man, who had put everything he owned into this still largely arid homestead, and had reaped nothing but mounting debts.
He had never, so the Morgans soon learned, paid any of the yearly Government payments assessed against his eighty. These assessments were his land’s share of the cost of the whole big irrigation works which had brought water to the thirsty country now known as the Pawaukee Reclamation Project.
Only once again that summer did Sayre know Sam Parsons to rise to any real assertiveness.
6
The Dream Takes Shape
“Oh, if Charley were only here!” Sayre wished this a good many times a day during the second summer on the Parsons eighty. It wasn’t so much that his being away threw more responsibility on her, it was just that she missed him, missed his easy raillery, his high spirits, even the occasional spur of his indifference. With Sam Parsons continually on hand to remind her of the Morgans’ real situation, her hopeful dream of a year ago seemed by now “just another crazy Morgan scheme.” She was glad she hadn’t spoken of it to anybody for sometimes she felt pretty hopeless.
Still, she was no quitter. She had school to cling to. Cling she did with steady, hardworking determination. She would finish the course she had started with the part-time class. Then, when that was over this spring, she would go on with the projects that she had started in it and continue them for another year, at least, with full credit to herself and to Mr. Kitchell. That was what Charley was doing, all that he had ever believed himself to be doing, since he did not suspect Sayre’s hope of what it might lead to.
Troubles seemed to follow Charley’s leaving home. A hard freeze ended her early potato venture. All that work and money wasted. Well, she had no one to blame but herself. She was a humbler person now.
Her chicks and her poults hatched beautifully. Cleanliness and careful attention made them thrive almost untouched by pests and disease. Yet once in the early evening, and twice later during late moonlight nights, she lost considerable numbers of birds from her young flocks.
Sam Parsons reported what proved to be her first loss as a matter of amusement. He had stayed home one Sunday evening, agreeing to do the chores so that the Morgans could go to the Hansens’ for supper. On the family’s return he greeted the girl with that formal joviality of his which she hated. He was seated as usual in Dad’s easy chair. “Sayre, are you including an intoxicant in your careful feeding of your young chicks?”
“An intoxicant?” Sayre tossed her hat through her open bedroom door onto the bed within. “What on earth do you mean?”
“Well,” the man continued his pleasantry, “just before roosting time this evening I saw some of your young birds behaving as if you had. I saw half a dozen chicks line up and march like tipsy soldiers straight across their yard to the opposite fence and disappear under it. Their legs balked like a drunken man’s at every step, and their unhappy cheeps were pretty thick-sounding utterances.”
Sayre seized and lighted a lantern and hurried out to her poultry quarters. Nothing apparently was wrong. The birds were all roosting or else secure in their hovers. But the next morning she discovered that a number of her young chicks were missing, and that a stretch along the bottom of the yard’s wiremesh fence showed traces of having been bent. She set promptly to work stapling the fence down. “And that lazy Sam Parsons,” she fumed to herself, meanwhile, in helpless exasperation, “would not even make the effort to investigate what was causing the trouble.”
From now on she would count her birds regularly every morning. No more losses showed up, however, until the birds were fairly well grown and Sayre had ceased to worry. Then one morning after a night of late moonlight ten chickens were gone. A month later eight more chickens and five turkey poults. Sayre discussed the matter with Dad and Sam Parsons and Nels Hansen. No one had any solution to offer. Coyotes and badgers and occasional skunks were the big menace to poultry raisers in this country, but Sayre’s losses left none of the telltale traces of such robbers. Their very mysteriousness made these losses even more discouraging. But for the time being, that is, until another month again brought late moonlight, there was nothing she could do about them.
It was easy to grow discouraged that summer on that part of the Pawaukee Irrigation Project. Gloom was everywhere among its alfalfa farmers. Hailstones in May and June ruined the first alfalfa cutting over a wide strip of country which fortunately for Mr. Parsons did not include his fields. These flourished as never before in a way which seemed to Sayre little less than mockery.
But on most of the old alfalfa fields of the Pawaukee not only was the first cutting ruined, but the second cutting looked thin and unpromising. The Pawaukee was too far north to count on much of a third cutting. Those poor farmers who under Mr. Hoskins’ leadership had been depending on their hay as their one marketable crop were facing a situation little less than desperate. They called a water users’ meeting in August to see if anything could be done to relieve matters.
Sayre and her father had little personal concern in the meeting, but Sam Parsons insisted they should attend. They went willingly enough. After all, the Morgans were water renters, even if for only five acres of Sam Parsons’ land. All the Pawaukee settlers of this region still bought water each year from the Government. Not until the settlers on a federal irrigation project have practically completed paying for the whole irrigation system which has brought water to the lands they occupy, do they themselves take over full legal rights and control of the water through an organization of their own.
When the Morgan party arrived at the meeting, the high school auditorium was already so nearly filled they had to separate to find seats. Mr. Parsons promptly wedged his way through the crowd to an unoccupied place directly in front of Mr. Hoskins. Mr. Morgan slipped unobtrusively into a rear seat and squeezed Hitty into his lap. Sayre found a place on the farther side of the room just in front of Frank Hoskins and Rene Osgood, who were sitting together. From this vantage point she began watching the late arrivals.
She was really looking for Charley. It was ten days since she had seen him and there were things she wanted to tell him about. There he was, entering the room through the main door. But who was that big, impressive-looking man he had with him? A total stranger in this community, that Sayre knew. What were they waiting just inside the door for? And scanning the crowd so carefully? To locate Mr. Kitchell, of course. He had seen them now and, handing those chairs he was carrying into the aisle to another man, he was hurrying toward them. He must know that man and like him awfully well, he was shaking hands with him so cordially. Now he was finding the strange man a seat. He seemed determined to get him a good one. But he wasn’t sitting down, himself. He had gone back to Charley and was talking to him. What were they so in earnest about? He was returning to the stranger again, though, and that nice part-time boy was giving Mr. Kitchell his seat right next to the visitor.
Charley, meanwhile, must have edged his way through the crowd to where Mr. Hansen was sitting. For now those two were talking, just as earnestly as Charley and Mr. Kitchell had done. There, the meeting was being called to order. That funny German-Russian Boris was offering Charley half his seat. Charley was slipping into it, his arm across the fellow’s broad back.
Behind her, Sayre heard Rene Osgood give a contemptuous sniff. It awoke her to the realization that every move Charley had made had been as plain to Rene and Frank, and to everyone else in the audience for that matter, as it had been to her. Well, what if it were?
It was time, anyway, that she bent her powers to listening. Wasn’t that first speaker Rene Osgood’s father? What was all this he was saying about the settlers’ troubles and the settlers’ wrongs? Everybody knew he held some of the best land on the Pawaukee.
As Sayre continued to listen her astonishment grew. For the second speaker and the third talked in exactly the same strain as Mr. Osgood. Yet she knew their children in school as the best dressed among the pupils, the ones with the most spending money. The third speaker ceased. Sayre thought she saw Mr. Hoskins give Sam Parsons a nudge from behind. Anyway the little man in his shiny floorwalker’s cutaway coat bobbed importantly to his feet. Well, he, at least, represented a truly poor farm.
Mr. Parsons, too, began to talk much as had the others. His farm, burdened with debt, gave no promise of returns sufficient to pay for its upkeep, not to mention its obligations, even after all the money, the weary toil, and the time he had expended upon it.
Here Sayre, catching a gleam from Charley’s eye across the room, stifled a giggle.
Conditions were worse this season than ever, Mr. Parsons was going on. Yet the Government was reminding them that another of the forty annual installment payments for the irrigation works was due. More than that, the Government was rubbing in the fact that most of the farmers were already heavily in debt for past unpaid installments.
“That very Government enticed us here, falsely, declaring that the desert would blossom like the rose. Instead, in many places irrigation has made it more worthless than ever with alkali. Now it coolly says that these lands must be drained. It proposes to inflict its drainage systems upon us, and add their cost to our already overburdened, unproductive acres.
“I tell you, the hand that lured us hither has turned against us in our dire adversity. The Government that has coaxed us here must be made to see our plight. It must not only lift the hard hand of oppression from us. It must right our wrongs!” The flowery little orator wiped his perspiring brow with a lavender-tinted handkerchief and plopped himself down.
Sayre had been listening, spellbound. Could this excitable public haranguer really be the shabby basement floorwalker whom she had so often seen in Chicago, shifting his weary feet as he swayed and swung homeward at night, hanging to a strap in a jammed and jolting West Van Buren street car? The mere pleasure of the change must nearly make up for his eighty!
Mr. Hoskins’ erect, angular figure arose and stood waiting in gracious impressiveness. The relaxing buzz of the room settled once more into obedient silence. The man began to talk, suavely, sympathetically, in his high nervous voice. In his opinion the Government could not fairly be censured. That it meant to be considerate and just, it had shown often in the past. Here the speaker enumerated in detail the times when Government payments for water and construction of the irrigation works had either been remitted or postponed.
Each time, Mr. Hoskins went on, the Government’s action had been taken after the settlers themselves had laid before the Department of the Interior at Washington the actual facts of the situation. Consequently he recommended that all the water users of that part of the Pawaukee Irrigation Project of which Upham was the center, acting together as a unit, once more petition the Government for consideration of postponement, in the hope that another growing season would bring some brighter promise to the discouraged, disillusioned, hard-working dwellers on a federal reclamation project from which so many of their fellow settlers had already departed, leaving behind them disconsolate marks of wasted capital and wasted years.
“I might add another suggestion,” the speaker concluded, “which I hope the meeting will understand in the spirit in which it is offered. If it seems to you that such a request would meet more favorable response if carried to Washington by a personal commissioner, I should be glad to act as your commissioner at my own expense.”
Mr. Hoskins had warmed to his task in a way that had brought an emotional quality into his voice. Sayre found herself responding to the man in spite of herself.
“Yess, Meester Speaker, and den vat?” The interrupting voice, level to dullness in intonation, nevertheless electrified the room. “Us fellows vat pay all de time vant to know dat. More debts, huh? And den more debts? Vere do de cry babies come out in de end? Dis year dey don’t pay. And last year dey don’t pay. Next year, too, maybe dey don’t pay if dey howl loud enough. By and by de Gover’ment get pretty tired vid all dis howling. Den he pay all de bills yust like a good, tired, kind papa. Den ve all own our farms. De man dat don’t pay nutting own his farm yust like us who pay all de time. Square, ain’t it? Easy den to collect mortgages,” the monotonous voice broke suddenly into a clearly audible chuckle, “or to foreclose ’em on land vat ain’t got no udder debts.”
“Speech, Hansen! Speech,” broke from a half dozen places.
While Mr. Hoskins, flushed and glaring continued to stand as if seeking with dignity an opening to regain the room’s attention, the big, stoop-shouldered form of Nels Hansen pulled itself slowly to its feet. His long arms hung forwar
d, one huge hand resting on a neighboring school desk. Under his sun-faded tow hair his bright blue eyes twinkled out of the expanse of weather-worn stolidity which was his face.
“Naw, I ain’t no speaker. I’m yust a farmer on a darn poor farm. But by vorking early and vorking late and vorking hard all de time, I ain’t got no back debts on dat farm.
“In de old country I vork hard on a darn poor farm vat belongs to anudder man. In America de darn poor farm I vork on belongs to me. And ven I’m dead and my kids get to vorking it, it ain’t going to be such a darn poor farm. And if it ain’t, and if I don’t owe de Gover’ment nutting, it’s some because dere’s a young man ve’ve got here dat us old folks don’t know vell enough. He don’t talk much. He yust teach. First, his high school kids. Den dis year a part-time agriculture class for big farm kids, and von girl.” (Here for an uncomfortable instant Sayre found herself the swift target of many eyes.) “And a class, too, for some old hayseed farmers like me in de evening. I ask de Ag teacher to make my speech for me.”
“Yah. Yah!” The sound was a prolonged guttural murmur proceeding from the group of foreigners close around Nels Hansen. Among them Sayre had recognized not only several of her winter classmates, but even a number of the men from the clannish German-Russian settlement whom she had never before known to appear at a public community affair.
Sayre saw Mr. Hoskins waver. For all his self-importance he was a good politician. Nodding toward the presiding officer he seated himself with gracious condescension as if to hide his vexation.
The Ag teacher rose not quite to erectness against his folding seat. “I’m not eligible to speak,” he said with a smile of boyish modesty. “I’m neither a water renter nor a landholder. But I’d like to pass the buck, as the style seems to have become at this meeting.
“There’s a man here whom I know you all want to hear. He’s Mr. Wallace S. Hexall, an irrigation engineer, who used to be a professor in the Engineering Department of the Colorado Agricultural College. He has just returned from Washington, D. C. The Department of the Interior called him there to take part in a conference held to discuss the many serious problems of the Federal irrigation reclamation projects, and to suggest action on the report of the Committee that has been investigating these problems. He must have many things to tell us which are of vital interest to us all.”
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 108