The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack

by Emily Cheney Neville

  The response of the audience was an immediate and obvious eagerness. The chairman called upon the stranger who had entered the room with Charley Morgan.

  He was a large man of that comfortable heaviness of advancing years which implies a vigorous maturity. Uncompromisingly straightforward in manner, he spoke with the simple, unassuming directness of one who is used to the command and respect of men. His words created from the beginning an unquestioning conviction.

  He began by showing how thoroughly and sympathetically he understood many of the unfortunate settlers’ troubles and problems. He went on to say that in spite of much discouragement and genuine distress there was also much successful farming being done on all but a few sections of the Government’s reclamation ventures. He spoke of their own Pawaukee, amazing his hearers with his accurate statistical knowledge of yields, products, expenditures, and all other economic details.

  He told of the meeting from which he had just come. Its results had been new Government rulings which would be made public without delay.

  “All of these new rulings are aimed directly at the three main causes of failures on Government irrigation, or reclamation, projects.

  “One of these causes is that some of the land is not fit for cultivation under any circumstances. Some of the rest of it needs to be drained before it can be made fit. Not all of the good land is equally good; yet all has equal charges against it. The new rulings change all this. Some of the settlers will be transferred to other claims with full credit for what they have tried to accomplish. Some of the land will be drained. It will all be revalued. It is only just that the man who acquires possession of the superior land should pay a larger share of construction costs than the man who gets the poor land.”

  (“What’ll they do with Mr. Parsons’ land?” Sayre wondered.)

  “But land cannot be blamed for everything,” the speaker was continuing. “A lot of the fault lies with the settlers themselves, the kind of men whom the Government has, until recently, allowed to take up claims. Farming,” the man spoke emphatically, “is a profession. Imagine a lawyer or a physician attempting to practise without aptitude or training. What kind of job would he do? A mighty poor one, so poor that it’s dangerous to the community. Yet that is just what has been happening in the farming profession on these irrigation projects.

  “The great majority of the original homesteaders have been inexperienced, untrained men without capital, who have been so unsuccessful in other fields they have turned to farming only as a last hope. To let them settle is not fair to them or to the whole enterprise. As during the last few months, so in the future, men of that stamp will not—”

  Sayre’s gaze had fastened upon her lap; color rushed under the tan of her skin. “Sam Parsons—and—and,” her thought added, miserably, “Dad.”

  “From now on would-be settlers—”

  Again Sayre sat bolt upright, gaze intent. She must not miss one word of this. Her lips parted; she listened so hard that each word of the speaker’s two succeeding sentences stamped itself on her brain with indelible accuracy.

  “Any person to homestead a claim on a federal irrigation project must have had at least two years of successful farm experience, preferably in an irrigated section; and—

  “He must possess a minimum capital of twenty-five hundred dollars in money, equipment, or stock.”

  Sayre longed for time to think. She could not take it. The speaker was going on to his third point.

  “The third cause,” he spoke deliberately, “is—dishonest men.”

  Sayre heard and could not believe her ears.

  The stranger had paused. “The third cause,” he repeated, speaking with even greater distinctness and emphasis than before, “is—dishonest men.

  “These dishonest men are working to get into their clutches big areas of the best of these new lands. Their method is largely that of mortgages, loans, and easy credit. They play their heartless game under the guise of sympathy and friendliness for the poverty-stricken settlers, showing pretended leniency over interest and renewal of notes. Often, too, they go further, fostering action which a little intelligent investigation of the right sources of information would show to be utterly inadvisable. Such men, I scarcely need to say, are frequently to be found in the front ranks of those settlers most loud-voiced in their protestations of inability to meet Government payments.”

  Sayre gasped. Was this man talking merely from general knowledge? Was he, or was he not, looking directly at Mr. Hoskins? Sayre tried so hard to see that she nearly fell out of her seat. In regaining it she half-turned to meet behind her Frank Hoskins’ angry, brooding glance, studying not the speaker but her own obvious excitement. For a moment she was so confused that she lost track of what the speaker was saying. Then once more she was all attention.

  “The Government will no longer consider the postponement of repayment of construction costs where such a request comes from a project or any portion of a project as a whole. All investigators of project troubles feel that the men who can pay must pay. For you settlers on this part of the Pawaukee Project to send to Washington a wholesale request for renewed postponement, or to dispatch a commissioner on any such errand, would, I assure you, be a waste of time, energy and money.

  “At the same time, Uncle Sam is just, even fatherly. He knows only too well that many earnest, hard-working, honest men among you really need extension. If you do, put in your individual claim to him, stating your own personal case and no other. Individual requests he will be glad to consider, weigh, and, where right, grant. Collective requests he will no longer receive.”

  In a room stunned to temporary silence the man sat down. The meeting came to an abrupt adjournment, followed by a buzzing, lingering dispersal.

  Sayre sought out Charley as quickly as she could, and together they were caught in the crowd near the door in company with a number of their school friends. “I lost seven more birds, Chuck,” Sayre was saying. “All from the two-pound fries I was going to send with Mr. Hansen’s lot to Cody, to get the good prices from the camping tourists going into Yellowstone Park. They disappeared just the way those baby chicks and poults did last month.”

  “Moonlight again? Any tracks this time?”

  Sayre shook her head. “Not a track. Nor a blood mark. Nor a feather. Mr. Hansen thinks it couldn’t have been a coyote or a badger. I do wish my yards weren’t so far from the house.”

  “Next late full moon—”

  The sudden appearance of Frank Hoskins close at Sayre’s side checked Charley’s words. The press of the outgoing throng, separating Frank from Rene, had thrust him deep into the group. There it held him, plainly a most rebellious and uncomfortable prisoner. So closely packed were they all for a moment that no one could move.

  “Just discussing Sayre’s poultry, Frank.” Good-natured Charley sought to ease the situation. “How’re your birds coming?”

  Frank flushed a deep red. “None o’ your darn business,” he muttered. Thrusting his heavy face down close to Charley’s he added through his teeth in a voice so low that only Sayre could fully overhear, “I’ll get even with you yet, Charles Morgan, you immigrants’ and school-teacher’s star pupil and right-hand man! More’n even. I’ll finish you. If ever you banked on anything in your whole snaky life, you can bank on that!”

  “What for?” The retort came from Sayre, wedged close to Frank’s elbow.

  Frank’s menacing eyes traveled straight to hers. “And with you, too, Sayre Morgan! Anyone who knows you knows you couldn’t keep your finger out of any Charley Morgan mess.” Then by sheer force of his strength he pushed his way rudely through the crowd.

  “Charley,” Sayre murmured in astonishment, “he actually thinks you brought that man here tonight on purpose.”

  “He’s too upset to know what he does think. You’d be too, if your dad had just got in public what his has.”

  “But,” Sayre persisted, “you didn’t, did you? Only, where did you get him? That man, I me
an.”

  “At our house, Mr. Cowan’s, where he’s visiting. I brought him here because my sick boss couldn’t.”

  “On purpose?”

  Charley laughed. “Don’t people usually make visits on purpose?” he evaded.

  Sayre was too light-hearted to worry. That meeting had given her back her dream. More than that, it had brought to the dream some definiteness of shape. The whole background of her mind was filled with the consciousness of this as a little later she climbed into the empty ‘Shake.

  That definiteness of shape would make her dream easy now to hold to firmly. Before, it had been so discouragingly vague. Visions of what that dream’s fulfilment would mean began floating all about her:

  Dad, free from worry as she had never known him to be, contented at last in conditions that promised a future for his children;

  Hitty, growing up a popular, educated young woman, a member of an established, respected family in a good home community;

  Charley, holding steadily to a really definite chance, and learning how to exercise in that chance the leadership that was so natural to him;

  She, Sayre, happy in work she loved;

  All the Morgans somebody at last, with a real home of their own!

  Could anyone live and work for a better dream? She was glad she had never told it. She could not bear that anyone should ridicule it, or try to shake her faith in it. Not until she had proved it to be something more than a mere dream would she breathe a hint of it to a living soul.

  Suddenly she realized that Sam Parsons and Dad and Hitty were settling themselves in the ‘Shake’s back seat. She shook herself out of her visions to concentrate on guiding the car skillfully out from among the other cars buzzing thick about the high school grounds.

  7

  Queer Fish

  The Sam Parsons whom Sayre drove home from the water users’ meeting on the back seat of the ‘Shake was no longer the flowery orator of the early evening. He was a dejected little man who babbled querulous confidences to Mr. Morgan.

  “Most of my land will be in the temporarily withdrawn, I suppose; it’ll have to be drained. And hay alone’ll never pay for the good acres. Besides, I’ve other debts. Getting full title’s a long way off. Years. And I’m no natural farmer.

  “After I’ve trusted so in Mr. Hoskins, too! He’s assured me again and again—in strict confidence, you understand; but you’re my friend, Morgan—that if we held out long enough, presenting our case year after year, in the end the Government would never make us pay the construction charges. Just give us title to the water and the works if we had proved up on the land itself. But now—”

  “There are individual petitions, as that man said.”

  The discouraged little floorwalker heaved a prodigious sigh. “Not for me. I don’t dare, Morgan. They’d investigate me, my living up to the homestead laws, I mean. Didn’t that land agent stop me on the street down town the other day to warn me on the sly? I saw what he was driving at. Asking me where my wife was this summer. (She hates the place.) And what my children were doing. You’ve got to make a place the home of your family to homestead it. That agent was letting me know he was on to me.”

  Mr. Morgan made no reply; there really was nothing to say.

  “It was all Hoskins’ idea, Morgan, the way I treated you, got you out here. I never really told you you could get possession of my land. But I knew you understood things that way. I meant you to. I hadn’t a cent. I had to do something to tide over. And my wife just would not stay here any more. So Hoskins suggested.… I see it all now. He was only trying to keep a sure hold on what I owed him—maybe meant in the end to get possession of my alfalfa land if I could succeed first in proving up. The mills of the gods, you know. It wasn’t all accident that your boy brought that man to the meeting tonight.

  “After all Hoskins’ careful plans, too. The way he sent word to me to get out here early this spring. And working up that speech for me tonight—”

  “All that man told us tonight would have come out soon anyway,” Mr. Morgan interrupted.

  “But not by showing Hoskins up like that right before the people he’s had dealings with.” The querulous voice was as plaintive with self-pity as before, but more decisive. “Morgan, I’m through. I’m going back to my Chicago job tomorrow. My substitute’s not giving satisfaction. I can’t afford to stay away.

  “Now, that alfalfa of mine that Hoskins has got a hold of, if you’ll turn it over to him till he’s paid, you can stay on my place, do anything you want with it, as long as the law will let you. That’ll probably be quite a while. Till the new drainage system’s done, anyway.

  “I never want to see the place again. As a homesteader on a federal reclamation project I’m through. I’ve sunk every cent I could scrape together in that wretched place. I’ve never really got one cent back. I’m not a young man any more. Just the same I’m through, good and through.”

  This time Sam Parsons was as good as his word. After a day spent on winding up his affairs, as he put it, he traveled out of Upham on the evening train.

  Sayre saw him go with relief. One fewer to feed. More time now to put on her projects, especially on her turkeys, her “just source of pride,” as Mr. Kitchell was publicly pronouncing them to be.

  Such was the effect of the water users’ meeting on the Morgans’ “visitor.” Its effect on Mr. Hoskins himself was an even greater surprise to Sayre.

  She had expected to find her father’s employer a subdued and guilty man when next she saw him. Instead, he was moving among the groups of farmers in his store more obligingly gracious and important than ever. His eager, animated manner implied how magnanimously he was ignoring the gossip buzzing all over the community, of whose stings he surely could not be unaware.

  “Who ever would have thought that after all its years of empty talk the Government would suddenly become so particular? I’d be very glad to help any hard-pressed farmer get his individual petition for postponement of payment into proper shape. It’s certainly what I am having to do for myself,” Sayre overheard him say more than once, the last time adding:

  “Pardon me just a moment. There’s my boy, Frank, bringing some of his school project poultry into our meat department.” The tall man’s nervous step loped toward the back of the store.

  Sayre followed. She was interested in market poultry.

  High-pitched words reached her from behind the swinging door through which Mr. Hoskins disappeared. “Take them? I’ve got to take them. Who else would—scrawny, yellow things? Think Hansen would let those measure up to required standards for his holiday carloads he’s talking up around here so hard lately? He’d like nothing better than to turn down my son. Yet he’ll call that Morgan girl’s ‘fancies.’ Kitchell’s even got the nerve to say some of her birds aren’t market stuff at all, but show and breeding stock. How do you think that makes me feel? My boy being beaten by a chit of a nobody of a GIRL!”

  Sayre caught no spoken answer; she could picture the sulkiness of Frank’s silence and for the first time sympathized with it. She voiced her indignation to Dad that night.

  “Mr. Hoskins loses his self-control frequently lately,” her father responded. “The man’s under more strain than he acknowledges, I’m afraid. Frank irritates him most. It used to be the boy’s five new acres of alfalfa. Now it’s everything, his peas and his poultry. Nothing’s right. His father snaps at the boy right before everybody, too. Throws you and Charley up to him continually. I feel sorry for the lad. Such treatment’s humiliating. It whets the boy’s jealousy, too. It’s really dangerous.”

  “It isn’t fair, either,” Sayre retorted. “Frank has neglected his five new alfalfa acres. But not his peas nor his poultry. His birds are good. And he doesn’t lose some of them on a moonlight night out of every month the way I do.”

  Charley and Sayre had made plans for a closer watching of Sayre’s flocks at the time when the moon would again be full during late, sleeping hours. Thus it happened that one
night in early September Sayre, warmly dressed and aglow with the spirit of adventure, awaited her brother’s coming at the foot of the back step. When Charley appeared, it was cautiously, on foot, as she had known he would come. No noise of a car must approach near enough to rouse Dad and Hitty, or to serve as warning to possibly lurking thieves. Sayre handed the boy the old-fashioned shotgun she carried, and together, hugging the dark spots as best they could, they tip-toed out through bare, outlying yards to that part of the alfalfa field nearest Sayre’s poultry quarters. There in the shadow of the new alfalfa stack they took up their vigil.

  The silver lure of the moonlight lay over the land, its mounting, seductive brilliance reducing to ever more and more meager proportions the dark, sharply outlined shadows of settlers’ fences, sheds and habitations. Closer and closer into the densest strip cast by the alfalfa stack, Sayre and Charley half squatted, half leaned, until their cramped bodies ached with prolonged inactivity.

  All about them brooded the listening silence of the night. Brother and sister could hear every rise and fall of each other’s breathing. Every crackle of dry leaf or stem as their bodies pressed against the stack. Every ripple of water in the nearest irrigating ditch. Every movement of sleeping birds in Sayre’s adjacent turkey and chicken houses and yards.

  Fall nights are cold on that high, dry tableland. Charley heard Sayre’s teeth chatter. He lowered his mouth cautiously to her ear. “You’d better go in, Sayre.”

  “Not much.”

  “Whatever’s been doing the stealing, it’s evidently on to our watching to—”

  Sayre’s quick hand against Charley’s mouth smothered his words. There had come a new sound, a slow, stealthy movement of the water, entirely without the rhythmic melody of a natural ripple. It continued for a while, though, just as persistently. Suddenly it stopped. A faint crackling followed, like the cautious parting of brush and the snapping of small twigs. Then, a hovering sensation of forward motion which, though unmistakable, was scarcely sound at all.