A YOUNG FARMER'S UPWARD STRUGGLE

BY BURBANK L. TODD

AUTHOR OF "HIRAM THE YOUNG FARMER."

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY

Copyright, 1920, By GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

BACK TO THE SOIL SERIES

By BURBANK L. TODD

12mo. Cloth. Illustrated.

HIRAM THE YOUNG FARMER Or, Making the Soil Pay

HIRAM IN THE MIDDLE WEST Or, A Young Fanner's Upward Struggle

(Other Volumes in Preparation)

George Sully & Company, New York

CHAPTER I

THE MAN WHO WAS AFRAID OF RATS

For an hour before the accommodation train stopped at Pringleton the rain had etched zigzag lines upon the windowpane beside Hiram Strong's seat; so to find the platform aglitter with puddles in the dull lamp light and the water dripping drearily from the station eaves did not surprise him. What was rather astonishing was to find Pringleton such a very lonely place.

As far as he could see, when he had walked around the bungalow-built station the light in the stationmaster's ticket office was the only light visible save the switch-targets and the disappearing green lamps on the end of the train. Hiram, with his heavy bag, was the only passenger who had got off the evening train.

When he came around to the front of the station again he saw the stationmaster humped over his desk in the bay window, with a pen stuck over his ear, looking for all the world like a secretary bird. He peered out of the window at Hiram curiously, and finally pushed up the sash.

"I don't know whether you know it or not, young fellow," the stationmaster said, "but the company charges mileage if you use this platform for a walking track. And you'll make trouble for me if you keep going around, for I never have found out how many laps make a mile, and I sha'n't know what to charge you."

Hiram Strong smiled his approval of this brand of humor, yet his question put in reply was quite serious:

"Have you seen anybody around here, sir, from a place called Sunnyside Farm?"

"There isn't anybody at Sunnyside Farm, as far as I know," said the stationmaster; "and there hasn't been since the house burned down last year."

"Yes, I know," Hiram said quickly. "But I rather expected Mr. Bronson would have somebody over here to meet me."

"Mr. Stephen Bronson?" asked the man. "Him that's just bought the Sunnyside place?"

"Yes. It's quite a walk to the farm, isn't it?"

"It is the longest two miles you ever walked, son," declared the stationmaster. "Were you thinking to walk it to-night?"

"As there is nobody here to meet me, I guess I'll have to," replied the youth cheerfully. "Which way do I head? You'll have to start me right, or else I may wear out your platform walking around and around on it all night."

The stationmaster chuckled. "Well, young fellow," he observed, "it is evidently to my advantage to put you on your way. Turn around, pick up your bag, go right down those steps to the road and walk straight ahead. You are now facing west. When you get into the road you will find it not so dark as it seems."

"Dark enough, I guess," muttered Hiram.

"You can't miss the road even on a dark night, for there is no fork in it till after you pass Sunnyside."

"But," asked the youth, "is there anybody up that way who will lodge me for the night, as the Sunnyside house is burned?"

"You may get taken in at Miss Delia Pringle's, just beyond Sunnyside—first house after you pass the ruins of the burned farmhouse. This station is named after her folks. Don't make the mistake of going to the first house this side of Sunnyside."

He said this last so curiously that Hiram asked him: "Why not?"

"Because that is Yancey Battick's place. He'll likely blow a charge of rock salt into you from his shotgun and then ask what you want afterward."

"Why, what's his idea?" asked Hiram much amazed.

"Says he's afraid of rats—that's all," declared the stationmaster, and immediately slammed down the window to shut out the searching February wind.

The youth hesitated for only a moment longer. He rather thought the stationmaster of Pringleton was quite as odd as the man he called Yancey Battick, who met all visitors with a salt-loaded shotgun and was afraid of rats.

"And this isn't really a night fit for a rat to be out," Hiram muttered, after he had walked for some time along the muddy road leading west from the station.

Occasionally while he was still near the railroad he passed a dwelling; but it was just about supper time, and nearly all the lights were at the backs of the houses. Hardly a ray of cheerful lamp light reached the road.

The houses were situated farther apart as he continued his march. The fine rain was penetrating in the extreme. Hiram desired shelter more than he ever had before, it seemed to him.

And just when it appeared as though nothing about his situation could be worse, the heavens opened. It had been doing this, off and on, all day. But this water fall seemed heavier than any of those that had preceded it.

Hiram Strong saw a light ahead and a little to one side of the road. It was not a very bright light (perhaps it was drowned by the curtain of falling rain) but it must be in a house, he thought. At a time like this, it was any port in a storm.

He set out at a heavy run toward the light. He found a sagging gate in a decrepit fence. Plunging up a muddy path, he reached a tiny porch which might have offered some shelter had not the roof leaked like a sieve.

"Hard luck!" muttered the youth. "If they won't let me in—"

His feet pounding on the rickety steps and the thump of his heavy bag on the porch aroused somebody within. Hiram heard a firm step at the other side of the door.

Suddenly the door opened with an abruptness which was startling. The door opened on a chain, and through the aperture of about eight inches was thrust the brown muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun that, at the moment, looked as big as a cannon to the youth. He stepped back promptly, and a cascade off the roof of the porch went down the back of his neck.

"What are you after?" demanded a harsh voice.

Above the slanted gun-barrel appeared a ferocious black moustache which completely hid the wearer's mouth, a beak-like nose, and a pair of blue eyes that glittered half wildly. Altogether the householder was of most forbidding aspect, and the youth at once identified him as Yancey Battick. He had evidently stopped at the wrong house after all!

"I want nothing, Mr. Battick, but shelter till the rain holds up," Hiram answered.

"Who told you my name?" demanded the man. "I never saw you before, young fellow."

"I guessed it," Hiram replied. "I'm a pretty good Yankee at guessing."

"And you are a Yankee, I imagine," the man said. "You're from the East, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir," replied Hiram, and mentioned the locality from which he had just come in answer to Mr. Stephen Bronson's summons.

The man still presented the gun, and although Hiram had stepped from under the cascade pouring down from the roof, he was anything but comfortable out there on the porch.

"Where are you going?" asked Battick, scowling still.

"To Sunnyside Farm."

"Why, there's nobody there! The house is burned down."

"I expect to work that place this year for Mr. Stephen Bronson. I want to find a place to lodge near the farm, and I was told to apply to—Miss Pringle, I believe the name is."

"What!" gasped the man. "A young fellow like you? Who sent you unwarned into the clutches of that old maid?"

"Why—is she so bad?" Hiram asked.

"There isn't any male too young nor yet too old to be out of danger of that old maid. Come on in," added Mr. Battick, unchaining the door. "I wouldn't let any male creature get into that woman's clutches."

Hiram stepped rather doubtfully into the house. Mr. Yancey Battick certainly was a very odd person. He had been warned that the man with the welcoming shotgun was afraid of rats; it appeared that he was likewise much afraid of spinsters.

CHAPTER II

A KERNEL OF WHEAT

"Hold on!" said Yancey Battick, halting Hiram just after he was inside the house and the door was closed. "Who sent you here?"

He seemed a very suspicious man. His blue eyes searched the open countenance of the boy from the East, and his expression, with bristling moustache and all, was fierce indeed.

"I tell you I was not sent here at all," Hiram explained rather wearily. "In fact, I was advised strongly against knocking at your door."

"Who advised you?" demanded Battick quickly.

"The stationmaster."

"That old thimblerigger, Jason Oakley? Huh! Are you a friend of his?"

It was evident that Mr. Battick was not on friendly terms with many of his neighbors. Hiram Strong did not lack common sense. He proposed to say nothing to cause the householder to turn him out into the downpour, which was now very severe.

"I am just as much a friend of his, Mr. Battick, as I am of yours," the youth said.

"Humph! Well! And I suppose Jason told you to try at Delia Pringle's?"

"He did."

"Humph!" Battick said again, and finally set the gun in a rack near the chimney corner.

At last Hiram Strong felt as though he could look about the room. Heretofore his attention had been given to that gun. The door by which he had entered opened directly from the porch; there was no entry-way. The room seemed to be the entire width of the cottage with a wide fireplace facing the door, and evidently there was another room behind the chimney—perhaps two.

This living room was sufficiently interesting—not to say surprising—to the visitor to hold his full attention for the time being. The two ends of the room, at the right and left of the doorway, first gained Hiram Strong's interest. At the right the wall was completely masked from floor to ceiling by bookshelves, and those shelves were filled with books, the nature of which he could not so easily learn, for the hanging lamp did not thoroughly illuminate the apartment.

At the other end was a bench upon which were retorts, a mortar-and-pestle, an alcohol forge, and other implements and instruments which suggested chemical—and other—experiments. There were, too, racks of seed-boxes for testing. Hiram was thoroughly familiar with these shallow trays.

But in the middle of the room was the object that most excited Hiram's interest. This was a high table—or so it seemed—its shape something like that of a coffin. At least, it was as long as a full length casket, about as wide, and was side-boarded like no table Hiram had ever seen before. But there was a tarpaulin spread over it. The four legs were of round, barked, straight logs four inches in diameter.

After setting the gun in the rack Battick turned toward his visitor and, though not very graciously, invited him to be seated, pointing to a rustic armchair at the side of the hearth farthest from the gun-rack.

"And take off your coat, stranger. What did you say your name was?"

"It is Hiram Strong."

"What did you say about working Sunnyside for Mr. Bronson?" continued the host. "I guess you mean you're going to chore around for him?"

"I hope to run the farm for Mr. Bronson."

"A boy like you?"

"I'll never be any younger," Hiram laughed, for he was rather used to having people cast reflections upon his age. He had had, however, much greater experience in practical farming than many men on farms who were twice his age.

"What do you know about farming?" asked Battick abruptly. "What experience have you had, Mr. Strong?"

Hiram smiled slowly. He was by no means a handsome boy, but he was wholesome looking and his smile was disarming. Even the scowling visage of Yancey Battick began to smooth out as he watched his visitor. But it was plain to be seen that the man was a misanthrope.

"You see," Hiram began, "my father was a very good farmer indeed, although he farmed for other men all his life. He read a great deal and studied farming methods, and I worked right along with him until I was fourteen. What he learned—at least, a good deal of it—I learned, too."

"Humph!" sniffed Battick, "a boy of that immature age?"

"Father made a friend of me. We were like brothers—chums," Hiram Strong continued. "Somehow, he was an easy man to learn from—he was patient."

"I see," muttered Battick. "Well, I take it your father died?"

"Yes, sir. I had got it into my head that I did not want to be a tenant farmer, as he was all his life, and there was no money left. So I went to town thinking there would be more and better chances for a boy."

"Humph! You were starting out young."

"I didn't have any folks," explained Hiram. "I got a job that barely paid my board and lodging. And I soon got sick of it."

"Of the job or the city?" asked Battick, the ghost of a smile passing over his face as he listened to his involuntary guest and stared into the leaping flames on the hearth.

"Of both," replied Hiram promptly. "The city is no place for a fellow who loves the country as I found I did. Mother Atterson, with whom I boarded, had eighty acres left her near the town of Scoville, and she and I made a dicker. I farmed it for her for two years, and when our contract ended at Christmas last, I had fixed things so that she could run it on a paying basis with the help of a friend of mine, Henry Pollock, and by the aid of Sister, whom Mother Atterson has adopted, and Lem Camp, who lives with them.

"Mr. Stephen Bronson bought a place near Scoville—"

"He's always buying farms," grumbled Battick. "Got more money than brains."

"I wouldn't say that," Hiram emphasized in disagreement. "I do not believe that Mr. Bronson ever invests in a farm without getting a good return for his outlay. He did on the old Fleigler place there in Scoville. And he only bought that place to live there for a part of each year while his daughter, Lettie, is going to school at St. Beris."

"Yes. I've heard he has a daughter that just about leads him around by the nose," sniffed Battick.

Hiram Strong laughed.

"She's a girl that most any man would be willing to be led around by, by the nose or otherwise," he said. "Lettie Bronson is a mighty pretty girl. Anyhow, her father liked my work on the Atterson Eighty; so he has made me this offer to come out here to the Middle West and farm Sunnyside for a couple of years."

In this brief way Hiram Strong had related the more important occurrences narrated in the first volume of this series, entitled "Hiram the Young Farmer; Or, Making the Soil Pay." His modest statement that "Mr. Bronson had liked my work on the Atterson Eighty" scarcely described the farm owner's enthusiasm, however, or explained why Mr. Bronson had sent for so young a fellow to run his new purchase here at Pringleton near the Ohio River.

The rain continued to slap against the old clapboards of the house and the limbs of the huge buttonwood tree Hiram had seen in the front yard creaked loudly. A long and hard storm threatened, and the outlook for pushing on to Miss Pringle's was not a happy one. The woman would be in bed before Hiram reached her place.

As Mr. Battick seemed to have fallen into a brown study and asked no further questions, Hiram felt free to examine the furniture of the living room again. The table—if it was a table—was an odd thing. The young man did not know what to make of it.

The piece of tarpaulin that covered it was sunk in along the top, and he came to the conclusion that there was no real top to the table. Then, in leaning back in his low chair near the fire, he saw that the long frame was bottomed with heavy planks. It was a box on four legs rather than a table.

Mr. Battick spoke again, in his usual abrupt fashion:

"Have you had your supper yet, young fellow?"

The tone could not be called cordial.

"I had something to eat on the train," replied Hiram indifferently.

"On that old accommodation?" sniffed Battick. "Case-hardened sandwiches, I bet."

Hiram laughed, but admitted the fact.

"I know what it is to ride on that train," the man said. "In spite of what Jase Oakley told you about me, I wouldn't see a man starve—not right here in my own house," added this queer individual, though still gruffly.

"Oh, the stationmaster did not say anything about you except that you were afraid of rats," Hiram rejoined, watching Battick slyly, for he was very curious about the man.

"That's what that old thimblerigger said about me, eh?" growled Battick. "Lucky he don't often come up this way. It might happen that I should take him for a rat."

He said it so savagely that Hiram considered it best to say nothing more to excite his strange host. Battick brought eggs and bacon and half of a corn pone from a cupboard, preparing the meal deftly at the open fire.

Suddenly Hiram's attention was caught by something on the floor just under the nearest corner of the odd table, or box, in the middle of the room. It was a tiny, cone-shaped heap of grain—wheat, he thought. It had dribbled through the bottom of that box by some tiny hole, it was plain, and had fallen unnoticed to the floor.

There was something odd about this grain—something that immediately attracted Hiram's particular interest. When Battick's back was turned he stooped sideways from his chair and secured one of the kernels of wheat between his thumb and finger. He placed it in his palm and studied it minutely.

The kernel of wheat was different from any grain he had ever seen. First of all, it was a very large, plump grain, perfectly formed, and upon one side was a tiny yet distinct red stripe.

Suddenly Hiram looked up from the grain in his hand. Battick had made a strange move. He had set the skillet down on the hearth and was reaching for the shotgun. His eyes seemed to glow and a deep flush was diffused over the man's forbidding looking countenance.

Hiram Strong was amazed and startled at his host's appearance.

"What is the matter, Mr. Battick?" cried the visitor. "What are you doing with that gun?" for the man had seized it now.

"Hush!" hissed Yancey Battick. "I think I see a rat!"

CHAPTER III

INVENTOR'S LUCK

The thought had been impressed upon Hiram Strong's mind from the very first that there was something altogether wrong with Yancey Battick. His wild eyes and excited manner now convinced the visitor that this suspicion was correct. Battick was not altogether sane. And when he reached for that rock-salt loaded shotgun the visitor prepared to defend himself.

The muzzle of the gun swung toward Hiram. The latter slid out of his chair and darted sideways just as Battick rose up with the butt of the gun at his shoulder. The muzzle seemed closely following Hiram's movements.

Then the man's finger pressed the trigger and the gun roared. It seemed that the wind of the charge passed over Hiram's head.

"What under the sun are you doing?" demanded the youth, leaping up and facing the householder.

"What did you move for?" retorted Battick. "I might have got you instead of the rat."

"The rat?" repeated Hiram in some doubt.

Battick returned the smoking shotgun to its rack and crossed the room to the workbench. Under it, deep in the shadow of the corner, he found his game—a fat, gray rat, still kicking.

"Great Scott!" murmured the boy from the East, "it really was a rat."

"What did you think I would be shooting in this old house?" growled Battick. "It's rat-ridden. They give me no peace. They have cost me more—well, no use going into that," said the man, and so concluded.

But Hiram Strong was now immensely interested in this strange individual. His fright because of Mr. Battick's reckless use of his shotgun was soon over. The rats about this ancient cottage certainly were very bold. But there must be—there was—a particular reason why the man was afraid of the rats. This fear of which Hiram had first heard from Jason Oakley, the stationmaster, was not merely some idiosyncrasy of Battick's.

"Have you tried poison for the vermin?" Hiram demanded.

"I've tried everything," replied the man gruffly.

"What makes them so bold?"