Fruits of the Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

second, he noticed the progress made in the interval.
    â€œThat there outfit,” Hall said, “lifts three yards of dirt at a bite; the ditch is forty feet wide and thirty deep; but that there monster digs it at the rate of two rods an hour. Twenty rods in a ten-hour day; that’s two miles a month. They’re speeding her up now to five miles a month, what with night work and more help. They’ve got to finish her, or they lose their deposit.”
    â€œThat so? How do you know?” Abe felt Ruth pressing against him.
    Hall, however, did not take the slightest notice of her. Again he spat. “I’ve been down. Foreman told me.”
    â€œWell,” Abe said, turning away, “I was thinking of hitching up and driving down myself to-morrow, it being Sunday.”
    â€œNo work on Sundays,” Hall said. “Stop at midnight. Wait till Monday.”
    Abe was fingering the gate. “No time on weekdays.”
    â€œYou’re in a blasted hurry. Learn better by-m-by. When do I start on that there granary of yours?”
    â€œReport on Monday. We’ll haul the lumber…Good night.”
    And once more husband and wife sat in silence within the smudge till the excitement of the trip to the road had worn off and drowsiness reconquered body and mind.

FIRST NEIGHBOURS
    A gain a year had gone by; and Abe, with the help of a huge steam-tractor rented from Anderson, the round-faced young hardware dealer in town, and operated by Bigelow, the powerful, club-footed blacksmith, had hauled out for Hall a three-roomed farm-house which he had bought from Wilson, postmaster at Morley. The price, three hundred dollars, had been figured, as Dr. Vanbruik had advised, against the wages which Abe owed Hall for work done during the year.
    It was in that spring of 1902 that Nicoll first came out to look the district over. He was renting a farm along the southern edge of Grand Pré Plains.
    â€œRenting!” he said to Abe. “You don’t know what that means. No chance to do as I think best. My landlord wants me to summer-fallow eighty acres. ‘Very well,’ I say, ‘give me a lease so that I can count on some return from my labour. Unless I know that I can crop that fallow next year, I won’t earn wages for my work.’ ‘I can hardly do that,’ he says. I may want to sell; or another tenant may offer a better rent.’ ‘Then,’ I say, ‘I’ll crop what I till or go where I can do so.’ ‘You’ve gotyour living,’ he says; ‘what more do you want?’ I always leave my land better than I found it; but it’s no use. I have to have land of my own. I have my own horses and implements, such as they are. And I’ve a little money besides. I’ve got to have land of my own.”
    â€œThe land’s here,” Abe said, irritated by the man’s hesitation, yet liking him. “It has its drawbacks, like any land. It’s subject to floods coming down from the hills. They bring weeds. But I ’m farming. Seems to me I’m getting ahead; though, of course, it’s hard to say where you stand in this game. So far I’ve been tying my money down, what little I had. But this year I’ll have a crop of a hundred and fifty acres; and it’s doing well. I came when there wasn’t even a ditch. We are getting the better of the water. I’m buying more land and proving up on the homestead. Seems to me I’m on the safe side.”
    â€œIt looks that way,” Nicoll said.
    But he did not, that year, file on the quarter section which he had picked and decided upon.
    In the summer of 1903 he returned. During the previous fall Abe had built a huge barn and added a room to the shack, financing his operations by using his last capital and borrowing at the Somerville bank–a process which he found surprisingly easy. True enough, it was a short-term loan of only fifteen hundred dollars; but, after