The Unplowed Sky (17 page)

“Thought I'd save you a trip, MacLeod. Jenkins won't be needing you.”

Garth quit writing. Hallie could see the muscles ridge like steel in the back of his neck. “How would you know that?”

“Because my crew and brand-new gasoline tractor are already threshing for him.”

As motionless as if he were paralyzed, Garth didn't speak for a moment. He closed his record book, put it in his shirt pocket, and stood up. “Pete Jenkins has always been satisfied with my work. But your bank holds the mortgage on his farm.”

Raford nodded. “I don't hold a mortgage on Jonas MacAfee, but I offered to thresh for three cents a bushel less than your price.”

“Well, that must have tickled Jonas. He's tighter than bark on a tree. You'll lose money, but I reckon you don't care.”

“Oh, I'll raise prices—after I've run you out of business.” Raford smiled. “There's one alternative: sell your outfit to me.”

Garth smiled, too. “Reckon I can still break even.”

“Can you?” Raford produced a small notepad and read off names. “Milt Jones, Stanley Ridges, George Cranston, Matt Bloodhart, Shelby Hughes. They've agreed to hire my outfit.”

Garth controlled a wince at the first name. He listened to the rest with a face hard as granite. “There's still Mike Donnelly and Harry Crutchfield. Their farms aren't mortgaged.”

“They soon will be if they turn down good business deals,” shrugged Raford.

“Jim”—Garth, turned to Wyatt—“if you're packed up, will you take your bunch ahead to Donnellys? Tell them we'll be there in time to thresh at least one set before dark.”

Raford frowned. “Sell your outfit and land to me and you can still live on the place and run your separator, have your brother on the engine. You can keep your crew. Why be a mule?”

“Must be I don't want to work for you. And I've told you before. I won't sell you my land.”

Reddening to the edges of his thick dark gray hair, Raford said, “You're threshing two farmers instead of eleven in fields ten miles apart.”

“They stuck by me. I'd thresh them if they lived at opposite ends of the county.”

“With that kind of crazy thinking, it's a wonder you've lasted as long as you have.”

“I like to live
with
as well as
on
what I do. Maybe you've got time to chat, Raford, but we've got to move along.” He strode toward the machinery.

Raford swept a stripping glance over Hallie. “If you ever get tired of sweaty threshermen and hot stoves, come and see me.”

The yellow runabout lurched in a circle, narrowly missing Luke Rogers, who was hurrying to Jim Wyatt's flivver. Meg, who had heard the exchange between Raford and her father, cupped her hands and yelled, “Blow a tire, you lousy skunk! Get stuck so deep in the sand you never can dig out!”

“Meg,” said Shaft, “your dad don't want you screechin' names like that. Anyhow, it don't help.”

“It helps me feel better!” Then Meg noticed that Luke was staring at her in amazed disapproval. She gulped and colored. “All the same,” she muttered, “Raford is a lousy skunk.”

“And an underhanded overbearing weaselly snake,” Shaft agreed. “Now let's fold up these steps. Here comes the engine!”

Brawny redheaded Mike Donnelly, tagged by two small red-haired daughters, showed Rory where he wanted his straw stack. The cookshack had the luxury of three cottonwoods for shade. “Left 'em so the colleens would have a nice place to play,” said Mike. He grinned at Jackie. “I'll hang up another old tire for you so you can all swing at the same time. Is it okay with you, Mr. Hurok, if Bridget and Kathleen stay and play for a while?”

“Sure, long as they don't get underfoot. Reckon Miz Donnelly has some extra milk and eggs?”

“All you want. And she just churned butter. We'll throw in watermelon, roasting ears, and green beans, if you'd like some.”

“Would we!” Shaft told the young farmer what was needed and Donnelly left with a caution to his girls to keep out of the way.

Jackie was older than Bridget, younger than Kathleen. In short order, Kathleen was scratching the outline of a house in the earth near one tree while Jackie and Bridget dragged up fallen limbs and pieces of old bark for the walls. There was still plenty of kindling for the engine, which would please both Rory and Baldy. Laird stretched out near the “house” as if on guard, little knowing that he was now a mighty lion like the one the girls had seen at a circus in Kansas City when they went there to visit their grandmother.

As soon as the shack was in working order, Shaft asked Hallie to make some pies while he peeled potatoes. “Guess I'll make salmon loaf for a change,” he said. “Now, if Miz Donnelly brings them good fresh vegetables, we'll be all set.”

Mary Donnelly brought all her husband had promised and a basket of red tomatoes, ripe to bursting, and another of green onions. “There's not much lettuce,” she apologized. “But if you wilt it with bacon grease and vinegar and serve it with scrambled eggs, there should be a bite for everyone.”

“Wilted lettuce!” Shaft heaved a happy sigh. “My absolute top-notch all-time favorite! Though roastin' ears are a close second. Good gracious, Miz Donnelly! You can't give us all this stuff for free!”

“It'd go to the hogs otherwise. I've canned enough corn and beans to last us three years.” Mary Donnelly was perhaps five or six years older than Hallie, pleasingly rounded, a dusting of freckles across her tilted nose. Her hair, more richly gold than red, was pinned up in a knot with many escaped ringlets. Her clear gray eyes met Hallie's. “Anyway, Mr. Hurok, we owe Garth MacLeod a lot. When the hail ruined our wheat three years ago, we got in debt so deep we thought we'd lose the place, but Garth loaned us seed wheat, and for two years he and Rory just charged us pitchers' wages—two dollars a day—instead of what the six dollars engineers and separator men get.”

“Garth sure appreciates your staying with him,” Shaft said.

Her eyes flashed. “You can't blame the ones with mortgages at Mr. Raford's bank. But I'm plumb ashamed of Jonas MacAfee, who's got more money than he'll ever use, and Matt Bloodhart and Shelby Hughes. They know Garth charges a fair price. What did he do to Raford, anyway?”

“He wouldn't thresh him first.”

Mary Donnelly gasped. “So Garth loses by playing fair—by protecting the turns of that ungrateful bunch! Serve them right if Garth
had
threshed Raford first and they got rained or hailed out!” She brooded. “Would it do any good if Mike went to talk to them? I'll bet Raford never said how come he was going into business.”

“Like you said, the ones with a mortgage at the Hollister bank are in no spot to argue. The ones who switched for three cents a bushel would say Garth's a fool and deserves to lose his outfit.”

“Will he?” The pretty young woman looked so distressed that Shaft forced cheer into his voice.

“The farther we get from Hollister, the less likely Raford's bank is to hold mortgages. If Raford does try to cut in on Garth's northern loop, I'd bet most of the folks will stick with the man they know has always done a good job and treated them square. 'Course, farmers are scared of rain and hail. If Raford's gang beat us to a farm and the weather looked bad, no one could blame that farmer much if he told Raford's crew to start threshin'.”

“It's not right!”

“No, but your heart's right, Miz Donnelly. That'll mean a lot to Garth. And we'll sure enjoy the melon and roastin' ears and all.”

The feast did raise the men's spirits in spite of the threat of clearing considerably less money than they'd hoped for. Ears of tender, juicy, golden corn dripping with fresh butter, crunchy green beans flavored with dill, sliced tomatoes on a platter with green onions. Cooled in a tub of water, the crisp red melon hunks seemed to evaporate. No sliver of Hallie's pie ever escaped, but Laird and Smoky got dabs of mashed potatoes and salmon loaf that night, the first time Hallie had seen leftovers.

Usually the men made for bed soon after supper; but instead of threshing ten hours today, they'd worked about six, and so they lingered. Perhaps, too, they unconsciously wanted to find out more about the two new hands, Lefty Halstead and Luke Rogers. While pitching grain into the feeder, a man had to shout to be heard. Conversation had to wait till appetites were sated at mealtime, and by then it was generally time to go back to work or hunt the coolest place to sleep.

“If I can get enough roastin' ears and butter, you're purely welcome to everything else—exceptin' Miss Hallie's pies, of course,” Rusty said. “Remember ‘meatless days' durin' the war? I was in the army, so it didn't bother me—all the grub was bad.”

“Whooee, wasn't that a mess!” Shaft caressed Smoky, who had just draped herself from shoulder to shoulder. “Hoover was in charge of food in 1918, and he got the bright idea of two wheatless days a week, two porkless, and one meatless. On top of that, there was one wheatless and one meatless meal each day. And then the dratted influenza busted out!”

“Wheatless, meatless!” Rory whooped. “It sounds like a crazy song!”

“Yes, and then Congress gave us Daylight Saving Time,' Baldy grumbled. “As if humans can add one minute to the sun's shining!”

“It's like Will Rogers says; ‘I don't make jokes, I just watch the government and report it,'” said Rusty.

“Will didn't like Hollywood.” Luke spoke with the privilege of a relative, however distant. “He spent a year out there but now he's back twirlin' ropes at the Ziegfeld Follies.”

“Funny place for an Oklahoma Indian cowboy,” Lefty Halstead said.

“Oh, Will didn't have to be a cowboy,” Luke explained. “His folks own a big ranch. He
liked
roping and riding.”

“If he ever runs for president, I'll vote for him,” Jim Wyatt said. “He's got a lot more sense than any politician up in Washington.”

“Yeah, and he'd get every veteran's vote,” Rusty said. “Did you see what he wrote about this measly bonus ole Careful Cal vetoed in May?”

Rich Mondell grinned. “Congress overrode him. Guess they heard from enough voters who thought it was fair to try to make up a little for the difference between what soldiers were paid and civilian wages during the war. A dollar twenty-five a day for overseas duty and a dollar for stateside service isn't a lot, but it helps.”

From what Shaft and the men themselves said, Hallie knew that the young professor, like Jim and Rusty, had been in the war, though he had been mustered out as a captain while Jim and Rusty were sergeants. They were all infantry and had all shot and been shot at. None of them, according to Henry, had ever said a derogatory word about his refusal to put on the uniform they had volunteered to wear.

“Will compared the dollar twenty-five a day soldiers got with the twelve-fifty minimum shipyard workers pulled down,” Jim said. When he laughed, the burned side of his face didn't move with the other half. Ironic that he'd gone through the bitter fighting along the Marne, including Chateau Thierry, without a scratch but had been almost killed on his own steam engine. “Will said statistics prove that the Germans fired an average of twenty-five bullets a day at each soldier, the same average number of nails a worker hammered. Will reckoned the pay of five cents per bullet was pretty stingy compared to fifty cents per nail.”

“I liked his answer to those who claimed they didn't want to insult the soldiers' ‘noble patriotism,' or that most of the men didn't want the bonus,” Garth put in. “He said pay it to everybody, and let those that didn't want it put it in a fund for the disabled.”

“'Course they're not goin' to pay that bonus all at once,” Rusty said. “Reckon they don't want us to spend it all in one place. The bonuses will be twenty-year endowment policies.”

“But you can borrow up to a quarter of the face value from the government,” Jim said. “I'm going to do that and put it towards my new engine.”

“Another thing Will's right about,” Buford said. “There shouldn't be any tax-exempt securities that rich people can use to dodge taxes—and that's what'll send the country to the poorhouse, not soldiers' bonuses.”

“Quent Raford didn't go to war,” Baldy said. “And the guy who runs the Hollister pool hall told me he'd heard Raford brag about not paying a dime of income tax for years.”

“You can bet his threshing business is going to lose money this year,” predicted Jim. “He undercuts Garth, tries to put him out of business, and gets a break on taxes for his dirty tricks.”

As Rory went out to dump the dishwater, Shaft got to his feet, a slumberous Jackie cradled in his arms next to the little gray cat. “Bedtime, fellas! Let's not get into politics and dirty tricks, or we'll be up all night.”

Rory lingered. “If you don't practice, Miss Hallie, you'll forget what you've learned about the engine. If we have a good chance tomorrow, you ought to learn to belt up.”

“Oh, I don't—”

Garth said from the porch, “If she messes up that belt I spent hours lacing together, you can fix it, Rory.”

Hallie's cheeks blazed. “If Shaft can spare me when it's time to move sets, I'll certainly come!”

“Great.” Rory brushed her cheek with long brown fingers. Under his breath he said, “Good night, sweetheart.” He was out the door swiftly.

“I saw quite a bit of gray smoke this evening,” came Garth's voice.

“So?”

“Generally means there's holes in your fire.”

“I kept the steam up, didn't I?”

“Yes, but that fire needs to burn even from one end of the grate to the other. A hole lets a blast of cold air into the firebox. And it looks like you have a leaky flue.”

“I'll fix it in the morning, for Pete's sake!” Rory's voice rose. “Say, how would you like it if I went poking around your damned old separator for any piddling little thing that wasn't quite right?”