The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack

by Emily Cheney Neville

  “All that takes money. Where’re you going to get any?”

  Charley’s enthusiasm dimmed. “Have to borrow, of course. Like all the vocational Ag fellows. On strict business principles. The way everything’s got to be done in our work, even with a fellow’s dad. Notes, interest, security.”

  Sayre waved the empty scrap pan in impatience. “As if I didn’t know all that! What I mean is, who’ve you got to borrow from?”

  “Well—” Charley wiggled the toe of his shoe, his eyes intent upon the action. What a plague Sayre always was with her point-blank questions! “Some of the fellows’ve got it from the bank. And some—” Charley hesitated—“have got it from Mr. Hoskins. Really, Sayre, he’s been mighty decent about helping the fellows out. Says that’s because his boy’s in the work—”

  Sayre threw up her dark head. “Borrow from Frank Hoskins’ father! After the way Frank’s been treating you lately? I’d like to see myself.”

  “I’d hate it all right, you bet. And Mr. Kitchell doesn’t like to have us borrow from Mr. Hoskins. It’s easy to see that, even when he doesn’t say anything. But what’s a fellow to do?”

  Sayre was talking on unheeding. “All you’d be doing, anyhow, is to eat humble-pie. Like as not he’d turn you down. You haven’t any security to offer him. Your father hasn’t even the right to a homestead claim.” The need of argument made this almost forgotten fact bob up suddenly in Sayre’s consciousness.

  “Well,” Charley retorted with unusual heat, “what are you going to do yourself? Here you are, planning projects that make Frank Hoskins as jealous of you as he is of me. That fellow can’t stand being beaten by anyone. But when it comes to a girl”—Charley lifted his eyebrows to suggest the inadequacy of words. “Frank himself doesn’t want to be bothered with any Ag project this year but his five new alfalfa acres. You and I won’t give him a chance to beat us at that. And does it make him sulky?”

  “A lot I care.” Sayre shrugged her shoulders.

  “You bet you don’t. But I’m not so sure but you’d better care. Do you know what that fellow’s got everybody to calling you behind your back lately? Project Sayre. And the way he says it it isn’t any bouquet either. He cracks heavy jokes about your being the teacher’s pet. Tells our bunch you’re doing all this planning to make the part-timers look bigger than the four-year regulars. Then he razzes the part-timers. He knows those foreigners haven’t the same ideas we have about girls working with ’em as their equals, about letting a girl stand out as one of their best workers.”

  Sayre’s answering laugh was a trifle shaky. “Well, let him. That won’t stop me.”

  “Don’t I know it? You’ve got enough grit and stick-to-itiveness for a dozen, I’ll say that. But what good will that do you if, after all the talk that’s going on, too, you blow up higher’n an airplane? And that’s just what you will do if you try to take off with all you say you are, without any money to do it with.”

  “I’ve got the money.”

  Charley’s face fell into a stare of amazement and incredulity. “You’ve got the money! Where?”

  Sayre hugged her old red sweater about her, and lowered herself gingerly to a seat on the split, rickety rail of the manure spreader before she answered. “In the bank. Down town. It’s a dead secret.”

  “I should say it was. Where did it come from?”

  “Aunt Mehitable.”

  “Aunt Hit? Again? When she told Dad flat when we moved out here that that was the last cent she was going to let him have?”

  “She didn’t let him have it. She loaned this money to me. Or rather she sent it to the bank with orders that I was to have it strictly under vocational Ag rules.”

  “Well, wouldn’t that knock you flat! Aunt Hit always was queer.”

  “And smart,” added Sayre roguishly. She was enjoying herself hugely, getting the full effects she sought.

  “I’m letting you have this money, Sayre”—her aunt had written—“because I think you have the character to carry your school plans through. Be sure you make Charley a help to you. I am more than pleased with what you tell me of the influence of this Mr. Kitchell upon him. Give the boy his chance, too, to hold to something steady.”

  So now Sayre added, “I’ll share with you, Chuck. Aunt Hitty said I should. How much money do you need?”

  “About forty dollars. Mr. Kitchell thinks I can do it for that. I’ve got to have some new lumber. Pine’ll do for some of it. But part’s got to be oak. And there’s got to be some castings for parts that have to be replaced.”

  Charley had seated himself on the spreader rim beside his sister. He drew from his pocket a pencil and a notebook in which he had been wont to keep football signals, wrenched a piece of loose board from the ramshackle spreader, and laid it across both laps as a desk. Two dark heads bent close together in complete absorption over the figuring below until the twins’ father waved at them from the back steps of the house.

  Sayre rose with reluctance. “I’ve got to go. Dad’s hauled the water from the ditch to help me wash.”

  Her father was calling something Sayre did not catch. “What did he say?”

  Charley burst into laughter. “Hitty’s trying to wash the coal dust off her cat in the water he’s just hauled.”

  “Oh, dear! She’s probably all scratched up.” Sayre raced toward the house. “She can be the biggest nuisance.”

  Charley spent one hundred and forty hours on the rebuilding of his spreader, becoming so interested in the job that he put upon it all the out-of-school time he could find. When the building of it was completed, Mr. Kitchell was very proud of the result. He published a full account of the boy’s accomplishment in the local weekly paper, and arranged a two-day exhibit of the work of the farm-shop pupils of both vocational agriculture groups.

  Practically everybody in the community came. Everybody talked about the affair, too, publishing far and wide the fact that the outstanding point of attention was Charley Morgan’s manure spreader.

  “It’s an excellent piece of machinery. Tell the boy I’ll give him a hundred and seventy dollars for it.” Mr. Kitchell brought Charley this message from a Mr. Cowan, a quiet man who owned one of the very best eighties on the Pawaukee, out of which he made a sort of experimental farm. But Charley would not part with his treasure.

  On the evening of Saturday, the last day of the exhibit, the big room of the farm shop was packed to discomfort with a milling crowd. Sayre was in the midst of it, her eager eye watching two strangers, who from the moment of their arrival had seemed peculiarly attracted by Charley’s spreader.

  “Who are those men?” she sought out Charley’s best pal, a freckle-faced, humorous lad named Spenser Trowbridge, to ask.

  “Oh, one’s the Wyoming state supervisor of high school vocational Ag work. He comes here lots. But the other’s a big man from Washington, D. C. Some kind of agent. Federal, I guess they call it. Anyhow, he’s the Government man who looks after the vocational high school agriculture work for all this western part of the United States. You’d know he was somebody by watching how Mr. Hoskins takes him around.”

  Sayre made her way near to the newcomers and the spreader, near enough to hear Mr. Hoskins say in that slightly over-gracious manner he always adopted for any visitor of importance, “Yes, a really remarkable piece of work for a boy. But between you and me, not quite all it’s represented to be. I sold the boy the original spreader for a merely nominal price, not one that at all represented its real value or condition. A public-spirited man, you know, must do all he can to encourage these earnest boys.”

  Sayre was so angry she felt weak. She watched the three men thread their way through the crowd. Mr. Hoskins’ high, syrupy voice came back to her as they moved forward. “I want you to see what my boy has done. A harness he’s practically remade.”

  Sayre squeezed in nearer the spreader. Both strangers had followed Mr. Hoskins with such evident reluctance that she felt sure they would return. And return they did, and alo
ne. Summoning all her courage, she addressed the state supervisor. “I—I beg your pardon, sir, but I wish, please, you’d ask Mr. Kitchell about the beginning of this spreader. You see, my brother did it.”

  The supervisor smiled at her in a way which made her feel he understood.

  “What I want,” the other man was remarking, “is a photograph of the way the thing looked before the boy began to work. Surely Kitchell had him take one.”

  It was the impulsive Sayre who answered. “Oh, yes, he did! But only with a Brownie kodak. It’s all Charley’s got. That’s why Mr. Kitchell took the film to have an enlarged print made. The little print’s over there. On the wall. As near as we could get it to the spreader. Why, how funny! It was there this afternoon. I saw it. But now it’s gone!”

  Sayre lost no time in seeking out Mr. Kitchell with the news of the disappearance of the print. She found him, not in the shop, but upstairs in his own office.

  “Charley must have taken the picture down to preserve it,” was his conclusion. “I’d just told him about the letter I got this afternoon. Let’s hunt him up.”

  Together the teacher and Sayre searched through the lighted building, Mr. Kitchell explaining to the girl meanwhile what he had meant by his reference to a letter.

  “It seems that those two films Charley took of the original spreader were the first of a dozen roll. Since Charley has to be economical, he saved the last films for the completed spreader. This meant that he did not have the roll ready to develop until a week or so ago. By that time I had begun to realize that the spreader was more than an ordinary success. So I asked him for those films the very day he’d got permission to develop them in the chemistry laboratory closet at school. That’s why he had time to make only one print. The second film was slow to dry and not promising. But I packaged it up with the other one. Then I wrote a letter to the photographer. I am sending them to him for enlarged—”

  An effusive woman accosted Mr. Kitchell, demanding his attention. Sayre waited restlessly. How could he be so patient? There, he’d got rid of her. He picked up his story.

  “Just as I finished that letter the principal called me out of my office to a hurried faculty meeting. I met Charley in the lower hall. School was just out. The hall was full of pupils. I called out to him to go and get the mail he’d find in my right-hand drawer and post it. He was coming out of shop, where he’d been working overtime. Said he would as soon as he’d taken off his cover-alls and washed up.

  “Next day he said he’d—”

  Another interruption, this time from a prosy old farmer. That, too, presently ended, and Mr. Kitchell went on right from where he had left off.

  “—done what I told him to. That’s the last I thought about the matter until I got this afternoon’s mail. The photographer wrote that he’d received my letter but never any films. And now Charley says that the letter was all he mailed, all he found to mail. He had supposed that the films were inside of it. They could easily have been. I’ve just been turning my desk inside out, but not a trace of those films can I find. There’s Charley now.”

  But Charley was as puzzled by the disappearance of the print as the others were.

  All the next day the hunt kept up. Search, inquiry, advertising proved of no avail. On Monday morning Mr. Kitchell appealed to the vocational agricultural classes. “I think you all know,” he began, “of the loss the vocational department has just suffered, the films and print of Charley Morgan’s manure spreader.”

  Sayre turned part way around in her seat so that she could see Frank Hoskins better. He was seated ahead of her and a little to one side. “Loss!” her mind was repeating ironically. Never from the first had she believed that those disappearances were a matter of loss. She fixed her scrutiny upon Frank. She intended to keep it there.

  “Theft,” her mind substituted conclusively a few seconds later for the word loss. “I’ve no way of proving it, of course. But if ever in my life I saw a person acting his best to appear interested and innocent when he wasn’t, that somebody is Frank Hoskins at this very moment. He’s even trying to let on he doesn’t know I’m looking at him.”

  “Is there anyone among you,” Mr. Kitchell was continuing meanwhile, “who can tell us anything at all of Morgan’s films, or of the print that was on the shop wall Saturday night? Or is there anyone who by any chance took a picture of Morgan’s spreader as it appeared when he first brought it into the shop?”

  Response to both questions came from Spenser Trowbridge. “Last I saw of Chuck’s print was the Saturday night of the exhibit. It was hanging by one corner as if all but one of the tacks had come out. I tried to get over to fix it, but I couldn’t get through the crowd. I meant to go later, but I forgot.”

  The next morning Spens accosted Sayre in the school hall. “Say, Sayre.” He held out toward her an oblong, battered piece of dark celluloid. “Take a squint at this. See if it isn’t Chuck’s spreader, before treatment.”

  Sayre held the celluloid up to the light. “It is! It is! Oh, Spens, wherever did you get it? This can’t be the one that got lost?”

  “No, this is another one, mine. I found it last night when I was rummaging through a box of old films. I took it for a joke the first day Chuck hauled that thing into the shop. Everybody thought he was plumb nuts. I never printed it. The film looked too bum.”

  Sayre with head uptilted was still intent upon the film. “Background is pretty blurred. But the machine looks clear. Perhaps it will do what Mr. Kitchell wants.”

  It did. An enlarged print of Spens’ film accompanied Charley’s spreader when it became an object of display in the vocational agriculture exhibit at the next State Fair.

  Long before that event came off, however, illustrated accounts of Charley’s achievement appeared in print, thanks to the two visitors at’ the exhibit. The state vocational agriculture magazine published a full write-up of Charley’s job. So also did a publication issued by the Federal Board for Vocational Education at Washington. An agricultural magazine copied the latter account and enlarged upon it. A monthly magazine interested in the industrial arts followed suit. Copies of all these found their way to Mr. Kitchell’s desk, and from there circulated throughout the community until Charley had become a well-known local figure.

  Everybody praised him, of course. Better still, everybody liked him. Except Frank Hoskins. The pose of “magnanimity” which ever since the football election Frank had striven hard to keep up toward Charley in public, at least, now grew so strained that it became a common subject for jokes among the high school pupils.

  Spens Trowbridge, natural mimic that he was, would swagger heavily up to Charley in the high school hall and remark with pompous affability edged with snap, “Well, Morgan, how is our school’s skilled mechanic this morning?” and expectant pupil onlookers of both sexes would guffaw and giggle with full understanding and appreciation. No one’s laugh was ever more completely good-natured than Charley’s.

  To Sayre the best of the entire situation was that Charley, pleased with his triumph and more pleased still with Mr. Kitchell’s delight in it, was at last centering his wholehearted interest in his agricultural work at the beginning of the growing season.

  “Five acres of seed peas on turned-under alfalfa land. Won’t that make a peach of a crops project, Sayre?” he asked, inviting his sister’s approval. She gave it heartily, helped him study and plan, wrote to Aunt Mehitable for him. It was a pretty expensive venture, but both Mr. Kitchell and Mr. Hansen approved it.

  One Saturday afternoon in early spring Charley went into town with Dad. Sayre heard the ‘Shake returning sooner than she had expected. Her ear told her, too, that it was being driven over the corrugated driveway with a caution beyond all precedent under Charley’s guidance. She hurried out to investigate and found the ‘Shake parked. Charley was lifting out of it passengers which he counted as he lifted, and upon which Hitty was descending from the back yard with whoops of joy. The passengers themselves, ten in number, stood huddled
together on wobbly legs, squeaking forth thin, quavery bleats, and shivering with fright. They were very young lambs.

  “Beginning of my animal husbandry project,” Charley announced airily. “I’m looking ahead to my next year’s school Ag work, sheep. There’s a lot of good forage on our bad acres.”

  “Poor babies! Where are their mothers?”

  “Haven’t any. They’re bum lambs. Ones whose ewes either died or refused to own them. The big sheep men in the hills never bother to raise bums. Just get rid of them any way they can. I met a mountain rancher bringing these into town to give to some kids he knew, if he couldn’t find anything better to do with them. He sold ’em for thirty-five cents apiece. We’ll have to raise them on the bottle. Quite a lot of work, but Dad’ll help, and Hitty can learn too. With all that milk now that Mr. Hansen’s cow has freshened—”

  Charley was again reaching into the ‘Shake. This time he drew forth a knobby package which he handed to Sayre with a look of sheepish worry. “I—I—bought some nursing bottles. See if they’re all right.”

  Sayre laughed so hard she could scarcely undo the package, but there was no censure in her mirth. Charley did not need to apologize for his new venture to either of his sisters.

  Sayre’s heart was light these early spring days. A spreader, field peas, sheep; Charley would make a farmer yet. Was it too much to hope that these new projects of his would turn out as well as the spreader had?

  Part-time school was out that week, but the following Monday Sayre and Hitty went to town with the Hansens as they occasionally did. Sayre entered the Hoskins store to speak to her father about some needed supplies. She found him deep in the circle of men that habitually clustered about the stove, handing about from one man to another an open letter.