Sayre’s rocking ceased. She sat perfectly still for a full moment, breathless with astonishment. “Why?” she just managed to pipe.
“Because—” Charley began.
How firmly he spoke. Sayre came alive enough to notice that. “I’d rather you and I—It’s all right about Dad, of course. But you and I, Sayre, well, I’d just rather you and I kept ourselves entirely clear of any business tie-up with a Hoskins.”
“Even after you and Frank have become such friends?” Full-voiced at last Sayre blurted out the expression of the idea that had been her torment all of these last three weeks. For was it not this idea that had made the whole situation seem to her so completely hopeless?
Charley did not answer for a time. “Are Frank and I friends?” he parried at last thoughtfully with emphasis on the final word. “In a way we sure are. How could he help being after all that has happened? Even seems funny now to think we two could ever have been at such fool outs as we were. What was it all about, anyway? There’s none of that left, you bet. And there’s feeling of another kind, too. A whole lot of it. Always will be.
“But friends? I wouldn’t hint a word of it now to anybody in the world but you. Only, Frank’s still a lot his father’s son, you know. And friendship, oh, I’m no good at putting things, but to me a friend’s, well, what you are, Sayre: a person that’s absolutely true blue. That a fellow can trust, always, at any time, with anything, right down to the ground, better even than he can trust himself.”
Tears of happiness sprang into Sayre’s eyes. She swallowed hard to keep Charley from detecting the choke in her throat.
“I’m glad Frank’s going off to college this fall,” Charley mused on. “He and I couldn’t ever really be thick. I’d always be getting in the way of that cross-eyed squint he has when he looks at things. Like those early trips of his to Laramie, you know.”
“Did Mr. Kitchell do anything about that?” There was emotional relief for Sayre in the speech.
“Couldn’t—without being what he called quixotic. Our score was so far ahead we’d have beaten anyway. But he had it out with Frank in private, I guess, before we started back.”
“Rene Osgood says it’s Frank’s father that makes him do such things—that Frank’s always believed in Mr. Kitchell.”
“He has, I guess, in a way, and Kit knows it. That’s Kit for you—how he gets a fellow. First he just understands you, somehow, without saying a thing. And then he gets a fellow to feeling there’s nothing he’d hate so much as to lose Kit’s respect. That keeps him straight and fighting.”
Sayre’s pose relaxed into one of eager listening. How nice it was to have Charley really talking again!
“It kept me going all last winter, that and this other notion he popped into my head. Sticking on that team with Frank, I mean, working right along with him without once striking a spark to blow up the show, which was what everybody was primed for. Neither Frank nor I cared a puff what we did to the other fellow. We were that badly at outs. Yet that was Mr. Kitchell’s team. I just kept my teeth shut tight together all the time. The first move to bust up that team with a row wasn’t coming from me. Frank’s told me since that that was what was holding him in, too.
“Kit, I suppose, understood us. Ever since Mr. Kitchell’s been here Frank’s father had been trying to knife his work in the back. Yet he was absolutely square with Frank, giving him all the time he asked for, coaching him just as hard as he coached anybody else, if not harder. I own up, it used to make me pretty darn sore sometimes.
“But I got my eyes opened in the hut, that last day.” That hesitancy had crept into Charley’s speech which had already told Sayre how difficult even a brief reference to his recent experiences was for the boy. “We’d about given up, you know. And what do you think Frank said to me? No good-bye messages to his folks or anything like that. Just, if I happened to get out alive and he didn’t, would I be willing to tell Mr. Kitchell that at the end, at least, he’d played a clean game?”
Sayre brushed the back of her hand across her eyes. “I’m glad you told me that, Chuck. I pity Frank, sort of. Must be awful hard to see straight when you’ve always had a dad like his.”
“You and I don’t know anything about it, Sayre. Our dad’s always been poor. Call him visionary, as Aunt Hit does, too, if you want to. Just the same, he’s always been dead square and above-board honest.”
Sayre slipped her arm through her brother’s and pressed his to her in happy assent.
“Perhaps, at college,” Charley ruminated on, “if Frank falls in with other profs like Mr. Kitchell—”
“I know,” Sayre nodded understandingly. She was smiling a little, conscious that Charley was thinking how well she had taken his news. “So that’s why you turned Mr. Hoskins down,” she added with irrelevance more seeming than real.
“Mostly. But there’s another reason. Folks’ll think me nutty, I suppose. Well, let ’em, I say.
“I know well enough, of course, that we’re only kids, not yet twenty. Just the same, I’ve got my heart set on settling and proving up on a claim. You and me, I mean, Sayre, forming a regular business partnership to develop a place that’s all our independent own. Perhaps this very one, when the land’s revalued and drained. Of course, we’ll have a lot better house on it some day. But I’d hate awfully, after all it’s sheltered us through, to go back altogether on the old home Crate.”
“Charley!” Sayre was fairly jumping up and down in her elation. Had she gone another inch she would have fallen off the railless step, a risk that neither of them noticed.
“We can do it,” Charley was going on. “File for ourselves, I mean. We’ll be of age to file by the time the land’s revalued. And by this fall we’ll have had our two years of successful farming experience. And we’ll have, I know we’re going to have it, for look at the start we’ve got already, more than our twenty-five hundred dollars’ capital. I’ve got the figures all worked out in a notebook. I’ll show ’em to you when we go—”
Sayre, who was still bouncing back and forth on the step, trying to hold in check her bubbling joy until Charley had finished, could contain herself no longer. “Chuck,” she cried, “how long have you been planning things like that?”
“Ever since right after the alfalfa mess. Mr. Kitchell planted the notion in my noodle to give me something to hang on to, I guess, after my stock had taken such an awful slump around here.”
“Mr. Kitchell?”
“Sure. Who else would it be? Made me feel, too, as if I were doing something that would square him again. Said if two vocational agriculture high school kids, green at farming at that (of course we counted you in, Sayre) could in two years through their project work earn the twenty-five hundred dollars’ capital the Government requires now for filing on this land, it would be the very biggest boost vocational agriculture high school work could have anywhere. And around here was right where it needed that boost most, where everything it tries to do has had to fight so awfully hard to get its chance. He got me clamped down on to the job, I can tell you. ’Twas darn good for me, too. Kept me going, head on.”
“And you never said a word to me?”
Charley shuffled his feet uncomfortably, watching the process. “Maybe ’twasn’t quite on the square. But you see, Sayre,” he looked up, “you couldn’t possibly have tried any harder’n you were doing. And if you had once let the idea leak out, so that Frank Hoskins had got wind of it and lit out, usual style, to beat me at it, well, it would have wrecked the whole works for me. Besides, you know well enough you’d have called it just another crazy Morgan scheme!”
Sayre broke into infectious laughter. “No, I wouldn’t, Chuck,” she protested. “I was too afraid, myself, that somebody would call it that. That’s why I never told, either!”
Charley shot his legs straight out in front of him and jerked his face toward his sister in an open-mouthed stare.
Sayre’s merriment grew. His expression was so funny.
“Y-y-y
ou mean—” he was stammering.
Sayre nodded vigorously. “Of course I do. I’ve worked for it longer than you have. It’s been my dream ever since that day after we landed on this Pawaukee Irrigation Project.”
Charley’s comprehension dawned slowly. “And you never peeped once? To anybody?”
“Oh, yes, I did. To—” Just in time Sayre clapped her mouth shut. She was beginning to learn that there were times when candor was a mistake, when silence on a woman’s part was wiser and more tactful. “Aunt Hitty, a little,” she finished without any outward show of evasion. “That’s why she lent me that first two hundred and fifty dollars.”
The girl sprang to her feet, listening. Through the clear, dry, silent air penetrated the chug and rattle of a distantly approaching Ford. “Must be the ‘Shake and Dad. Let’s go and meet him, Chuck, and tell him everything.”
Charley picked himself up and followed her. She was skipping down the long, worn thread of path, talking all the while. “We’ll go in later and light the kitchen lamp. I want to see that notebook of yours and compare your figures with mine. I’ve got a notebook, too. But I don’t have to look in it to know what’s there.”
She began to quote: “Morgan capital: One manure spreader, $175.00; one half-ton Ford truck, $125; one high-grade Holstein milk cow, $75; one purebred Rambouillet ram, $50; seven purebred Rambouillet ewes, $140; ten Corriedale ewes, $120; one purebred two-year-old Hampshire sow, registered, $80; three yearling Hampshire sows, $120; thirty-two Bronze turkey hens, $60; sixty White Wyandotte hens and roosters, $40.”
She was making a low chant of her statistics as she danced on, Charley close at her heels. Occasionally he chimed in, changing her figures a little. Occasionally, too, they both stopped to laugh for no reason at all.
“And then there’re all the young things. Five hundred baby chicks. Two hundred and eighty turkey poults. Twenty-one lambs. Thirty-five young pigs. And we haven’t counted the heifer and the bull calf. Let’s say we’ve sixteen hundred dollars, Chuck. It’s really more than that, with my turkey house and your sheds and the plow and other little things. And that’s for now. By the end of the season—”
At the front gate they paused. The sound of the Ford had vanished. Its driver must have been, not Dad, but one of the German-Russians who would have turned at the crossroads. The twins stood a moment, suddenly solemn in the wide, silent beauty of the half-desert night. Sayre forgot her statistics. She was conscious of only one thing: Charley, her own twin brother, was here beside her again, safe and well. She squeezed up close to him. “Chuck,” she whispered reverently, “isn’t life wonderful? For people like you and me, I mean, who have real, worth-while work to do? And can do it out of doors in a big, new country like this?”
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 123
