The Story of the Soil

CHAPTER I. The Old South

THE OLD SOUTH

PERCY JOHNSTON stood waiting on the broad veranda of an old-style Southern home, on a bright November day in 1903. He had just come from Blue Mound Station, three miles away, with suit-case in hand.

"Would it be possible for me to secure room and board here for a few days?" he inquired of the elderly woman who answered his knock.

"Would it be possible?" she repeated, apparently asking herself the question, while she scanned the face of her visitor with kindly eyes that seemed to look beneath the surface.

"I beg your pardon, my name is Johnston,--Percy Johnston--" he said with some embarrassment and hesitation, realizing from her speech and manner that he was not addressing a servant.

"No pardon is needed for that name," she interrupted; "Johnston is a name we're mighty proud of here in the South."

"But I am from the West," he said.

"We're proud of the West, too; and you should feel right welcome here, for this is 'Westover,'" waving her hand toward the inroad fields surrounding the old mansion house. "I am Mrs. West, or at least I used to be. Perhaps the title better belongs to my son's wife at the present time; while I am mother, grandma, and great-grandmother.

"Yes, Sir, you will be very welcome to share our home for a few days if you wish; and we'll take you as a boarder. We used to entertain my husband's friends from Richmond,--and from Washington, too, before the sixties; but since then we have grown poor, and of late years we take some summer boarders. They have all returned to the city, however, the last of them having left only yesterday; so you can have as many rooms as you like.

"Adelaide!" she called.

A rugged girl of seventeen entered the hall from a rear room.

"This is my granddaughter, Adelaide, Mr. Johnston."

Percy looked into her eyes for an instant; then her lashes dropped. He remembered afterward that they were like her grandmother's, and he found himself repeating, "The eye is the window of the soul."

"My Dear, will you ask Wilkes to show Mr. Johnston to the southwest room, and to put a fire in the grate and warm water in the pitcher?"

"Thank you, that will not be necessary," said Percy. "I wish to see and learn as much as possible of the country hereabout, and particularly of the farm lands; and, if I may leave my suit-case to be sent to my room when convenient, I shall take a walk,--perhaps a long walk. When should I be back to supper."

"At six or half past. My son Charles has gone to Montplain, but he will be home for dinner. He knows the lands all about here and will be glad, I am sure, to give you any information possible."

With rapid strides Percy followed the private lane to the open fields of Westover.

"Is he a cowboy, Grandma?" asked Adelaide, in a tone which did not suggest a very high regard for cowboys. "Anyway," she continued, detecting a shade of disapproval in the grandmother's face, "he has a cowboy's hat, but he doesn't wear buckskin trousers or spurs."

Percy's hat was a relic of college life. Two years before he had completed the agricultural course at one of the state universities in the corn belt. Somewhat above the average in size, well proportioned, accustomed to the heaviest farm work, and trained in football at college, he was a sturdy young giant,--" strong as an ox and quick as lightning," in the exaggerated language of his football admirers

CHAPTER II. Forty Acres in the Corn Belt

FORTY ACRES IN THE CORN BELT

PERCY JOHNSTON'S grandfather had gone west from "York State" and secured from the federal government a 160-acre "Claim" of the rich corn belt land. His father had received through inheritance only 40 acres of this; and, marrying his choice from the choir of the local Lutheran congregation, he had farmed his forty and an adjoining eighty acres, "rented on shares," for only three years, when he was taken with pneumonia from exposure and overwork, and died within a week.

Percy was scarcely a year old when his father was laid in the grave; but to the sorrowing mother he was all that life held dear. Existence seemed possible to her only because she could bestow upon him her double affection, and because the double duties which she took upon herself completely occupied her time.

She was not in immediate financial need, for her husband had been able to put some money in the bank during the last year, after having paid for his "outfit;" the forty-acre farm was free from debt, but under the law it must remain the joint property of mother and child for twenty years.

Wisely or unwisely she rejected every opportunity presented that would have given Percy a stepfather. As daughter and wife she had learned much of the art of agriculture, and, after some consultation with a neighbor who seemed to be successful, she made her own plans.

In her make up, sentiment was balanced with sense. Even as a young wife she had sometimes driven the mower or the self-binder to "help-out," and she had found pleasure and health in such hours of out-door life. "I can work and not overwork," she said to her friends; and in any case the crops seemed to grow better under the eye of the mistress.

Some years she employed a neighbor boy or girl, and always hired such other help as she needed. Prices were sometimes low and crops were not always good; and only widowed mothers can know the full story of her labor, love and sacrifice. With Percy's help he was sent to school and finally to the university, choosing for himself the agricultural college, much to the surprise and disappointment of his devoted mother.

"Why," she asked, "why should my son go to college to study agriculture? Have you not studied farming in the practical school of experience all your life? Surely we have done as much as could be done on our own little farm; and you have also had the benefit of the longer experience of our best farmers hereabout, and of the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors. Oh, I had hoped and truly believed that you would become interested in engineering, or in medicine, or may be in the law. I cannot understand why you should think of going to college to study farming. Surely you already know more than the college professors do about agriculture."

Percy's mother had too much good sense to have raised a spoiled boy. He had been taught to work and to think for himself. She loved her boy far better than her own life,--loved as only a widowed mother can who has risked her life for him, and who has given to him all her thought and all her energy from the best twenty years of her own life; but she had never let herself enjoy that kind of selfishness which prompts a mother to do for her child what he should be taught to do for himself. Despite his natural love of sport and the severe trials he had often brought to her patience and perseverance during his boyhood days, he had reached a development with the advance of youth that satisfied her high ideal. His love and appreciation and tender care for her repaid her every day, she told herself, for all the years of watching, working, waiting. Never before had he withstood her positive wish and final judgment.

And yet it was she who had told him that he alone must choose his life work and his college course in preparation for that work; but, after the years of toil, she had not dreamed that he would choose the farm life.

"My darling boy," she continued, "it leads to nothing. This little farm is poorer to-day than it was when your dear father and I came here to live and labor. To be sure, the lower field still grows as good or better crops than ever; but I can remember when that field was so wet and swampy that it could not be cultivated, and it was in the work of ditching and tiling that field," she sobbed, "that your father took the sickness that caused his death."

Tears were in Percy's eyes as he put his arm about his mother and wiped her tears away.

"But I must tell you what I know to be the truth," she went on quickly. "The older fields that your grandfather cultivated are less productive now than when he received them from our generous government. Indeed, it was your father's plan to continue to farm here only for a few years longer until he could save enough to enable him, with what we could have gotten from the sale of our own forty, to go farther west and purchase a large farm of virgin soil. He realized, my Son, that even that part of his father's farm that was first put under cultivation was becoming distinctly reduced in productiveness. He remembered, too, the stories often repeated by your grandfather of the run-down condition of the once exceedingly fertile soils of the Mohawk Valley and other parts of New York State.

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