The Bondboy Part 61

"Which?" queried Sol, perking his head in puzzled and impertinent way, very much as the rooster had done a little while before him.

"Next spring, I said," she repeated, nodding over her bonnet, into which she was slipping the splints.

"No crop this year?"

"No; Joe says it weakens the plants to bear the first year they're set.

It takes the strength away from the roots, he says. He goes through the field and snips off every bloom he sees when he's hoein' among 'em, and I help him between times. We don't git all of 'em, by a mighty sight, though."

Sol shook his head with wise depreciation.

"Throwin' away money," said he.

"Did you ever raise any strawberries?" she inquired, putting down the bonnet, bringing Sol up with a sharp look.

"Reckon I raised as many as Joe ever did, and them mainly with a spoon,"

said Sol.

The joke was not entirely new; it could not have been original with Sol by at least three hundred years. But it did very well as an excuse for Sol to laugh. He was always looking for excuses to laugh, that was the one virtue in him. Without his big laugh he would have been an empty sack without a bottom.

"Joe got them rows mighty purty and straight," said Sol, squinting along the apple trees.

"Yes, he set 'em out accordin' to geog'aphy," said she.

"Which?" said Sol.

"Ge-og'a-phy, I said. Didn't you never hear tell of that before neither, Sol Greening?"

"Oh," said Sol, lightly, as if that made it all as plain to him as his own cracked thumbs. "How much does Joe reckon he'll git off of that patch of berries when it begins to bear?"

"I never heard him say he expected to make anything," said she, "but I read in one of them fruit-growin' papers he takes that they make as much as three hundred dollars an acre from 'em back in Ellinoi."

Sol got up, slowly; took a backward step into the yard; filled his lungs, opened his mouth, made his eyes round. Under the internal pressure his whiskers stood on end and his face grew red. "Oh, you git _out_!" said he.

"I can show it to you in the paper," she offered, making as if to put aside her sewing.

Sol laid a finger on his palm and stood with his head bent. After a bit he looked up, his eyes still round.

"If he even makes a hundred, that'll be two thousand dollars a year!"

It was such a magnificent sum that Sol did not feel like taking the familiarity with it of mentioning it aloud. He whispered it, giving it large, rich sound.

"Why, I reckon it would be," said she, offhand and careless, just as if two thousand a year, more or less, mattered very little to Joe.

"That's more than I ever made in my whole dad-blame life," said Sol.

"Well, whose fault is it, Sol?" asked she.

"I don't believe it can be done!"

"You'll see," she a.s.sured him, comfortably.

"And Joe he went and stuck to the old place," reflected Sol. "He might 'a' got some better land for his sperimentin' and projeckin' if he'd 'a'

looked around."

"He was offered land, all the land a man could want," said she. "Ollie wanted him to take over the Chase home place and farm it when she and Morgan married and left, but Joe he said no; the Newbolts had made their failures here, he said, and here they was goin' to make their success.

He had to redeem the past, Joe said, and wipe out the mistakes, and show folks what a Newbolt can do when he gits his foot set right."

"He'll do it, too," said Sol, without a reserved grudge or jealousy; "he's doin' it already."

"Yes, I always knew Joe would," said she. "When he was nothing but a little shaver he'd read the _Cottage Encyclopedy_ and the _Imitation_ and the Bible, from back to back. I said then he'd be governor of this state, and he will."

She spoke confidently, nodding over her work.

"Shucks! How do you know he will?"

Sol's faith was not strong in this high-flying forecast. It seemed to him that it was crowding things a little too far.

"You'll live to see it," said she.

Sol sat with his back against a pillar of the porch, one foot on the ground, the other standing on the boards in front of him, his hands locked about his doubled knee. He sat there and looked up at the Widow Newbolt, raising his eyebrows and rolling his eyes, but not lifting his head, which was slightly bent. "Well, what's to be's to be," said he.

"When's he goin' to marry?"

"When he's through goin' to college."

"That'll be two or three years, maybe?"

"Maybe."

"Hum; Alice Price she'll be gettin' purty well along by that time."

"She's not quite a year older than Joe," Mrs. Newbolt corrected him, with some asperity, "and she's one of the kind that'll keep. Well, I was married myself, and had a baby, when I was nineteen. But that's no sign."

"Joe'll build, I reckon, before then?" guessed Sol.

"No; Alice don't want him to. She wants to come here a bride, to this house, like I come to it long, long ago. We'll fix up and make ready for her, little by little, as we go along. It'll be bringin' back the pleasure of the old days, it'll be like livin' my courts.h.i.+p and marriage over. This was a fine house in the days that Peter brought me here, for Peter, he had money then, and he put the best there was goin' into it."

"It looks better than any house around here now, since you fixed it up and painted it," said Sol.

"It's better inside than outside," said she, with a woman's pride in a home, which justifies her warmth for it. "We had it all plastered and varnished. The doors and casin's and all the trimmin's are walnut, worth their weight in gold, now, almost, Judge Maxwell says."

"Yes, the curly walnut's all gone, years and years ago," said Sol.

"It pa.s.sed away with the pioneers," sighed she.

"I suppose they'll build in time, though?" Sol said.

"I 'low they will, maybe, after I'm gone," said she.

"Well, well!" said Sol. He sat silent a little while. "Folks never have got over wonderin' on the way she took up with Joe," he said.