Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A load of lumber would be hauled to some spot on the free wilderness, where water could be easily found, and a rude box-cabin built. Then a gang-plow was procured, and a dozen mustang ponies, worth ten or fifteen dollars apiece, and with these hundreds of acres were stirred as easily as if the land had been under cultivation for years, tough, perennial roots being almost wholly absent.
A week later, Charnock sat, one afternoon, in the saddle of his gang-plow, tearing a row of furrows through the dusty sod. The sweating horses moved leisurely, and he did not urge them as he moodily watched the tangled grass part before the shares and vanish beneath the polished surface of the turned-up clods.
It does not always do so, because, as I myself saw, it is often badly and irregularly burned over, and probably otherwise mismanaged. The crop is taken off with headers, as is usual in this State. For the second year's crop the land is plowed. A two-share gang-plow is used, with a seat for the plowman.
Then Merrick sent up a gang-plow and eight horses, and the tender green of Sam's quarter section was rapidly changed to a dull-brown color, which is odious unto the eye of the Pike. Day by day the brown spot grew larger, and one morning Sam arose to find all his neighbors departed, having wreaked their vengeance upon him by taking away his dogs.
They went off to work, but Edgar, driving the gang-plow through the stubble under a scorching sun, thought that Sylvia's idea might bear more fruit than she had calculated on, and that it would be bitter to her.
Irresolution, however, was perhaps his greatest failing, and now he must decide, he wavered and thought about what he had lost. There were days when he would not admit that all was lost, and harnessing his team in the early morning, drove the gang-plow through the soil until the red sunset faded off the plain.
"But surely, if we get a crop," I began. It was, however, a lame beginning. And like most lame beginnings, it didn't go far. "How are we going to get a crop when we can't even raise money enough to get a tractor?" was Dinky-Dunk's challenge. "When we haven't help, and we're short of seed-grain, and we can't even get a gang-plow on credit?"
Give him a patch of pine-scrub or a bit of poor soil in a sand-belt and he'd feel it his duty to cultivate it, no matter how much work it cost. Show him good wheat land lying vacant or rocks that block a railroad, and he won't rest till he starts the gang-plow or gets to work with giant-powder. He can't help it; the thing's born in him. Like liquor or gambling, only cleaner!"
A few days afterward, when we spent all of one afternoon discussing finances and our program for spring, he agreed with me when, contrary to my usual caution, I suggested that we should make a plunge that year by purchasing a gang-plow and hiring more horses, then, giving a bond on the homestead and expected crop, sink the last dollar we could raise in sowing the utmost acreage and breaking more sod on the free land we had pre-empted.
Then, too, machinery has one thing in common with man: they occasionally get out of kilter at the very time you expect most from them. So this morning I had to bend, if I did not actually break, the Sabbath by working on my tractor-engine. I put on Ikkie's overalls for I have succeeded in coercing Ikkie into a jumper and the riding-seat of the old gang-plow and went out and studied that tractor.
Word Of The Day