"Don't he?" Nixon applied his knife again to the edge of the piece of pine board; "maybe he didn't when he first come out here, but there ain't much now he don't know. He's watched me blue-stonin' the seed wheat; he's had me take the fannin' mill apart to see what makes it go; and I guess I've plowed pretty near thirty acres for him, in pantomime, with the old breakin' plow, out there in the snow. No hired farmin' for Bill--he's a-goin' to do all the work himself." "I pity his hands," Lovina Nixon observed, her knuckles at her chin reflectively. "Where's he gettin' his farm? Not going to buy us out, I suppose." "Oh, we're fixin' that part of it," John Nixon, having finished the kindlings, folded his knife and returned it to his hip-pocket. "To keep you from gettin' any wrong notions into your head, I might say that he ain't goin' to buy _us_ out, however. It's Jimmy Tomlinson's place he's gettin'. We're going over to see Jimmy to-morrow." Jimmy Tomlinson, standing in the doorway of his bachelor cabin across the road-allowance from the Nixon farm, next morning welcomed glowingly the tall man in gray and the short broad man in overalls who drove up to his door in a muddy-spoke blackboard. "Spring-like weather, Jim," said John Nixon, quizzically, as he pulled up the bay horse in the lee of the house bluff, "why ain't you down't the granary, picklin' up your seed?" Jimmy Tomlinson merely grinned. He was uncommunicative and small and somewhere between fifty and sixty years old. To his gray flannel shirt he had this morning buttoned the celluloid collar which was always added to his attire when receiving callers or when working in his front field, which adjoined the Toddburn road. He had a little sandy moustache and a rather delicately-tipped chin which, as a cut in its cleft attested, had just been shaven. "Putt in y'r horse," he said, in a thin high voice like a woman's, "tie him in the far stall, Jack. Come in, sir." This last to Sir William, upon whom the eyes of Mr. Tomlinson--who wanted $20,000, for his half-section--were fixed in timid appraisal.