"But I feel that I have in me the pluck to take that gambler's chance. I am going to bide my time, but have my money ready. The money is in the great wheat fields of the Northwest. America must feed the world, and I want to do my part. Ten years of raising wheat in a big way will enable me to retire, if I wish to. "My father worked for other men all his life. I am going to be my own man before I get through. To this I set my hand and seal, "Hiram Strong." There was a wee note of anxiety, if not sorrow, in the return letter which Sister wrote. Those on the Atterson Eighty feared that Hiram Strong was getting altogether too far away from them. But there was something else in Sister's letter that struck Hiram much more sharply. It suggested a possibility that startled him, to say the least, and roused in his mind again much suspicion regarding the bewhiskered farmer, whose name, he believed, was "Orrin Post," and his own Orrin's connection with this man. Sister wrote: "What do you think, Hiram? My lawyer wrote me from Boston that perhaps I might have been near to my dear little lost brother when I was out there to see you and Miss Pringle. He writes that he traced poor little Marvin (or whatever his name may be) to the Middle West, and that a correspondent of his, whom he put on the case, writes that he believes the boy has been in your neighborhood. The western lawyer is named Eben Craddock." CHAPTER XXXI WHO IS THEODORE CHESTER? By this time the great corn crop was in the cribs and Sunnyside Farm was down to a winter basis. The crop had averaged sixty-five bushels of shelled corn to the acre, and only one other farm belonging to Mr. Bronson--and that a very well tilled one indeed--had done better, or as well. Hiram's success with corn (which was, indeed, the principal reason for his having been put in charge of the farm by Mr. Bronson) was all the more to be commended because of the conditions under which the young fellow had undertaken this present contract. Hiram had been obliged to change radically the methods of corn growing he had followed in the East. Just as the old-time farmer who hand-hoed his cornfield learned to throw away the hoe and use the cultivator, horse-hoe, and fluke-harrow, so these big corn growers had developed a method of cultivation quite at variance with that of the small farmer cultivating but a few acres. Hiram had discovered that by rotation of crops which kept down the weeds corn could be cultivated with a riding harrow drawn by two or three Percherons that could do twice the work in a day of three ordinary horses worked to single cultivators, and with the saving of two men's time.