The horses were really huge fellows, quiet, kindly, and well broken to work. They were not much like the horses Hiram had been used to in the East, it must be confessed. Even Jerry, who was a good cross of Morgan and Canadian stock, looked truly Lilliputian beside these huge fellows. When the Percherons started one of the largest logs in the burned piece, the driver chanced to steer them wrong at one point and the foot-and-a-half butt of the pine-log rammed a stump. The force of the blow, with the horses leaning against their collars, split the pine-log for half its length. "Say," said Will Pardee, the driver, "let me tackle them to the corner of that barn, and I bet I could start it. Aside from a steam engine, they are the best pullers I ever saw." The carpenter gang was now at work and the material for the stave silo had arrived. All but the wire cables with which Hiram had advised that it should be stayed. But those were promised. It was to be a hundred-and-forty-ton silo--one of the largest of the old-fashioned kind--and its foundation was of masonry. Under proper conditions it would last for years if the walls (the staves were grooved and tongued) were properly erected. The silo was placed at one corner of the barn just where it would be handy to shred and blow the ensilage into the enormous round tank. Meanwhile, Hiram had continued his corn testing, and to his satisfaction. Having selected the good ears among those he had bought of Mr. Brown, discarding the less vigorous, he shelled the remaining corn off these good ears and mixed the kernels thoroughly. This seed he sacked, tagging it plainly, and hung it where Yancey Battick's dread enemies, the rats, would not get at it. This bag of corn would not furnish Hiram with all the seed he would need at planting time. He had other corn to test and his testing boxes were busy for some weeks. In the meantime he had tried out the little handful of wheat he had brought with him from Yancey Battick's place. The vigor and uniformity of that red-streaked wheat was quite remarkable. Never had Hiram Strong seen a wheat that pleased him as much as did this new grain. He was deeply interested in Yancey Battick's experiment with this wheat; but he did not know how to go about gaining the odd man's confidence. Really, he was on less familiar terms with Battick than with any other neighbors about Sunnyside--save, perhaps, the rascally Adam Banks. The latter came around occasionally and talked with the men working for Hiram and interfered in a small way with the ditching and the chopping down of the pine trees. But Hiram was determined to have no trouble with the fellow if he could help it. He had been told that Adam Banks had quarreled with a farmer for whom he had worked, and later, when that farmer's barns were fired, the owner had declared that Adam Banks had done the firing. But nothing could be proved against the fellow.