They cut and stacked it, however, trusting that it would pay for thrashing later. Hiram went to the expense of removing the sheaves from the field entirely and building the stacks on a lot near the barns. Immediately he put the Percherons to work plowing the twenty acres along the county road. He had no stable manure to broadcast here; yet he desired to help fill his silo from this very piece of ground as well as to put the soil in better condition for winter wheat. The Percherons certainly earned their keep that week. It was dry, with the ground getting harder and more baked every day. Yet Hiram ploughed the piece deep and raked it well before setting out to broadcast a good dressing of bone meal. Turner came along and stopped to watch Hiram, who was himself riding the harrow which, in this case, pulverized the soil better than the disc machine. "I don't know why it is," the aged farmer said, as Hiram stopped near the road fence in a cloud of dust, "but this soil fines up, seems to me, after such late plowing, better than I ever remember its doing before. Why do you suppose that is, Mr. Strong?" Hiram smiled across the fence at him: "I never saw the piece plowed before, you know, Mr. Turner. I don't think much of it even now. But if there has been any change in the condition of the soil I am inclined to lay it to that foolish job of underdraining I did." "Pshaw! Nonsense! Couldn't be that!" exclaimed the old fellow, driving on. "We ain't had no rain to amount to anything yet. When I see the water pouring out o' those log drains of yours into the county ditch I'll take back all that I said about that foolishness." "Mighty hard work to convince some people they are wrong," chuckled Hiram to himself, as he started the Percherons again. "But it looks as if we would get enough rain pretty soon to prove one of us--either Mr. Turner or me--in the wrong." CHAPTER XVIII THE BABY TORNADO Hiram had not lost sight of the fact that Yancey Battick's wheat had promised to be better than any of that planted on Sunnyside, to say the least; and although since his rather serious experience with Battick and his gun he had barely nodded to the strange man in passing the old Pringle homestead, Hiram had been very curious as to how Battick's crop was coming on. While Mr. Bronson's binder was at Sunnyside Hiram offered Battick the use of the machine. "Of course, I will drive it myself, so nobody else need know anything about your crop," Hiram said.