This was a vital question. I leaned forward, awaiting the answer, while Jessie listened with parted lips, as she might if our good neighbor had been some ancient oracle, whose lightest word was law. Mr. Wilson regarded us steadfastly for a moment, then scratched his head again. "Well," he said slowly, at last, "I s'pose, setting aside all questions of circumstances, that when the Bible said: 'Honor thy father and thy mother in the days of thy youth,' it meant to reach clean down to the things that your parents wanted you to do--or not to do--whether they was alive to see it done or not. I do s'pose that that was what it means, and your father he was sure set against borrowing." Stooping, he picked up a straw, and began biting it meditatively, while we two pondered his plain interpretation of a very plain text. Suddenly he dropped the straw, and looked at us with a brightening face: "Why, say, you can give a mortgage on your own land, when you get your title, and your father, nor the Bible, nor nobody else, would say there was anything wrong in your neighbor's helping you out, if so be that you couldn't lift the mortgage when the time come. Not that there'll be any danger of that, with the price that wheat always brings in this grazing country." He went away shortly after, leaving us much comforted. Joe had housed the un-needed reaper in the shed and was examining the plow before he had been gone an hour. Some bolts needed tightening and Jessie offered her services as assistant. "We'll get ahead of Mr. Horton yet!" she exclaimed, hammering away at the head of the bolt that she was manipulating, under Joe's direction, as vigorously as though it might have been the head of the gentleman in question. CHAPTER XII ON THE TRAIL OF A WILDCAT Joe went at the plowing the next morning and kept at it with dogged perseverance for several days. Jessie and I, busy with the sewing, at first paid little attention to him, but after a few days the look of settled exasperation on his sable countenance, as he returned to the house at the close of his day's work, drew my attention. "Joe," I said to him one morning, as he was about starting for the field, "what is the matter? You look discouraged." "I ain' discouraged, so my looks is deceivin', den; but I is kine o' wore out in my patience." "Why; what about?" "Hit's dat 'ar Frank horse; nothin' gwine ter do him, but he mus' stop in de furrer, ebbery few ya'ahds, an' tun aroun' in de ha'ness ter look at me. 'Pears like he can' be satisfy dat I knows my own business, but he's got to obersee hit. Hit done gets mighty worrisome afore de day's out," he concluded with a heavy sigh. "Why don't you whip him for it?" demanded Jessie indignantly. "W'ip nuffin'! Hes a saddle hoss; he's nebber been call' on fer to do such wuck afore, an' he doan know what hit means."