I made good with my gang, and did a third more than any other eight
teams on the place. Before I went away, Gowdy talked around as if he
wanted me for overseer; but I couldn't decide without studying a long
time, to take a step so far from what I had been thinking of, and he
dropped the subject. I did not like the way things were going there. The
men were out of control. They despised Mobley, and said sly things about
his using his wife to keep him in a job. One day I told Magnus
Thorkelson about Mrs. Mobley's coming and taking Gowdy away from the
little cabin of the Fewkes family.
"She do dat," said he, "a dozen times ven Ay bane dar. She alvays bane
chasing Buck Gowdy."
"Well," I said, "who be you chasing, coming over here a dozen times when
I didn't know it? That's why you bought that mustang pony, eh?"
"I yust go over," said he, squirming, "to help Surajah fix up his
machines--his inwentions. Sometimes I take over de wyolin to play for
Rowena. Dat bane all, Yake."
When we went home, I with money enough for some new clothes, with what I
had by me, we caught a ride with one of Judge Stone's teams to a point
two-thirds of the way to Monterey Centre, and came into our own places
from the south. We were both glad to see long black streaks of new
breaking in the section of which my eighty was a part, and two new
shanties belonging to new neighbors. This would bring cultivated land up
to my south line, and I afterward found out, take the whole half of the
section into the new farms. The Zenas Smith family had moved on to the
southwest quarter, and the J.P. Roebuck family on the southeast.
The Smiths and Roebucks still live in the township--as good neighbors as
a man need ask for; except that I never could agree with Zenas Smith
about line fences, when the time came for them. Once we almost came to
the spite-fence stage; but our children were such friends that they kept
us from that disgrace. But Mrs. Smith was as good a woman in sickness as
I ever saw.
George Story was working for the Smiths, and was almost one of the
family. He finally took the northeast quarter of the section, and lives
there yet. David Roebuck, J.P.'s son, when he came of age acquired the
eighty next to me, and thus completed the settlement of the section.
Most of the Roebuck girls and boys became school-teachers, and they had
the biggest mail of anybody in the neighborhood. I never saw Dave
Roebuck spelled down but once, and that was by his sister Theodosia,
called "Dose" for short.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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