ight
for us to let you lend us the money when we know how opposed poor
father was to anything of that kind?"

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;