, "sixteen hundred dollars would not be a speculative price to pay
for your farm--and well Pepper knows it."

"Then Mr. Damocles's sword has got to hang over us, has it?" demanded
the old lady.

"I am afraid so," admitted the lawyer, smiling.

Mrs. Atterson could not be more troubled than was Hiram himself. Youth
feels the sting of such arrows of fortune more keenly than does age. We
get "case-hardened" to trouble as the years bend our shoulders.

The thought that he might, after all, get nothing but a hundred dollars
and his board for all the work he had done in preparation for the second
year's crop sometimes embittered Hiram's thoughts.

Once, when he spoke to Pepper, and the snaky man sneered at him and
laughed, the young farmer came near attacking him then and there in the
street.

"I certainly could have given that Pepper as good a thrashing as ever he
got," muttered Hiram. "And even Pete Dickerson never deserved one more
than Pepper."

Pete fought shy of Hiram these days, and as the summer waned the young
farmer gradually became less watchful and expectant of trouble from the
direction of the west boundary of the Atterson Eighty.

But there was little breathing spell for him in the work of the farm.

"When we lay by the corn, you bet dad an' me goes fishing!" Henry
Pollock told Hiram, one day.

But it wasn't often that the young farmer could take half a day off for
any such pleasure.

"You've bit off more'n you kin chaw," observed Henry.

"That's all right; I'll keep chewing at it, just the same," returned
Hiram cheerfully.

For the truck crop was bringing them in a bigger sum of money than even
Hiram had expected. The season had been very favorable, indeed; Hiram's
vegetables had come along in good time, and even the barrels of sweet
corn he shipped to Crawberry brought a fair price--much better than he
could have got at the local cannery.

When the tomato pack came on, however, he did sell many baskets of his
"seconds" to the cannery. But the selected tomatoes he continued to ship
to Crawberry, and having established a reputation with his produce man
for handsome and evenly ripened fruit, the prices received were good all
through the season.

He saw the sum for tomatoes pass the hundred and fifty dollar mark
before frost struck the vines. Even then he was not satisfied. There was
a small cellar under the Atterson house, and when the frosty nights of
October came, Hiram dragged up the vines st