"

"On Deep Creek the tenant farmers are the biggest difficulty, your dad
told me last Sunday," said J.W. "They go to town when they go anywhere,
and not to church, either."

"I know," said Marty. "And I don't much blame 'em, from all I hear. But
Henderson changed that considerably in this community. He found out that
the tenants were just as human as the others, only they had the idea
that nobody cared about them, because they might be here to-day and gone
to-morrow. And, what do you think? I find tenant farmers around here are
beginning to take longer leases; one or two are about like dad's been
with your father--more partners than anything else. Every renter family
in this neighborhood comes to our church, and only three or four fight
shy of us at Valencia."

"All right," said J.W., drowsily. "Go to sleep now; I've got to inspect
that Holstein hotel in the morning, and I know what country hours are."

The next day J.W. drove off toward the big barns of his customer, and
left Marty deep in the mysteries of Sunday's sermon. Marty was yet a
very young preacher, and one sermon a week was all he could manage, as
several of his admirers had found out to his discomfiture, when one
Sunday they followed him from Ellis in the morning to Valencia at night.
But the "twicers" professed to enjoy it.

J.W.'s farmer was quite ready to talk about the new barn equipment and
how it was working, and he had remarkably few complaints, these more for
form's sake than anything else. That business was soon out of the way.

But Farmer Bellamy was interested in other things besides ventilators
and horse-forks.

"So you're a friend of our preacher," he said, in the questioning
affirmative of the deliberate country. "Well, he's quite a go-ahead
young fellow; you never get up early enough to find him working in a
cold collar. Maybe he's a mite ambitious, but I don't know."

J.W., as always, came promptly to Marty's defense. "He's not ambitious
for himself, Mr. Bellamy; I'll vouch for that. But I shouldn't wonder he
is ambitious about his work, and maybe that's not a bad thing for a
country preacher in these days."

"That's so," Mr. Bellamy assented. "But I doubt we keep him. He'll be
getting a church in town before long."

Now J.W. had no instructions from Marty, but he thought he might
venture. And he had been introduced to a few ideas that he had never met
in the days when he objected to Marty's taking a country circuit.

"I'll tel