“Pete’s off with the bit in his mouth—­haven’t seen him for three days,” answered Sam as he lifted me and swung me way out into the middle of my own clover-pink bed.  It was starred with sweet, white blossoms, having been treated according to Eph’s directions and those of Grandmother Nelson’s book.

“Peter off?  Where?  What’s happened, Sam?” I exclaimed, with astonished anxiety.

“The play,” answered Sam, calmly, as he lit his cob pipe and blew a ring of smoke.  “It hit him in the middle of the night before last, and he wrote me a note.  Mammy grubs him, and I haven’t seen him since.  I’ve paid the Byrd a half interest in the next young that happens to us not to go down the hill to the shack, and we’re all just going on as usual.”

“Maybe I’d better not go, either,” I said, with awe and sympathy for Peter fairly dropping from the words as I uttered them.

“Betty,” said Sam as he looked at me through a ring of smoke that the warm wind blew away over our heads, “you run just a little more sense to the cubic foot of dirt than the average, it seems to me.  Come on down and watch them begin to cut wheat.  It is one week ahead of time, so I can get all the harvesters and not a grain will be lost.  They say it’ll run sixty bushels to the acre.  Think of that, with only a thirty-six record to beat in the Valley.  It is that Canadian cross.  The Commissioner is down there, and so is your admirer, Chubb.  He wastes many hours riding over here to see you when you are in town on frivolous pursuits.”

“Frivolous!” I echoed as we went up the path back of the house; and on our way over the hill I told him about Tolly and Edith.  Sam laughed; he always does when I want him to; but his eyes were grave after a second.

“The mating season is a troublesome time, isn’t it, Betty?” he asked, as he swung me to the top rail of the fence, vaulted over it, and held up his arms to lift me down on the other side; but I sat poised in midair to argue his proposition.

“It ought not to be, Sam,” I said, with an experienced feeling rising in my mind and voice at thus discussing fundamentals with a man that could break a wheat record and be attended by the agricultural envoys of the United States government.  “People ought to sensibly pick each other from their needs, and not act unintelligent about it.”

At which perfectly sage remark a strange thing happened to Samuel Foster Crittenden.  He laid his head down on the rail beside my knee and laughed until he almost shook me from my perch.  It made me so furious that I slipped past him and ran on ahead.  I vaulted the next fence in fine style and landed among the Commissioner and Dr. Chubb and the tobacco-juice neighbors, who had come to see the output of the first book-grown acre.  I did not speak again to Sam that day until he tucked in Dr. Chubb beside me for a spin over to Spring Hill, leaving the doctor’s old roan for a week’s complimentary grazing on Sam’s east meadow of thick blue-grass, grown through a rock-lime dressing that all the neighbors had assured him would kill the land outright.