On Dick’s face, at lunch, there was no sign of trouble over the Harvest Group; nor could anybody have guessed that Jeremy Braxton’s visit had boded1 anything less gratifying than a report of unfailing earnings2. Although Adolph Weil had gone on the early morning train, which advertised that the business which had brought him had been transacted3 with Dick at some unheard of hour, Graham discovered a greater company than ever at the table. Besides a Mrs. Tully, who seemed a stout4 and elderly society matron, and whom Graham could not make out, there were three new men, of whose identity he gleaned5 a little: a Mr. Gulhuss, State Veterinary; a Mr. Deacon, a portrait painter of evident note on the Coast; and a Captain Lester, then captain of a Pacific Mail liner, who had sailed skipper for Dick nearly twenty years before and who had helped Dick to his navigation.
The meal was at its close, and the superintendent6 was glancing at his watch, when Dick said:
“Jeremy, I want to show you what I’ve been up to. We’ll go right now. You’ll have time on your way to the train.”
“Let us all go,” Paula suggested, “and make a party of it. I’m dying to see it myself, Dick’s been so obscure about it.”
Sanctioned by Dick’s nod, she was ordering machines and saddle horses the next moment.
“What is it?” Graham queried8, when she had finished.
“Oh, one of Dick’s stunts9. He’s always after something new. This is an invention. He swears it will revolutionize farming—that is, small farming. I have the general idea of it, but I haven’t seen it set up yet. It was ready a week ago, but there was some delay about a cable or something concerning an adjustment.”
“There’s billions in it... if it works,” Dick smiled over the table. “Billions for the farmers of the world, and perhaps a trifle of royalty10 for me... if it works.”
“But what is it?” O’Hay asked. “Music in the dairy barns to make the cows give down their milk more placidly11?”
“Every farmer his own plowman while sitting on his front porch,” Dick baffled back. “In fact, the labor13-eliminating intermediate stage between soil production and sheer laboratory production of food. But wait till you see it. Gulhuss, this is where I kill my own business, if it works, for it will do away with the one horse of every ten-acre farmer between here and Jericho.”
In ranch14 machines and on saddle animals, the company was taken a mile beyond the dairy center, where a level field was fenced squarely off and contained, as Dick announced, just precisely15 ten acres.
“Behold,” he said, “the one-man and no-horse farm where the farmer sits on the porch. Please imagine the porch.”
In the center of the field was a stout steel pole, at least twenty feet in height and guyed very low.
From a drum on top of the pole a thin wire cable ran to the extreme edge of the field and was attached to the steering16 lever of a small gasoline tractor. About the tractor two mechanics fluttered. At command from Dick they cranked the motor and started it on its way.
“This is the porch,” Dick said. “Just imagine we’re all that future farmer sitting in the shade and reading the morning paper while the manless, horseless plowing17 goes on.”
Alone, unguided, the drum on the head of the pole in the center winding18 up the cable, the tractor, at the circumference19 permitted by the cable, turned a single furrow20 as it described a circle, or, rather, an inward trending spiral about the field.
“No horse, no driver, no plowman, nothing but the farmer to crank the tractor and start it on its way,” Dick exulted21, as the uncanny mechanism22 turned up the brown soil and continued unguided, ever spiraling toward the field’s center. “Plow12, harrow, roll, seed, fertilize23, cultivate, harvest—all from the front porch. And where the farmer can buy juice from a power company, all he, or his wife, will have to do is press the button, and he to his newspaper, and she to her pie-crust.”
“All you need, now, to make it absolutely perfect,” Graham praised, “is to square the circle.”
“Yes,” Mr. Gulhuss agreed. “As it is, a circle in a square field loses some acreage.”
Graham’s face advertised a mental arithmetic trance for a minute, when he announced: “Loses, roughly, three acres out of every ten.”
“Sure,” Dick concurred25. “But the farmer has to have his front porch somewhere on his ten acres. And the front porch represents the house, the barn, the chicken yard and the various outbuildings. Very well. Let him get tradition out of his mind, and, instead of building these things in the center of his ten acres, let him build them on the three acres of fringe. And let him plant his fruit and shade trees and berry bushes on the fringe. When you come to consider it, the traditionary method of erecting26 the buildings in the center of a rectangular ten acres compels him to plow around the center in broken rectangles.”
Gulhuss nodded enthusiastically. “Sure. And there’s always the roadway from the center out to the county road or right of way. That breaks the efficiency of his plowing. Break ten acres into the consequent smaller rectangles, and it’s expensive cultivation27.”
“Wish navigation was as automatic,” was Captain Lester’s contribution.
“Or portrait painting,” laughed Rita Wainwright with a significant glance at Mr. Deacon.
“Or musical criticism,” Lute24 remarked, with no glance at all, but with a pointedness28 of present company that brought from O’Hay:
“Or just being a charming young woman.”
“What price for the outfit29?” Jeremy Braxton asked.
“Right now, we could manufacture and lay down, at a proper profit, for five hundred. If the thing came into general use, with up to date, large-scale factory methods, three hundred. But say five hundred. And write off fifteen per cent, for interest and constant, it would cost the farmer seventy dollars a year. What ten-acre farmer, on two-hundred-dollar land, who keeps books, can keep a horse for seventy dollars a year? And on top of that, it would save him, in labor, personal or hired, at the abjectest minimum, two hundred dollars a year.”
“But what guides it?” Rita asked.
“The drum on the post. The drum is graduated for the complete radius— which took some tall figuring, I assure you—and the cable, winding around the drum and shortening, draws the tractor in toward the center.”
“There are lots of objections to its general introduction, even among small farmers,” Gulhuss said.
Dick nodded affirmation.
“Sure,” he replied. “I have over forty noted30 down and classified. And I’ve as many more for the machine itself. If the thing is a success, it will take a long time to perfect it and introduce it.”
Graham found himself divided between watching the circling tractor and casting glances at the picture Paula Forrest was on her mount. It was her first day on The Fawn31, which was the Palomina mare32 Hennessy had trained for her. Graham smiled with secret approval of her femininity; for Paula, whether she had designed her habit for the mare, or had selected one most peculiarly appropriate, had achieved a triumph.
In place of a riding coat, for the afternoon was warm, she wore a tan linen33 blouse with white turnback collar. A short skirt, made like the lower part of a riding coat, reached the knees, and from knees to entrancing little bespurred champagne34 boots tight riding trousers showed. Skirt and trousers were of fawn-colored silk corduroy. Soft white gauntlets on her hands matched with the collar in the one emphasis of color. Her head was bare, the hair done tight and low around her ears and nape of neck.
“I don’t see how you can keep such a skin and expose yourself to the sun this way,” Graham ventured, in mild criticism.
“I don’t,” she smiled with a dazzle of white teeth. “That is, I don’t expose my face this way more than a few times a year. I’d like to, because I love the sun-gold burn in my hair; but I don’t dare a thorough tanning.”
The mare frisked, and a breeze of air blew back a flap of skirt, showing an articulate knee where the trouser leg narrowed tightly over it. Again Graham visioned the white round of knee pressed into the round muscles of the swimming Mountain Lad, as he noted the firm knee-grip on her pigskin English saddle, quite new and fawn-colored to match costume and horse.
When the magneto on the tractor went wrong, and the mechanics busied themselves with it in the midst of the partly plowed35 field, the company, under Paula’s guidance, leaving Dick behind with his invention, resolved itself into a pilgrimage among the brood-centers on the way to the swimming tank. Mr. Crellin, the hog-manager, showed them Lady Isleton, who, with her prodigious36, fat, recent progeny37 of eleven, won various naïve encomiums, while Mr. Crellin warmly proclaimed at least four times, “And not a runt, not a runt, in the bunch.”
Other glorious brood-sows, of Berkshire, Duroc-Jersey38, and O. I. C. blood, they saw till they were wearied, and new-born kids and lambs, and rotund does and ewes. From center to center, Paula kept the telephones warning ahead of the party’s coming, so that Mr. Manson waited to exhibit the great King Polo, and his broad-backed Shorthorn harem, and the Shorthorn harems of bulls that were only little less than King Polo in magnificence and record; and Parkman, the Jersey manager, was on hand, with staffed assistants, to parade Sensational39 Drake, Golden Jolly, Fontaine Royal, Oxford40 Master, and Karnak’s Fairy Boy—blue ribbon bulls, all, and founders41 and scions42 of noble houses of butter-fat renown43, and Rosaire Queen, Standby’s Dam, Golden Jolly’s Lass, Olga’s Pride, and Gertie of Maitlands—equally blue-ribboned and blue-blooded Jersey matrons in the royal realm of butter-fat; and Mr. Mendenhall, who had charge of the Shires, proudly exhibited a string of mighty44 stallions, led by the mighty Mountain Lad, and a longer string of matrons, headed by the Fotherington Princess of the silver whinny. Even old Alden Bessie, the Princess’s dam, retired45 to but part-day’s work, he sent for that they might render due honor to so notable a dam.
As four o’clock approached, Donald Ware46, not keen on swimming, returned in one of the machines to the Big House, and Mr. Gulhuss remained to discuss Shires with Mr. Mendenhall. Dick was at the tank when the party arrived, and the girls were immediately insistent47 for the new song.
“It isn’t exactly a new song,” Dick explained, his gray eyes twinkling roguery, “and it’s not my song. It was sung in Japan before I was born, and, I doubt not, before Columbus discovered America. Also, it is a duet—a competitive duet with forfeit48 penalties attached. Paula will have to sing it with me.—I’ll teach you. Sit down there, that’s right.—Now all the rest of you gather around and sit down.”
Still in her riding habit, Paula sat down on the concrete, facing her husband, in the center of the sitting audience. Under his direction, timing49 her movements to his, she slapped her hands on her knees, slapped her palms together, and slapped her palms against his palms much in the fashion of the nursery game of “Bean Porridge Hot.” Then he sang the song, which was short and which she quickly picked up, singing it with him and clapping the accent. While the air of it was orientally catchy50, it was chanted slowly, almost monotonously51, but it was quickly provocative52 of excitement to the spectators:
“Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena,
Jong-Jong, Keena-Keena,
Yo-ko-ham-a, Nag-a-sak-i,
Kobe-mar-o—hoy!!!”
The last syllable53, hoy, was uttered suddenly, explosively, and an octave and more higher than the pitch of the melody. At the same moment that it was uttered, Paula’s and Dick’s hands were abruptly54 shot toward each other’s, either clenched55 or open. The point of the game was that Paula’s hands, open or closed, at the instant of uttering hoy, should match Dick’s. Thus, the first time, she did match him, both his and her hands being closed, whereupon he took off his hat and tossed it into Lute’s lap.
“My forfeit,” he explained. “Come on, Paul, again.” And again they sang and clapped:
“Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena,
Jong-Jong, Keena-Keena,
Yo-ko-ham-a, Nag-a-sak-i,
Kobe-mar-o—hoy!!!”
This time, with the hoy, her hands were closed and his were open.
“Forfeit!—forfeit!” the girls cried.
She looked her costume over with alarm, asking, “What can I give?”
“A hair pin,” Dick advised; and one of her turtleshell hair pins joined his hat in Lute’s lap.
“Bother it!” she exclaimed, when the last of her hair pins had gone the same way, she having failed seven times to Dick’s once. “I can’t see why I should be so slow and stupid. Besides, Dick, you’re too clever. I never could out-guess you or out-anticipate you.”
Again they sang the song. She lost, and, to Mrs. Tully’s shocked “Paula!” she forfeited56 a spur and threatened a boot when the remaining spur should be gone. A winning streak57 of three compelled Dick to give up his wrist watch and both spurs. Then she lost her wrist watch and the remaining spur.
“Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena,” they began again, while Mrs. Tully remonstrated58, “Now, Paula, you simply must stop this.—Dick, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
But Dick, emitting a triumphant59 “Hoy!” won, and joined in the laughter as Paula took off one of her little champagne boots and added it to the heap in Lute’s lap.
“It’s all right, Aunt Martha,” Paula assured Mrs. Tully. “Mr. Ware’s not here, and he’s the only one who would be shocked.—Come on, Dick. You can’t wi............