Part 15 (1/2)

”Not quite,” replied Marty; ”we can't. We're too busy growing the food for you town folks. But we keep up a pretty stiff pace, for the preacher; I have no time hanging on my hands.”

”I should think not,” J.W. commented, ”if you try to run everything.

Mr. Drury always seems to have lots of time, just because he makes the rest of us run the works in Delafield First.”

”Oh, he does, does he?” said Marty, shortly, who knew something of the older minister's strategy. ”That's according to how you look at it. I'm not above learning from him, and I don't run everything, either. But I'm there, or thereabouts, most of the time.”

”How do you get time for your study and your sermons, then,” queried J.

W., ”if you're on the go so much?”

Marty turned a quizzical look at J.W. ”My beloved chum, how did you and I get time for our studies at Cartwright?” he said. ”Besides, I'm making one hand wash the other. The social life here, for instance, used to be pretty bad, before Henderson came--that's the preacher whose place I took. It was pulling away from the church; now it draws to the church.

Henderson started that. The people who are my main dependence in the other affairs are mostly the same people I can count on in the Sunday school and League and the preaching service. The more we do the better it is for what we do Sundays.”

”Then, there's another Because these people and I know one another so well, I couldn't put on airs in the pulpit if I wanted to. I've just got to preach straight, and I won't preach a thing I can't back up myself. I use country ill.u.s.trations; show them their own world. It's one big white mark for the Farwell farm, as you might suppose, that I know the best side of country life, though I don't advertise your real estate.”

”I know,” said J.W. ”But don't you find country people pretty hard to manage? That's our experience at the store. They are particular and critical, and think they know just what they want.”

”They do too,” Marty a.s.serted, ”Why shouldn't they? I believe I can tell you one big difference between the city boy and the country. You've been both; see if I'm right. The country boy minds his folks, and his teacher. But everything else minds him. He is boss of every critter on the place, from the hens to the horses, whenever he has anything to do with them at all. So he learns to think for them, as well as for himself. In the city the boy has no chance to give orders--he's under orders, all the time; the traffic cop, the truant officer, the boss in the shop or the office, the street car conductor, the janitor--everybody bosses him and he bosses nothing, except his kid brothers and sisters.

So he may come to be half cringer and half bully. The country boy is not likely to be much afraid, and he soon learns that if he tries to boss even the boys without good reason it doesn't pay. Maybe that's the reason so many country boys make good when they go to the city.”

”And the reason why a city boy like me,” suggested J.W., ”would be a misfit in the country.”

”Oh, you,” scoffed Marty. ”You don't count. You're a half-breed. But, as I meant to say, you're right about country folks. They are a little close, maybe. They are more independent in their business than town people, but they learn how to work together; they exchange farm work, and work the roads, and they are fairly dependent on one another for all social life.”

”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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sented. ”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 tell you something, Mr. Bellamy,” he said. ”Marty is a farmer's boy who loves the country. If he has the right sort of backing, I shouldn't wonder he stayed here a good long time. He's got enough plans ahead for this circuit of his.”

Mr. Bellamy laughed. ”He has that; if he waits to get 'em all going we're sure of him for a while. Why, he wants to make the church the most important business in the whole neighborhood; and, what's more, he's getting some of us to see it that way too.”

”Yes, I guess that's his dream,” J.W. said. ”And it's so much better than the reality up around where I used to live that I wouldn't head him off if I were you.”

”Head him off!” Mr. Bellamy laughed again. ”Why, do you know what he did in the fall, when some of us told him we couldn't do much for missions?