“Open to sun all day, and sea’ll keep ’em warm at night. No frost. I’ll get taties here two weeks earlier than up-along.”
“Read it. Growers in Jersey has been doin’ it these years.”
Eli digested this information and leaned against the wall, watching Penaluna at work.
Eli liked the man’s air of patient power, also his economy of speech. He decided he was to be trusted. “You’re a good farmer, aren’t you?”
“What’s wrong with our place, Bosula?” Eli inquired.
“Under-manned,” said Penaluna. “Your father had two men besides himself and he worked like a bullock and was clever, I’ve heard tell. Now you’ve got but two, and not a head between ’em. Place is going back. Come three years the trash’ll strangle ’e in your beds.”
Eli took the warning calmly. “We’ll stop that,” he announced.
Penaluna subjected him to a hard scrutiny, spat on his palms, worked the crow-bar into a crevice and tried his weight on it.
Eli nodded and considered again. “Are you clever?”
Penaluna swung his bar from left to right; the rock stirred in its bed.
Eli’s eyes opened. That was the second time reading had been mentioned. What had that school-mastering business to do with real work like farming?
“Went to free-school at Truro,” Simeon explained. “There’s clever ones that writes off books and I reads ’em. There’s smart notions in books—sometimes. I got six books on farming—six brains.”
“Um-m,” muttered Eli, the idea slowly taking hold.
In return for advice given, he helped the farmer pile walls until sunset and not another word was interchanged. When he got home it was to learn that Ortho was in Devon with Pyramus and that he was to go to school in his stead.
Eli’s feelings were mixed. If Ortho had had a bad time he would undoubtedly have worse, but on the other hand he would learn to read and could pick other people’s brains—like Penaluna. He rode to Helston with his mother, grimly silent all the way, steeling himself to bear the rods for Bosula’s sake. But Ortho, by the dramatic manner of his exit, had achieved popularity when it was no longer of any use to him. Eli stepped in at the right moment to receive the goodly heritage.
Was he not own brother to the hero who had tricked Rufus into slicing himself across the leg and followed up this triumph by pummeling seven bells out of the detested usher and flooring him in his own classroom? The story had lost nothing in the mouths of the spectators. A half-minute scramble between a sodden hulk of a man and a terrified boy had swollen into a Homeric contest as full of incident as the Seven Years’ War, lasting half an hour and ending in Rufus lying on the floor, spitting blood and imploring mercy. Eli entered the school surrounded by a warm nimbus of reflected glory and took Ortho’s place at the bottom of the lowest form.