To the south, through a break in the wooded hillside, he obtained a far- reaching view of the river valley as it lay, to the east and to the west. The prospect was delightful.
Here and there, on the farther bank of the river, which rose less abruptly there than on this side, lay several cheerful looking farmsteads. The white dwellings and outbuildings dotted the checkered fields of green and brown.
Cowbells tinkled in the distance, for the weather tempted farmers to let their cattle run in the pastures even so early in the season. A horsewhinnied shrilly to a mate in a distant field.
The creaking of the heavy wheels of a laden farm-cart was a mellow sound in Hiram's ears. Beyond a fir plantation, high on the hillside, the sharply outlined steeple of a little church lay against the soft blue horizon.
"A beauty-spot!" Hiram muttered. "What a site for a home! And yet people want to build their houses right on an automobile road, and in sight of the rural mail box!"His imagination began to riot, spurred by the outlook and by the nearer prospect of wood and hillside. The sun now lay warmly upon him as he sat upon a stump and drank in the beauty of it all.
After a time his ear, becoming attuned to the multitudinous voices of the wood, descried the silvery note of falling water. He arose and traced the sound.
Less than twenty yards away, and not far from the bluff, a vigorous rivulet started from beneath the half-bared roots of a monster beech, and fell over an outcropping boulder into a pool so clear that sand on its bottom, worked mysteriously into a pattern by the action of the water, lay revealed.
Hiram knelt on a mossy rock beside the pool, and bending put his lips to the water. It was the sweetest, most satisfying drink, he had imbibed for many a day.
But the morning was growing old, and Hiram wanted to trace the farther line of the farm. He went down to the river, crossed the open meadow again where they had built the campfire the morning before, and found the deeply scarred oak which stood exactly on the boundary line between the Atterson and Darrell tracts.
He turned to the north, and followed the line as nearly as might be. The Darrell tract was entirely wooded, and when he reached the uplands he kept on in the shadowy aisles of the sap-pines which covered his neighbor's property.
He came finally to where the ground fell away again, and the yellow, deeply-rutted road lay at his feet. The winter had played havoc with the automobile track.
The highway was unfenced and the bank dropped fifteen feet to thebeaten path. A leaning oak overhung the road and Hiram lingered here, lying on its broad trunk, face upward, with his hat pulled over his eyes to shield them from the sunlight which filtered through the branches.
This land hereabout was beautiful. The boy could appreciate the beauty as well as the utility of the soil. It was so pleasing to the eye that he wished with all his heart it had been his own land he had surveyed.
"And I'll not be a tenant farmer all my life, nor a farm-foreman, as father was," determined the boy. "I'll get ahead. If I work for the benefit of other people for a few years, surely I'll win the chance in time to at last work for myself."In the midst of his ruminations a sound broke upon his ear--a jarring note in the peaceful murmur of the woodland life. It was the thud of a horse's hoofs.
Not the sedate tunk-tunk of iron-shod feet on the damp earth, but an erratic and rapid pounding of hoof-beats which came on with such startling swiftness that Hiram sat up instantly, and craned his neck to see up the road.
"That horse is running away!" gasped the young farmer, and he swung himself out upon the lowest branch of the leaning tree which overhung the carttrack, the better to see along the highway.
