Free The Cross Timbers by Edward Everett Dale

them. We often had hot cakes for breakfast, with bacon, sorghum, and dried fruit, plus plenty of hot coffee; all of us gained weight.
    When, after a few weeks, most of the cotton had been picked Father decided it was about time to return home. We all felt that it had been a successful venture. Unfortunately, there had been several days when rain or misty weather made it impossible to pick cotton or gather corn. At such times George and I had fished or hunted, unless it was actually raining. Yet, on every working day we had made five or six dollars. Because our living had cost very little, by the time we started home we had saved seventy or eighty dollars. This was important money at a time when bacon sold for nine or ten cents a pound, and a good farm hand could be hired for fifteen dollars a month, plus board.
    Once we were back at Tom’s place we helped him pick the rest of his cotton. By that time our tenant, Mr. Pulliam, had finished harvesting his crop and had rented another small farm. To this he and his daughters, Adar and Idar removed, and we occupied our old home once more after an absence of nearly a year.
    We were all most happy to be back home, and the neighbors seemed pleased also. In “neighborly fashion” they told us that the shiftless Mr. Pulliam had allowed most of the blackberries and peaches to ripen and fall to the ground and rot. Plainly, hehad not kept up the fences or barn and sheds and he had allowed the weeds and sprouts to grow up in the fields.
    With characteristic energy our father set to work with the help of George and me to put the little farm and its improvements in good order again. He bought two or three milk cows, a couple of sows with their litters of pigs, and a dozen or more hens. The fences were mended, the fields plowed, the fruit trees checked for borers, and the orchard enlarged by our setting out forty or fifty more peach trees.
    During my stay with Mattie in Greer County I had done a bit of the cooking. This now helped, for we were keeping “bachelor’s hall” and had to do all of our own housework, including preparing our own meals. So-called mixes, and biscuits and rolls ready to pop into the oven, which have saved the reason of many young brides and the lives of their husbands, lay several decades in the future. In consequence, we had to deal with the raw materials in our culinary efforts.
    Father, whose experience went back to the days of the California gold rush, did most of the cooking, but I could do a fair job at “skillet slinging” myself, even if only ten years old. As George was a fair housekeeper we got along in excellent fashion and even entertained a good many persons at dinner or for overnight, including old Mr. Lopp and some of my father’s brethern in the Primitive Baptist Church.
    Toward spring Lucy, who was a remarkably good cook but a notoriously sloppy housekeeper, sponsored a surprise party for us. She conspired with seven or eight other women of the neighborhood to bring food for a sumptuous dinner and come to our bachelor home soon after breakfast to clean every inch of thehouse and prepare the noonday feast. They came in full force, each bringing her contribution of food.
    After looking the situation over, with two or three suggesting that maybe they should go home and clean up their own houses, they set to work. Some prepared the dinner, while others washed the windows and did a bit of scrubbing. Then, after finding a large stack of copies of the St. Louis Republic, they decided to paper the living room and small “side room” with newspapers. Because we did not have enough copies of The Republic to complete the project, one lady sent her son home to bring back an armload of another newspaper, to which she and her husband subscribed.
    It was a grand day, for two or three women had brought their children, and we had a lot of fun playing “hide-and-seek” and marbles while their mothers cooked and mixed