Free Big Wheat by Richard A. Thompson

Nearby, half a dozen wagons with two-horse teams hitched to them also sat idle, and at least twenty men were milling about. Charlie’s mental arithmetic told him that meant at least a thousand acres of wheat to be threshed, as the usual ratio was fifty acres per worker. That was, if the farmer hired enough men.
    A couple of the threshermen saw Avery’s truck and began motioning him to drive over to the Case. But Avery stopped in the main yard, got out, and pulled a circular gear and a toolbox from behind the seat. Then he made a show of taking his time walking over to the eager group.
    The farmer, Bjorkland, was easy to spot. He was the man with the best, newest-looking work clothes, the biggest belly, and the loudest mouth. By the time Charlie caught up, Avery was crawling into the guts of the Case and Bjorkland was in the middle of a major tirade.
    “Who you think is going to pay all these men for standing around with their thumbs up their asses? Me? It’s after eight o’clock already. We should have gotten fifty acres gleaned by now.” He held up his pocket watch and pointed to it importantly, and Charlie wondered if he really cared about the time, or if he just wanted to be sure everybody knew he had a fancy watch. He also wondered if Mr. Bjorkland was really going to pay anybody, whether they worked or not. He looked an awful lot like the man whose bacon was in Charlie’s backpack.
    “I seem to recall asking if you wanted to pay the extra cost for having me work all night to fix your gear, Mr. Bjorkland. You didn’t like that idea much.”
    “An extra two dollars, just for a little lamp oil? I’ll see you in hell first.”
    “No, you see me at eight o’clock, which is exactly what I promised you. Charlie, bring me that crescent wrench, will you?”
    Charlie was stunned at being asked to help. He ran with the wrench over to the disabled machine and poked his head inside the main chassis, where Avery had taken a very uncomfortable-looking position. It was a thrilling view, much better than he had gotten from the tiny panel on the top of the Case. He had seen plenty of threshing machines before, but he had never had a close look at the inside. All the parts he had read about or seen drawings of —the concaves, the shaker trays, the main cylinders, the transfer gears—were there for him to see, more wonderful than he had imagined but also somehow simpler, less mystical. Not hard to understand at all, once you knew the basic logic of it.
    “You must be replacing the auxiliary gear that drives the Windstacker,” he said.
    “I’m impressed. How did you figure that out?”
    “It’s the only subassembly that isn’t coated with chaff and dust, so it must have just been worked on. And nothing in that assembly but the drive gear ever breaks. I think Case didn’t use good enough steel in the original casting.”
    “You seem to know quite a lot. Do you know where the power takeoff for the whole machine comes out?”
    “Sure, it’s right—”
    “Go make sure this eager, oh-so-important, hot shot farmer doesn’t engage it before I’m out of here, okay?”
    “Absolutely.” He left the wrench where it was, jerked his body back out of the wonderful innards, and climbed up on top of the machine, where a nervous-looking separator operator was already gripping the main clutch lever.
    “I don’t need anybody else up here, kid.”
    “Yes, you do. You have a man inside your machine, and I’m here to see that you don’t jump the gun and get him killed. You want to fight me over that, we might as well start now. But either way, you’re going to take your hand off that lever.”
    The man gave Charlie a hard stare and made no move of any kind. He was a good bit smaller than Charlie, and he looked like he realized that. When Charlie crouched down in a sort of linebacker position, arms wide and hands ready to grab, the man let go of the lever and settled into a defensive pout.
    “Thank you,” said Charlie.
    “Go