Free Acres of Unrest by Max Brand

cows out, will you? They are tryin’ to tell me that you been over at Vincent’s and have ordered fifty whole head, to say nothing of four of the finest-looking hosses that ever…” He paused here, for his eyes lighted upon the new team in front of the buckboard and the heaped packages that piled the wagon.
    A flash of real hope and desire to believe darted like lightning across the features of the rancher.

Chapter Twelve
    When matters moved for Peter, they moved very fast. It was not many days before the bank had received its money and the little, petty debts with tradesmen around Sumnertown had been cleared away. There then remained nothing between Mr. Ross Hale and a new life except the habit of sorrow that had fallen upon him.
    However, he could not be long in being aware of a new existence. For, when he wakened in the morning, he could hear the hammers, big and little, chanting in chorus out beyond the corral, where the carpenters were whacking up a new barn as fast as their hands could raise and put together with spikes of a healthy size. Moreover, he could not fail to take note of the string of ten mules that had been brought into the pasture. Ten well-selected mules, well fitted for dragging the five-share plow through the soil of the farming land in the bottom, the surface of which had not been touched these seven years and more.
    There were good tools of all kinds, which Peter had collected at the Leffingwell sale. They had cost nearly nothing, and they could be made to serve as well as new implements. For a true Western farmer will not pay 5¢ on the dollar for rusted implements. He feels that rust may cover up some mysteriously, hidden weakness. Yet, for all his dislike of rust,with the carelessness of the true exploiter of a new country, he scorns to take the small expense and trouble of housing his tools.
    But Peter was not proud. He made his offers against the junkman, and he won out at ridiculously low figures. He heard his father itemizing his purchases for the benefit of Andy Hale, when the latter came to call and ask the meaning of the strange signs of life that were being shown on his brother’s ranch. Included among the necessary implements, vehicles, cattle, and horses were the entire fittings of a blacksmith shop—complete, although second-hand—all the other contraptions necessary to make the heart of an ironworker swell with pride. He had even bought a whole young grove of fast-growing poplars and such shade makers to be set up in the yard around the old ranch house, so that it began to look as comfortable as ever. Sundry oaks and fig trees were set out where time would make them thrive and they would eventually displace the rank poplars. A load of second-hand furniture had been secured at the last great sale.
    Peter, who had gone to the house on his noiseless crutches, sneaked hastily back into the old shed where he had been renovating the second-hand furniture. Therefore he could not hear the concluding speeches of his proud and bewildered father. But these had to do with the erection of the new barn.
    “He went over to the Cumberwell place, where all of those barns and sheds have been standing, half finished, since old man Cumberwell died and his kids went East. He bought the whole shebang. Said that that timber was well seasoned and would do him fine, and, besides, it cost next to nothing. He ripped those buildings down and carted thestuff over here. And you can see for yourself, Andy, what’s happening!”
    Andrew had already seen from a distance, but he went out and examined with a hungry eye for detail. “It’s a sort of a second-hand ranch that you’re turning out here, Ross,” he said gravely.
    “It is,” said Ross Hale. “But Pete, he says that he ain’t too proud to use second-hand things, because, in a way of speaking, he’s a second-hand man. But his brains ain’t second-hand, old-timer. You can lay to that.”
    “They ain’t.” Andy Hale nodded. He had grown more