It is a difficult thing and one requiring great tact quickly to become accepted in a rural community. The people of the valley had watched the advent of the Munroe family with a little animosity. The Battle farm was haunted. They had always considered it so, even those who laughed at the idea. Now a man came along and proved them wrong. More than that, he changed the face of the countryside by removing the accursed farm and substituting a harmless and fertile farm. The people were used to the Battle place as it was. Secretly they resented the change.
That Bert could remove this animosity was remarkable. Within three months he had become a part of the valley, a solid man, a neighbor. He borrowed tools and had tools borrowed from him. At the end of six months he was elected a member of the school board. To a large extent Bert’s own happiness at being free of his Furies made the people like him. In addition he was a kindly man; he enjoyed doing favors for his friends, and, more important, he had no hesitancy in asking favors.
At the store he explained his position to a group of farmers, and they admired the honesty of his explanation. It was soon after he had come to tile valley. T. B. Allen asked his old question.
“We always kind of thought that place was cursed. Lots of funny things have happened there. Seen any ghosts yet?”
Bert laughed. “If you take away all the food from a place, the rats will leave,” he said. “I took all the oldness and darkness away from that place. That’s what ghosts live on.”
“You sure made a nice looking place of it,” Allen admitted. “There ain’t a better place in the Pastures when it’s kept up.”
Bert had been frowning soberly as a new thought began to work in his mind. “I’ve had a lot of bad luck,” be said. “I’ve been in a lot of businesses and every one turned out bad. When I came down here, I had a kind of an idea that I was under a curse.” Suddenly he laughed delightedly at the thought that had come to him. “And what do I do? First thing out of the box, I buy a place that’s supposed to be under a curse. Well, I just happened to think, maybe my curse and the farm’s curse got to fighting and killed each other off. I’m dead certain they’ve gone, anyway.”
The men laughed with him. T. B. Allen whacked his hand down on the counter. “That’s a good one,” he cried. “But here’s a better one. Maybe your curse and the farm’s curse has mated and gone into a gopher hole like a pair of rattlesnakes. Maybe there’ll be a lot of baby curses crawling around the Pastures the first thing we know.”
The gathered men roared with laughter at that, and T. B. Allen memorized the whole scene so he could repeat it. It was almost like the talk in a play, he thought.
Three
EDWARD WICKS lived in a small, gloomy house on the edge of the county road in the Pastures of Heaven. Behind the house there was a peach orchard and a large vegetable garden. While Edward Wicks took care of the peaches, his wife and beautiful daughter cultivated the garden and got the peas and string beans and early strawberries ready to be sold in Monterey.
Edward Wicks had a blunt, brown face, and small, cold eyes almost devoid of lashes. He was known as the trickiest man in the valley. He drove hard deals and was never so happy as when he could force a few cents more out of his peaches than his neighbors did. When he could, he cheated ethically in horse trades, and because of his acuteness he gained the respect of the community, but strangely became no richer. However he liked to pretend that he was laying away money in securities. At school board meetings he asked the advice of the other members about various bonds, and in this way managed to give them the impression that his savings were considerable. The people of the valley called him “Shark” Wicks.
“Shark?” they said, “Oh, I guess he was worth around twenty thousand, maybe more. He’s nobody’s fool.”
And the truth was that Shark had never had more than five hundred dollars at one time in his life.
Shark’s greatest pleasure came of being considered a wealthy man. Indeed, he enjoyed it so much that the wealth itself became real to him. Setting his imaginary fortune at fifty thousand dollars, he kept a ledger in which he calculated his interest and entered records of his various investments. These manipulations were the first joy of his life.
An oil company was formed in Salinas with the purpose of boring a well in the southern part of Monterey county. When he heard of it, Shark walked over to the farm of John Whiteside to discuss the value of its stock. “I been wondering about that South County Oil Company,” he said.
“Well, the geologist’s report sounds good,” said John Whiteside. “I have always heard that there was oil in that section. I heard it years ago.” John Whiteside was often consulted in such matters. “Of course I wouldn’t put too much into it.”
Shark creased his lower lip with his fingers and pondered for a moment. “I been turning it over in my mind,” he said. “It looks like a pretty good proposition to me. I got about ten thousand lying around that ain’t bringing in what it should. I guess I’d better look into it pretty carefully. Just thought I’d see what your opinion was.”
But Shark’s mind was already made up. When he got home, he took down the ledger and withdrew ten thousand dollars from his imaginary bank account. Then he entered one thousand shares of Southern County Oil Company stock to his list of securities. From that day on he watched the stock lists feverishly. When the price rose a little, he went about whistling monotonously, and when the price dropped, he felt a lump of apprehension forming in his throat. At length, when there came a quick rise in the price of South County, Shark was so elated that he went to the Pastures of Heaven General Store and bought a black marble mantel clock with onyx columns on either side of the dial and a bronze horse to go on top of it. The men in the store looked wise and whispered that Shark was about to make a killing.
A week later the stock dropped out of sight and the company disappeared. The moment he heard the news, Shark dragged out his ledger and entered the fact that he had sold his shares the day before the break, had sold with a two thousand dollar profit.
Pat Humbert, driving back from Monterey, stopped his car on the county road in front of Shark’s house. “I heard you got washed out in that South County stock,” he observed.
Shark smiled contentedly. “What do you think I am, Pat? I sold out two days ago. You ought to know as well as the next man that I ain’t a sucker. I knew that stock was bum, but I also knew it would take a rise so the backers could get out whole. When they unloaded, I did too.”
“The hell you did!” said Pat admiringly. And when he went into the General Store he passed the information on. Men nodded their heads and made new guesses at the amount of Shark’s money. They admitted they’d hate to come up against him in a business deal.
At this time Shark borrowed four hundred dollars from a Monterey bank and bought a second-hand Fordson tractor.
Gradually his reputation for good judgment and foresight became so great that no man in the Pastures of Heaven thought of buying a bond or a piece of land or even a horse without first consulting Shark Wicks. With each of his admirers Shark went carefully into the problem and ended by giving startlingly good advice.
In a few years his ledger showed that he had accumulated one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars through sagacious investing. When his neighbors saw that he lived like a poor man, they respected him the more because his riches did not turn his head. He was nobody’s fool. His wife and beautiful daughter still cared for the vegetables and prepared them for sale in Monterey, while Shark attended to the thousand duties of the orchard.
In Shark’s life there had been no literary romance. At nineteen he took Katherine Mullock to three dances because she was available. This started the machine of precedent and he married her because her family and all of the neighbors expected it. Katherine was not pretty, but she had the firm freshness of a new weed, and the bridling vigor of a young mare. After her marriage she lost her vigor and her freshness as a flower does once it has received pollen. Her face sagged, her hips broadened, and she entered into her second destiny, that of work.