That story, and others, made quite a flurry for a month or so, but then it quieted down and you could see that the Heaths had become one of us and belonged to the valley. Bert went over and had quite a talk with Heath and the women-folks took to calling Mrs. Heath on the telephone, with some of those who were listening in breaking in to say a word or two, thereby initiating Mrs. Heath into the round-robin telephone conversations that are going on all the time on our valley party line, with it getting so that you have to bust in on them and tell them to get off the line when you want to make an important call.
We had Heath out with us on our coon hunts that fall and some of the young bloods started paying attention to Heath's daughter. It was almost as if the Heaths were old-time residents.
As I've said before, we've always been real fortunate in getting in good neighbours.
When things are going well, time has a way of flowing along so smoothly that you aren't conscious of its passing, and that was the way it was in the valley.
We had good years, but none of us paid much attention to that. You don't pay much attention to the good times, you get so you take them for granted. It's only when bad times come along that you look back and realize the good times you have had.
A year or so ago I was just finishing up the morning chores when a car with a New York licence pulled up at the barnyard gate. It isn't very often we see an out-of-state licence plate in the valley, so I figured that it probably was someone who had gotten lost and had stopped to ask directions. There was a man and woman in the front seat and three kids and a dog in the back seat and the car was new and shiny.
I was carrying the milk up from the barn and when the man got out I put the pails down on the ground and waited for him.
He was a youngish sort of fellow and he looked intelligent and he had good manners. He told me his name was Rickard and that he was a New York newspaperman on vacation and had dropped into the valley on his way out west to check some information.
It was the first time, so far as I knew, that the valley had ever been of any interest news-wise and I said so. I said we never did much here to get into the news.
"It's no scandal," Rickard told me, "if that is what you're thinking. It's just a matter of statistics."
There are a lot of times when I don't catch a situation as quickly as I should, being a sort of deliberate type, but it seems to me now that as soon as he said statistics I could see it coming.
"I did a series of farm articles a few months back," said Rickard, "and to get my information I had to go through a lot of government statistics. I never got so sick of anything in my entire life."
"And?" I asked, not feeling too well myself.
"I found some interesting things about this valley," he went on. "I remember that I didn't catch it for a while. Went on past the figures for a ways. Almost missed the significance, in fact. Then I did a doubletake and backed up and looked at them again. The full story wasn't in that report, of course. Just a hint of something. So I did some more digging and came up with other facts."
I tried to laugh it off, but he wouldn't let me.
"Your weather, for one thing," he said. "Do you realize you've had perfect weather for the past ten years?"
"The weather's been pretty good," I admitted.
"It wasn't always good. I went back to see."
"That's right," I said. "It's been better lately."
"Your crops have been the best they've ever been in the last ten years."
"Better seed," I said. "Better ways of farming."
He grinned at me. "You guys haven't changed your way of farming in the last quarter century." And he had me there, of course.
"There was an army worm invasion two years ago," he said. "It hit all around you, but you got by scot-free."
"We were lucky. I remember we said so at the time."
"I checked health records," he said. "Same thing once again. For ten solid years. No measles, no chickenpox, no pneumonia. No nothing. One death in ten full yearscomplications attendant on old age."
"Old Man Parks," I said. "He was going on to ninety. Fine old gentleman."
"You see," said Rickard. I did see. The fellow had the figures. He had tracked it down, this thing we hadn't even realized, and he had us cold.
"What do you want me to do about it?" I asked.
"I want to talk to you about a neighbour."
"I won't talk about any of my neighbours. Why don't you talk to him yourself?"
"I tried to, but he wasn't home. Fellow down the road said he'd gone into town. Whole family had gone into town."
"Reginald Heath," I said. There wasn't much sense in playing dumb with Rickard, for he knew all the angles.
"That's the man. I talked to folks in town. Found out he'd never had to have any repair work done on any of his machinery or his car. Has the same machinery he had when he started farming. And it was worn out then."
"He takes good care of it," I told him. "He keeps it tinkered up."
"Another thing," said Rickard. "Since he's been here he hasn't bought a drop of gasoline."
I'd know the rest of it, of course, although I'd never stopped to think about it. But I didn't know about the gasoline. I must have shown my surprise, for Rickard grinned at me.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"A story."
"Heath's the man to talk to. I don't know a thing to help you."
And even when I said it I felt easy in my mind. I seemed to have an instinctive faith that Heath could handle the situation, that he'd know just what to do.
But after breakfast I couldn't settle down to work. I was pruning the orchard, a job I'd been putting off for a year or two and that badly needed doing. I kept thinking of that business of Heath not buying gasoline and that night I'd found the tractor ploughing by itself and how smooth both the car and tractor ran despite all the noise they made.
So I laid down my pruning hook and shears and struck out across the fields. I knew the Heath family was in town, but I don't think it would have made any difference to me if they'd been at home. I think I would have gone just the same. For more than ten years now, I realized, I'd been wondering about that tractor and it was time that I found out.
I found the tractor in the machine shed and I thought maybe I'd have some trouble getting into it. But I didn't have a bit. I slipped the catches and the hood lifted up and I found exactly what I had thought I'd find, except that I hadn't actually worked out in my mind the picture of what I'd find underneath that hood.
It was just a block of some sort of shining metal that looked almost like a cube of heavy glass. It wasn't very big, but it had a massive look about it, as if it might have been a heavy thing to lift. You could see the old bolt holes where the original internal combustion engine had been mounted and a heavy piece of some sort of metal had been fused across the frame to seat that little power plant. And up above the shiny cube was an apparatus of some sort. I didn't take the time to find out how it worked, but I could see that it was connected to the exhaust and I knew it was a dingus that disguised the power plant. You know how in electric trains they have it fixed up so that the locomotive goes chuff-chuff and throws out a stream of smoke. Well, that was what that contraption was. It threw out little puffs of smoke and made a tractor noise.
I stood there looking at it and I wondered why it was, if Heath had an engine that worked better than an internal combustion engine, he should have gone to so much trouble to hide the fact he had it. If I'd had a thing like that, I knew, I'd make the most of it. I'd get someone to back me and go into production and in no time at all I'd be stinking rich. And there'd been nothing in the world to prevent Heath from doing that. But instead he'd fixed the tractor so it looked and sounded like an ordinary tractor and he'd fixed his car to make so much noise that it hid the fact it had a new type motor. Only he had overdone it. He'd made both the car and tractor make more noise than they should. And he'd missed an important bet in not buying gasoline. In his place I'd bought the stuff, just the way you should, and thrown it away or burned it to get rid of it.