“Look here," he said, and he put both hands on the fence rail as though it was a piano keyboard, crooking his fingers and dragging them on the bark of the rail. “You drag them over a field after plowing and disc-harrowing to break up the sods. When you get to the end of the field, the headland, you raise up the fingers, turn your rig and put them down again for another run across the field. Got it?"

“Gotcha", I said.

“Good, you’re a half a farmer already”

“One spring, Sam Acorn had McMaster working around the place and he put him to work harrowing with the tractor. McMaster was more used to a horse than a tractor so it took a lot of concentration keeping the outfit going straight and working the three-point hitch to lift the harrows up and down. He was getting along not bad until on one of his turns, he caught the two bottom strands of the barbed wire fence. Up the field he goes, dragging the wire fence with the stakes snapping off, wire an stakes in a vee behind the rig like the wake of a boat. Acorn comes running across the field waving his arms and finally got McMaster stopped. ‘Look, you!,’ he roars, pointing to the barbed-wire fence spread out on the field. ‘Man, oh man, Whatever were you thinking about?’

McMaster switched off the tractor, got down and turned around to the ruined fence. Then he drew himself up, straightened his cap like a baseball pitcher after a bad pitch and said, ‘I was minding my work.’

Great laugh from Paine. ‘Worthy of a Roman Senator,’he said. ‘He disdained incidentals in his devotion to duty.’

I think the story your grandfather liked best was about O’Brien when he traded horses with McGillivray out on the 7-mile road. Your grandfather knew McGillivray and I would rub my hands together and hitch up one shoulder the way McGillivray did. Anyway, O’Brien and McGillivray made a horse trade. Somewhere along the road, O’Brien got hold of some shine and after the dickering about the horses he headed home with the new horse and promptly went to sleep. Now this horse must have come from down Souris way because as soon as O’Brien went to sleep and the reins got slack, he turned around and headed for his stable, exactly opposite to the direction he should have been going. When O’Brien woke up from

his little snooze, he was miles and miles in the wrong direction. He 47