The plants were tender and it was necessary
to handle them carefully. The planter crawled slowly and painfully along,
and from the road looked like a wounded beast striving to make his way to
a hole in a distant wood. He crawled forward a little and then stopped and
hunched himself up into a ball-like mass. Taking the plant, dropped on the
ground by one of the plant droppers, he made a hole in the soft ground with
a small three-cornered hoe, and with his hands packed the earth about the
plant roots. Then he crawled on again.
Ezra the cabbage farmer had come west from one of the New England states
and had grown comfortably wealthy, but he would not employ extra labor for
the plant setting and the work was done by his sons and daughters. He was a
short, bearded man whose leg had been broken in his youth by a fall from
the loft of a barn. As it had not mended properly he could do little work
and limped painfully about. To the men of Bidwell he was known as something
of a wit, and in the winter he went to town every afternoon to stand in the
stores and tell the Rabelaisian stories for which he was famous; but when
spring came he became restlessly active, and in his own house and on the
farm, became a tyrant. During the time of the cabbage setting he drove his
sons and daughters like slaves. When in the evening the moon came up, he
made them go back to the fields immediately after supper and work until
midnight.
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