veral white
oaks of the right size for posts. He would have preferred cedars, of
course; but those trees were scarce on the Atterson tract--and they
might be needed for some more important job later on.

When he came up to the house at noon to feed the stock and make his own
frugal meal in the farm house kitchen, the posts were cut. After dinner
he harnessed the horse to the farm wagon, and went down for the posts,
taking the rolls of wire along to drop beside the fence.

The horse was a steady, willing creature, and seemed to have no tricks.
He did not drive very well on the road, of course; but that wasn't what
they needed a horse for.

Driving was a secondary matter.

Hiram loaded his posts and hauled them to the pasture, driving inside
the fence line and dropping a post wherever one had rotted out.

Yet posts that had rotted at the ground were not so easy to draw out, as
the young farmer very well knew, and he set his wits to work to make the
removal of the old posts easy of accomplishment.

He found an old, but strong, carpenter's horse in the shed, to act as
a fulcrum, and a seasoned bar of hickory as a lever. There was never
an old farm yet that didn't have a useful heap of junk, and Hiram had
already scratched over Uncle Jeptha's collection of many years' standng.

He found what he sought in a wrought iron band some half inch in
thickness with a heavy hook attached to it by a single strong link.
He fitted this band upon the larger end of the hickory bar, wedging it
tightly into place.

A short length of trace chain completed his simple post-puller. And he
could easily carry the outfit from place to place as it was needed.

When he found a weak or rotting post, he pulled the staples that held
the strands of wire to it and and then set the trestle alongside the
post. Resting the lever on the trestle, he dropped the end link of the
chain on the hook, looped the chain around the post, and hooked on with
another link. Bearing down on the lever brought the post out of the
ground every time.

With a long-handled spade Hiram cleaned out the old holes, or enlarged
them, and set his new posts, one after the other. He left the wires to
be tightened and stapled later.

It was not until the next afternoon that he worked down as far as the
water-hole. Meanwhile he had seen nothing of the neighbors and neither
knew, nor cared, whether they were watching him or not.

But it was evident that the Dickersons had kept