"Sam, will you send him a message from me?"
Another nod.
"Tell him that I love him," Michael breathed the words eagerly. His heart remembered kindness from Buck more than any other lighting of his sad childhood. "Tell him that I want him--that I need him! Tell him that I want him to make an appointment to meet me somewhere and let us talk this plan of mine over. I want him to go in with me and help me make that farm into a fit place to take people who haven't the right kind of homes, where they can have honest work and good air and be happy! Will you tell him?"
And Sam nodded his head emphatically.
"An' Jim'll help too ef Buck goes. That's dead sure!" Sam volunteered.
"And Sam, I'm counting on you!"
"Sure thing!" said Sam.
Michael tramped all over the place with Sam, showing him everything and telling all his plans. He was very familiar with his land now. He had planned the bog for a cranberry patch, and had already negotiated for the bushes. He had trimmed up the berry bushes in the garden himself during his various holiday trips, and had arranged with a fisherman to dump a few haulings of shellfish on one field where he thought that kind of fertilizer would be effective. He had determined to use his hundred-dollar graduation present in fertilizer and seed. It would not go far but it would be a beginning. The work he would have to get some other way. He would have but little time to put to it himself until late in the summer probably, and there was a great deal that ought to be done in the early spring. He would have to be contented to go slow of course, and must remember that unskilled labor is always expensive and wasteful; still it would likely be all he could get. Just how he would feed and house even unskilled labor was a problem yet to be solved.
It was a day of many revelations to Sam. For one thing even the bare snowy stretch, of wide country had taken on a new interest to him since Michael had been telling all these wonderful things about the earth. Sam's dull brain which up to this time had never busied itself about anything except how to get other men's goods away from them, had suddenly awakened to the wonders of the world.
It was he that recognized a little colony of cocoons on the underside of leaves and twigs and called attention to them.