seven
o'clock
Now , I 've always heard that he 's awful easy on poor men , but takes it out of the rich ones , so you can bet I went prepared to put up a hard-luck story . I wore a boiled shirt , goin ' down , but you bet I peeled it off before I went to see him , and I told him a pretty likely story about livin ' on a rented farm , and me with a big family , most of them sickly like their ma 's folks . He seemed awful sorry for me and wrote down my name and where I lived , and all that , and by George , I began to think he was goin ' to pay my way back or give me the price of a cow or somethin' . He husked out the lump quick enough , had me come at seven o'clock -- that man gets up as early as a farmer -- and when I came to settle up he says to me : ` Mr. Perkins , if I was you I would n't live on a rented farm any longer . I 'd go on one of my own -- the north half of seventeen there -- what 's the matter with that ? My secretary tells me you own that and there 's two hundred acres under cultivation , and then there 's that quarter-section of yours just across the Assiniboine , where you keep your polled Angus cattle . It really seems too bad for you to be grubbin along on a rented farm when you have four hundred and eighty acres of your own -- good land , too . '