"It's working," she said when she stopped for inspection.
Ellis took a handful of ears, checked their condition, and looked into the machinery for signs of trouble. "It's picking," he corrected. "We'll see if it keeps doing it."
Hollis smiled despite her exhaustion. "You never let anybody celebrate."
"Celebrate after we shut it off safely."
They made three short passes, inspecting between them. The tractor ran smoothly. The picker needed an adjustment to a worn gathering component, which Ellis completed after proper shutdown. One wagon filled enough to show the system could actually produce a usable load. It was slow, inefficient, and physically demanding compared with the modern combine. But it produced corn while the expensive machine sat immobilized under an unexplained administrative order.
A reporter arrived shortly afterward. He worked for the county paper and had driven out after seeing a photograph of the crew circulating among local farmers. He asked whether he could speak to Hollis on camera with the old tractor behind her. She wanted nothing less. Her hair was tangled, her eyes burned, and she had not slept for more than ninety minutes. But Wes suggested she could explain the situation accurately before the dealership defined it for everyone else.
Hollis agreed to a short interview near the barn, away from the working machines. She showed the reporter the hold notice, the disputed amount, and the written questions she had sent to the dealer. She did not accuse anyone of a crime. She said the machine was financed, operating properly, and disabled during harvest over an invoice she had not agreed was valid. She described her concern about the timing and her efforts to preserve the crop. She asked the reporter to seek a response from Schaefer Implement, not simply print her anger as fact.
Then he pointed toward the 1978 tractor. "Is that really your backup?"
She looked at the worn hood. "It's part of the backup. One old picker can't save four hundred eighty acres by itself. But my father kept it ready enough that we could restore it. And the neighbors are doing the heavy lifting."
"So the headline isn't that you beat modern technology with a forty-seven-year-old tractor?"