There's farmers and then there's farmers. Year after year, Farmer Bob raised fields full of grain, harvested them and shipped them off to market while struggling to make ends meet never knowing if he would have enough money to buy seed and fertilizer for the next year's planting while on the farm next door, Farmer Ted hardly grew any crops at all and what he grew always looked pathetic. Farmer Bob bought used trucks and farm equipment and used it for many years while Farmer Ted traded all his trucks and equipment in every year for new equipment.
A lot of the other farmers in the area didn't have nice things to say about Farmer Ted but Farmer Bob had never had a problem with him and just figured he probably inherited a bunch of money or something and the others were just jealous because Farmer Ted didn't have to work as hard as everyone else.
When the day came to harvest his first field of grain, Farmer Bob cranked his beat up old harvester and started driving it towards the field but before he got there it began to cough, sputter and then died. A quick check of his suspicions from years of maintaining diesel farm equipment confirmed that there was water in the fuel so Farmer Bob walked back a few miles to his maintenance shed where he picked up tools, fresh diesel fuel and a new fuel filter.
It was late in the day by the time Farmer Bob arrived at his field but when he got there the field had already been harvested. All that was there was Hunter Joe who was hunting doves. Farmer Bob had allowed Hunter Joe to hunt his newly harvested fields for many years because Joe was always a very careful hunter and because Joe always brought Bob and his family plenty of fresh killed birds after ever hunt. "What are you doing here?" Joe asked, "You're scaring off all the birds."
"I came to harvest my field," Bob replied, "but it looks as if somebody already beat me to it."
"Yeah," Joe replied, "I saw Ted leaving on his new harvester just as I got here. You know in 30 years of knowing him, Farmer Ted has never let me hunt on his farm."
"Did Ted see you?" Bob asked.
"No way, I was still back there in the woods as he drove over the hill."
"Keep this between me and you, understand?"
Joe nodded his head in agreement.
Farmer Bob went out earlier than usual the next morning and put some water finding paste on a stick and pushed it to the bottom of the fuel tank on his harvester. If there was water in his fuel again the paste would change colors. The stick turned so Bob ran to the locker where he keeps the dynamite he usually just uses for blowing stumps out of the ground, taped a few pieces to the stick, jumped in his pickup truck and rushed to beat Farmer Ted to the next field.
When Bob arrived there he ran into the field and pushed the end of the stick into the ground so that the dynamite was just a couple of feet above the ground, parked his truck in some nearby woods and waited.
The local newspaper headline read, Farmer Ted Killed in Harvester Explosion. As most folks don't know where one property ends and the next property begins nobody ever bothered to investigate. And if any of the locals did know, their distrust of Farmer Ted was enough to keep them from ever bringing it up.
