Youliangchuan is a river valley corridor from northwest to southeast, the widest point is only three or four miles, but there are nearly seventy miles from south to north, connecting the official road of Beizheng County and Ruqizhai, in this valley and the gurgling flow of the Liang River in parallel, and by the river channel continues to extend to the north.

The river is full of river floodplains that have been washed away for thousands of years, and the fat is so fat that you can pinch out the oil when you grab it, and the wild grass on the side of the river grows fast and is as tall and short as a person, and it is easy to look at it as green as it is greedy. However, after walking down for dozens of miles, except for the small post stations in the north and south of Chuankou, there are hardly a few households in sight, even if they are a little populated, there are three or five small courtyards and more than a dozen low grass houses, and there is not much popularity. Shang Cheng passed by here for the first time in late autumn last year, and when he saw this sparse and desolate scene, he curiously asked others, how could it be that no one wanted to cultivate such a good land? At that time, the little officer surnamed Sun of the escort team said that when the branch of their Sun clan moved to the territory of Yanshan, this Sichuan Road was still a famous place, and the white rice grown was so famous that even the emperor of the Jinluan Palace knew about it, and selected it as tribute rice. Until now, in the folk songs of Yanshan, there are still the names of Liang Mi one by one, "Li who stayed in the town, Mi by Liang, Gao Xiao's big pear, and Aunt Yi County"...... It's just that today's Yuliang rice is no longer the authentic white rice produced in this Sichuan Road. Since the late Tang Dynasty began to strand the grassland, it has become one of the important passages for them to go south to the Central Plains, and they will come to loot once every one or two years. It wasn't until more than ten years ago that the imperial court built a village at the mouth of Beichuan, and fought a few battles with the Tuqi people, making them suffer a little loss, which was considered to be the end of the thoughts of the Tuqi people, and this Sichuan Road had the peace of the past ten years. At the beginning, the imperial court also had plans to reclaim the land by immigrating from Liangchuan, but people's memories of the scourge of the Tuqi people were too deep, and from the east to the Bohai Sea and the west to Yumen, there were warning signs of the Tuqi people every year, so even if the conditions given by the imperial court were favorable, not many people were willing to relocate. Most of these farmers in front of them are the families of the border soldiers, not immigrants, and they burn the wasteland and cultivate the land, not to grow any Youliang rice, but to collect more grain to subsidize the family......

At noon, the pack team had already walked out of the forty miles in the Sichuan Road and rushed to the Ruqi B-shaped military station to eat noon.

Because the imperial court wanted to raise troops in the north, last winter and this spring, every twenty or thirty miles in the Sichuan Road, a new military station was built for the pack team to fight and rest, all of them were wooden fences and wooden watchtowers surrounded by brand-new cowhide tents, and the newly raised mud and straw houses, stables, grain and grass warehouses surrounded the military station, arranged neatly and neatly.

The outpost had already informed the station, and the station was ready to welcome the packers, so when the packees arrived at the station slowly in the spring breeze, the nests of soup, white rice, white flour, barley cakes, and miscellaneous grains had already been prepared, and the buckets and basins were arranged in a row in front of the dining room outside the station.

Naturally, the two frontier soldiers who escorted the pack team would not eat with the packers. They have walked back and forth countless times on this road, and they know each military station well, and when they enter the soldiers' room, they will smell and inquire about it, and they will immediately scold or smile and smile in the small room, and the quality of the food in the small room must be higher than that of the big room outside, but this is also a meal for dozens of people, no matter how capable the Huotou Army is, it is impossible to satisfy everyone who is a soldier.

Most of the packers were not in a hurry to get food, but were distressed to unload the goods from the back of the pack horses, and then bring water and fodder, and first serve the pack horses to eat and drink, and those animals belonging to the packmen were better paid, and many people secretly fed the best part of the forage to their horses.

Shang Cheng didn't have any intention of taking advantage of the public, but the bean cake he broke for the three-year-old horse was obviously much larger than the cake he gave to the other pack horses. When the three-year-old horse eats the forage, he fills half a pocket of wheat bran and bean dregs, breaks a small piece of green salt and crushes it with the palm of his hand and mixes it in the concentrate feed, and then hangs the bag on the three-year-old horse's head to "add food" to it. The three-year-old snorted contentedly as he ate, and his front hooves kicked the ground a few times in merry......

He patted the animal on the head, then wiped the mud off his hands, took out the bowl of the sea from the sack on the sack, and walked towards the big house.

The front of the house was no longer as crowded as before, and there was not much food left in the bucket and basin. He didn't even think what kind of food there was, so he handed the frontier soldier in charge a copper coin, and then stretched out the bowl and waited for him to serve him soup. With a wave of his hand, a large spoonful of soup poured into his bowl, and the rolled waves rushed straight out of the bowl to make a single amount of more than enough, but there was neither a single bit of oil and water, nor a few green cabbage leaves. Fortunately, a copper coin will definitely not have only a spoonful of soup, and the "master" scooped him a small half spoonful of green vegetables, and knocked him into the bowl as soon as he dipped it in the dry sauce bowl. He grabbed two more black coarse grain nests in the last tub, and turned back to see how the three-year-old was eating and drinking.

It was only a dozen or twenty paces from the big house to the place where the pack horses gathered, and before he could reach the place, he had swallowed two nests that were not much bigger than his fist, and by the way he had poured a small half bowl of soup—by this time he had seen the three-year-old horse from above the edge of the bowl. The beast chewed the essence in his pocket, and with a pocket still hanging on his head, he kept squeezing a pack horse as strong as it was, and turned around and stomped at the horse......

Seeing that the three-year-old horse was playing vigorously, he didn't go back. He picked up his coat and shouldered it, looked for a place where no one was around the horses, and didn't care whether there was ash or dirt on the ground or anything else, sat down with one butt, stretched one leg and curled one leg to make himself sit more comfortably, reached out and took out chopsticks from the jacket, wiped them back and forth on the sleeve twice, and stirred them one by one in the soup bowl. After stirring for a long time, he took a sip of soup and smacked his mouth to try the taste, and a slight smile appeared on the corner of his mouth, and then he took out a dry, hard and black vegetable dumpling from the blanket and gnawed it.

Someone came up to him and handed him three wheat cakes.

It's Liu Laozhu.

He didn't take the cake, shook his head, and didn't speak. The aroma of wheat cakes made his throat pound.

Liu Laozhu stubbornly handed the cake to him and said, "Take it." ”

He stared at the brown wheat cakes and swallowed his saliva, lowered his head and continued to nibble on the vegetable dumplings, and said vaguely: "No, I can't get used to eating it......" He is not reluctant to make money, the key is that the three wheat cakes here are sold for two yuan, which is twice the price of other places, and he is not willing to accept this exploitation. And this cake fried purely with wheat is not as good as the dry rice made by Lianniang with wheat ribbon, and then take the green onion and dip it in the sauce, that taste, don't change it for a fairy! What's more, this palm-sized cake is really useless for his amount of food, and it is easy to spoil his stomach......

Liu Laozhu didn't say anything more, just stuffed three cakes into his blanket, and turned around to take care of his pack horse.

"Uncle," Shang Cheng stopped him, "You come, I want you to discuss something." ”

Liu Laozhu walked back again, squatted sideways opposite Shang Cheng, holding his knees with his sleeves cageed, waiting for Shang Cheng to speak.

Shang Chengxian sighed in his heart. Uncle Zhu is good at everything, but this respect for himself as a life-saving benefactor is really unbearable; I can't persuade him, and I won't change it if I persuade him......

"Uncle, when I finish my errand, I'm going to go home and take care of Lianniang." Shang Cheng said. He had already eaten two vegetable dumplings, and his stomach was still empty. Alas, no matter how strong the dumplings are, no matter how much they are sufficient, after all, they can't be hungry. He hesitantly took out a wheat cake, stuffed it into his mouth and took a bite, the smell of the grain immediately made him feel comfortable all over his body, and even his stomach, which was still protesting just now, seemed to calm down. He chewed the cake carefully, letting the fragrance of wheat swirl in his mouth, and it took him half a day to swallow the soft crumbs. His stomach immediately squirmed uncontrollably, as if to welcome the real food warmly, or as if urging him to send more food.

"Hmm." Liu Laozhu simply replied.

"I'm not going to bring the horse back, how about you take care of it for me?" He thought that when he went back to take care of his wife, there would be no need for the pack horse to go back with him, and that he could keep it in the pack caravan and continue to earn money; And handed over the three-year-old horse to Uncle Zhu to take care of, and he was also relieved that Uncle Zhu was an old master of driving horses, and his ability to handle livestock was one of the best in the entire pack team.

"Hmm."

"Then let's talk about it, you will take forty percent of the horse's foot strength." He couldn't keep Uncle Zhu busy; He also carefully considered the forty percent of the members, and also referred to other people's ready-made examples: there is such an example in the pack caravan, the owner of the pack horse does not serve, only sends the pack horse, and then uses the money hired by the yamen to hire the people who take care of the horses, and the packer does not necessarily have to worry more about one or two horses, and can get an extra 30 to 3 to 5 percent of the foot strength money, of course, why not.

Liu Laozhu slowly shook his head. It seems that he does not agree with Shang Cheng's suggestion.

Shang Cheng didn't want to argue with Liu Laozhu about the distribution of the money, and he didn't feel that he was sure to convince Liu Laozhu, so he simply didn't mention it. He thought that after he got the money, it would not be too late for him to discuss it with Liu Laozhu, and at that time he could completely shoehorn the money into Liu Laozhu.

He was just about to ask Liu Laozhu if he had anything to bring to Yue'er, when he heard someone shout in surprise: "Ha, I'll just say, you must still eat these...... Not? Wheat cakes? Looking up, Zhao Shishi was holding a big bowl in one hand and a few white buns in the other, and was walking over with a smile.

Shi Shi pulled half of the sharp vegetables in his bowl into Shangcheng's bowl, and then turned out large slices of white raw oil from under the vegetable pile with chopsticks, and sandwiched a few slices of soup that were thrown into Shangcheng, and said in his mouth: "You are such a big man, you eat these things every day, aren't you hungry?" ”

Shang Cheng smiled and didn't speak. Not hungry? He was often dizzy and dizzy with hunger! But no matter how hungry he is, he has to endure it, he can't get used to his own temperament! He had to save up the money to pay off the debts, save the money to raise the mother-in-law and the doll, and he also wanted to save more money to buy a piece of land around Huojiabao, and then slowly dig in the field, maybe in another decade or two, he would also become a respected small landowner......

He didn't stop the stone from putting food in his bowl, but asked, "Didn't you lose all your money?" How do you have money to buy meat? I'm afraid this meal will cost five or six cents. ”

"Five or six Wen?" Shi pouted and said, "This dish, this meat, this oil soup, and this white bread are only five or six Wen?" It's a total of 14 texts! ”

"Where did you get the money for such a good thing?"

"I borrowed it from Jiang Si." The stone bit the piece of meat and said indistinctly, "I'll pay him back when I get paid." ”

Shang Cheng knew that the stone said "Jiang Si", this was the person he had seen in the Huo family on the day of the eldest girl's wedding. This man is now in this caravan. There are also rumors in the pack team that this Jiang Si is very remarkable, and he is the only guy in the pack team who has killed the Tu Ji people, one by one, he went to the grassland with a caravan to do business when he was young, and chopped over two horse thieves with his own hands.

"How do you ......?"

In a sentence, Shang Cheng only spit out two words, and suddenly disappeared. His brows furrowed suddenly, his eyes suddenly narrowed into a line, and his dark eyes stared at the slope behind the horses—he seemed to have seen a few bits of light flickering twice in the woods on the hillside, and then disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Liu Laozhu muttered a word, stood up and prepared to look at his pack horse.

At the moment when he stood up, Shang Cheng threw away the cakes, bowls and chopsticks in his hand, and as soon as he stretched out his arm, he grabbed his belt, and lifted him to the ground one by one, and his mouth was already hoarse, roaring with all his might:

"Get down!"

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The wise man is crisscrossing the country with iron and blood! Please watch the desert masterpiece "Jiangshan"!

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