d clack of the returning coffeepot, boiling up
the hill at an unwonted speed. And she waved her hand to Wes as he
came past; but he was bent over the wheel and did not even look round
for her, only banged the little car round to the back furiously.
Something in his attitude warned her, and she felt the old
almost-forgotten devil of her fear leap to clutch her heart.

Presently he came round the house, and she hardly dared to look at
him; she could not ask. But there was no need. He flung his hat on the
ground before her with a gesture of frantic violence. When he spoke
the words came in a ferment of fury:

"That skunk of a Harrison says he won't bring the thresher up here
this year; claims the road's too rough and bridges are too weak for
the engine."

"Oh, Wes--what'll you do?"

"Do! I'm not going to do anything! I'm not going to haul my wheat down
to him--I'll see him in hell and back again before I will."

"But our wheat!"

"The wheat can rot in the fields! I won't be bossed and blackguarded
by any dirty little runt that thinks because he owns the only
threshing outfit in the neighbourhood that he can run my affairs."

He raged up and down, adding invective, vituperation.

"But you can't, Wes--you can't let the wheat go to waste." For Annie
had absorbed the sound creed of the country, that to waste foodstuff
is a crime as heinous as murder.

"Can't I? Well, we'll see about that!"

She recognized from his tone that she had been wrong to protest; she
had confirmed him in his purpose. She picked up her sewing and tried
with unsteady fingers to go on with it, but she could not see the
stitches for her tears. He couldn't mean it--and yet, what if he
should? She looked up and out toward those still fields of precious
ore, dimming under the purple shadows of twilight, and saw them a
black tangle of wanton desolation. The story Aunt Dolcey had told her
about the potatoes of last year was ominous in her mind.

He was sitting opposite her now, his head in his hands, brooding,
sullen, the implacable vein in his forehead swollen with triumph,
something brutish and hard dimming his clean and gallant youth.

"That's the way he's going to look as he gets older," thought Annie
with a touch of prescience. "He's going to change into somebody
else--little by little. This is the worst spell he's ever had. And all
this mean blood's going to live again in my child. It goes on and on
and on."

She leaned against the porch