ust how many thousands of bushels of this marvellous crop were his
property. Through all these years of confusion, bickerings, open
hostility and, at last, actual warfare he had waited, nursing his
patience, calm with the firm assurance of ultimate success. The end, at
length, had come; he had entered into his reward and saw himself at last
installed in the place he had so long, so silently coveted; saw himself
chief of a principality, the Master of the Wheat.

The sprocket adjusted, the engineer called up the gang and the men took
their places. The fireman stoked vigorously, the two sack sewers resumed
their posts on the sacking platform, putting on the goggles that kept
the chaff from their eyes. The separator-man and header-man gripped
their levers.

The harvester, shooting a column of thick smoke straight upward,
vibrating to the top of the stack, hissed, clanked, and lurched forward.
Instantly, motion sprang to life in all its component parts; the header
knives, cutting a thirty-six foot swath, gnashed like teeth; beltings
slid and moved like smooth flowing streams; the separator whirred,
the agitator jarred and crashed; cylinders, augers, fans, seeders and
elevators, drapers and chaff-carriers clattered, rumbled, buzzed, and
clanged. The steam hissed and rasped; the ground reverberated a hollow
note, and the thousands upon thousands of wheat stalks sliced and
slashed in the clashing shears of the header, rattled like dry rushes in
a hurricane, as they fell inward, and were caught up by an endless belt,
to disappear into the bowels of the vast brute that devoured them.

It was that and no less. It was the feeding of some prodigious monster,
insatiable, with iron teeth, gnashing and threshing into the fields
of standing wheat; devouring always, never glutted, never satiated,
swallowing an entire harvest, snarling and slobbering in a welter of
warm vapour, acrid smoke, and blinding, pungent clouds of chaff. It
moved belly-deep in the standing grain, a hippopotamus, half-mired in
river ooze, gorging rushes, snorting, sweating; a dinosaur wallowing
through thick, hot grasses, floundering there, crouching, grovelling
there as its vast jaws crushed and tore, and its enormous gullet
swallowed, incessant, ravenous, and inordinate.

S. Behrman, very much amused, changed places with one of the sack
sewers, allowing him to hold his horse while he mounted the sacking
platform and took his place. The trepidation and jostling