of the machine
shook him till his teeth chattered in his head. His ears were shocked
and assaulted by a myriad-tongued clamour, clashing steel, straining
belts, jarring woodwork, while the impalpable chaff powder from the
separators settled like dust in his hair, his ears, eyes, and mouth.

Directly in front of where he sat on the platform was the chute from
the cleaner, and from this into the mouth of a half-full sack spouted an
unending gush of grain, winnowed, cleaned, threshed, ready for the mill.

The pour from the chute of the cleaner had for S. Behrman an immense
satisfaction. Without an instant's pause, a thick rivulet of wheat
rolled and dashed tumultuous into the sack. In half a minute--sometimes
in twenty seconds--the sack was full, was passed over to the second
sewer, the mouth reeved up, and the sack dumped out upon the ground, to
be picked up by the wagons and hauled to the railroad.

S. Behrman, hypnotised, sat watching that river of grain. All that
shrieking, bellowing machinery, all that gigantic organism, all the
months of labour, the ploughing, the planting, the prayers for rain, the
years of preparation, the heartaches, the anxiety, the foresight, all
the whole business of the ranch, the work of horses, of steam, of men
and boys, looked to this spot--the grain chute from the harvester into
the sacks. Its volume was the index of failure or success, of riches or
poverty. And at this point, the labour of the rancher ended. Here, at
the lip of the chute, he parted company with his grain, and from here
the wheat streamed forth to feed the world. The yawning mouths of the
sacks might well stand for the unnumbered mouths of the People, all
agape for food; and here, into these sacks, at first so lean, so
flaccid, attenuated like starved stomachs, rushed the living stream
of food, insistent, interminable, filling the empty, fattening the
shrivelled, making it sleek and heavy and solid.

Half an hour later, the harvester stopped again. The men on the sacking
platform had used up all the sacks. But S. Behrman's foreman, a new
man on Los Muertos, put in an appearance with the report that the wagon
bringing a fresh supply was approaching.

"How is the grain elevator at Port Costa getting on, sir?"

"Finished," replied S. Behrman.

The new master of Los Muertos had decided upon accumulating his grain in
bulk in a great elevator at the tide-water port, where the grain ships
for Liverpool and the East took o