'll get to Congress yet!"

But the children were a dangerous topic for overstrained nerves at this
particular time, so Alida told Jim that she had put the black hen to set
and she thought they'd have some chickens at last. Jim smoked while Alida
washed the dishes, and when Jim's back was turned she examined the lock on
the door--a good push would open it. Then she looked at the brown bureau,
and the recklessness of despair came into her eyes. In the room beyond,
Jim was reading a two weeks' old newspaper and smoking. He looked like a
lazy ranchman taking his ease.

As she went about her household tasks that morning, Alida noticed things
as she had never noticed them before. A sunbeam came through the
shutterless window of the house and writhed and quivered on the wall as if
it were a live thing. She read a warning in this, and in the color of the
sun, that was red, like blood, and in the whirr of the grasshoppers, that
was sinister and threatening. The creeks had dried, and their slimy beds
crept along the willows like sluggish snakes. Gaunt range-cattle bellowed
in their thirst, and the parched earth crackled beneath the sun that hung
above the house like a flaming disk. Sometimes she sank beneath the burden
of it; then she would wring her hands and call on God to help them; they
were beyond human power. She and Jim were alone all the morning; they did
not again refer to what they knew would happen. He read his old paper and
she put her house in order. She did it with especial care. It was meet to
have things seemly in the house of the dead. And every time she glanced at
Jim she repressed the desire to fling herself on his breast and cry out
the anguish that consumed her.

At noon she brought the children home to dinner, and afterwards Jim taught
them to throw the lasso and played buffalo with them. Alida did not trust
herself to watch them; she stayed in the kitchen and saw the sunbeam grow
pale with the waning of the day, the day whose minutes dragged like lead,
yet had rushed from her, leaving her the night to face. At sundown she
cooked supper, but she no longer knew what she did. A crazy agility had
taken possession of her and she spun about the kitchen, doing the same
errand many times, finding herself doing always something different from
that she had set about doing. The molten day was burning itself out like a
fever; hot gusts of air beat up from the earth, but the woman who waited
felt chilled to the marrow,