charge of the horses, and the party walked in
silence towards the wheat. It stretched before them in a vast
parallelogram, and while the oats were the pale gold of the austral,
there was the tint of the ruddier metal of their own Northwest in this.
It stood tall and stately, murmuring as the sea does, until it rolled
before a stronger puff of breeze in waves of ochre, through which the
warm bronze gleamed when its rhythmic patter swelled into deeper-toned
harmonies. There was that in the elfin music and blaze of color which
appealed to the sensual ear and eye, and something which struck deeper
still, as it did in the days men poured libations on the fruitful soil,
and white-robed priests blessed it, when the world was young.

Maud Barrington felt it vaguely, but she recognized more clearly, as
her aunt had done, the faith and daring of the sower. The earth was
very bountiful, but that wheat had not come there of itself; and she
knew the man who had called it up and had done more than bear his share
of the primeval curse which, however, was apparently more or less
evaded at Silverdale. Even when the issue appeared hopeless, the
courage that held him resolute in the face of others' fears, and the
greatness of his projects, had appealed to her, and it almost counted
for less that he had achieved success. Then glancing further across
the billowing grain she saw him--still, as it seemed it had always been
with him, amid the stress and dust of strenuous endeavor.

Once more, as she had seen them when the furrows were bare at seed
time, and there was apparently only ruin in store for those who raised
the Eastern people's bread, lines of dusty teams came plodding down the
rise. They advanced in echelon, keeping their time and distance with a
military precision, but in place of the harrows, the tossing arms of
the binders flashed and swung. The wheat went down before them, their
wake was strewn with gleaming sheaves, and one man came foremost
swaying in the driving-seat of a rattling machine. His face was the
color of a Blackfeet's, and she could see the darkness of his neck
above the loose-fronted shirt, and a bare blackened arm that was raised
to hold the tired beasts to their task. Their trampling, and the crash
and rattle that swelled in slow crescendo, drowned the murmur of the
wheat, until one of the machines stood still, and the leader, turning a
moment in his saddle, held up a hand. Then those that came behind