re was only the tall forbidding figure of Colonel Carrington.
Afterward I often remembered that dream.

CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST CROP

Each day brought much the same tasks at Fairmead until the disc-harrows
had rent up the clods, and with a seeder borrowed from a neighbor ten
miles away we drilled in the grain. While we worked the air above us was
filled with the beat of wings, as in skeins, wedges, and crescents the
wild fowl, varying from the tiny butter-duck to the brant goose and
stately crane, went by on their long journey from the bayous by the sunny
gulf to the newly thawn tundra mosses beside the Polar Sea. Legion by
legion they came up from the south and passed, though some folded their
weary pinions to rest on the way, and for a few short weeks every sloo was
dotted with their plumage. Then they went on, and we knew we should see no
more of them until the first blasts of winter brought them south again.
All this appealed to our sporting instincts, but time was precious then,
and though I glanced longingly at Harry's double-barrel, I did not lift it
from the wall. Every moment had its duties, and the thought of the
mortgage held us to our task.

Then there followed an interlude of building and well-digging, when we
sank down some thirty feet or so, and rammed the shaft sides with
nigger-head stones, while occasionally some of our scattered neighbors
rode twenty miles to lend us assistance. Meantime, a tender flush of
emerald crept across the crackling sod, and the birches unfolded their
tiny leaves until the bluff shimmered with tender verdure silver inlaid,
while the jack-rabbits, which had not as yet wholly put off their winter
robes of ermine, scurried, piebald and mottled, through its shadows. Then,
while the wheat grew taller, and the air warmer every day, the prairie
assumed an evanescent beauty which it presently put off again, for the
flush faded from the grasses, and only the birch bluff remained for a
refuge filled with cool neutral shadow in a sun-parched land. It was now
time for the hay cutting, and we drove the rusty mower here and there
across the dazzling plain, upon which willow grove and bluff stood cut off
from the levels beneath by glancing vapor, like islands rising out of a
shimmering sea. On much of it the grasses grew only to a few inches in
length, and we had therefore to seek winter food for our beasts in each
dried-up sloo, where they stood sometimes waist-high and even higher