of this, might not one burn coarse grass if
necessary, or stalks of corn, or even ears of corn? No tree showed in
scores of miles, and often from smoke to tiny smoke it was farther than
one could see, even in the clear blue mocking morn; yet the little
houses were low and warm, and each had its makeshift for fuel, and in
each the husband ate, and the wife sewed, and the babes wept and
prattled as they have in generations past; and none looked on the sky
to call it treacherous.

One morning the sun rose with a swift bound into a cloudless field.
The air was mild, dead, absolutely silent and motionless. The wires
along the railway alone sang loudly, as though in warning--a warning
unfounded and without apparent cause. Yet the sighing in the short
grass was gone. In the still air the smokes of the town rose directly
upright; and answering to them faint, thin spires rose here and there
far out over the prairies, all straight, unswerving, ominous, terrible.
There was a great hush, a calm, a pause upon all things. The sky was
blue and cloudless, but at last it could not conceal the mockery it
bore upon its face, so that when men looked at it and listened to the
singing of the wires they stopped, and without conscious plan hurried
on, silent, to the nearest company.

Somewhere, high up in the air, unheralded, invisible, there were
passing some thin inarticulate sounds, far above the tops of the
tallest smoke spires, as though some Titan blew a far jest across the
continent to another near the sea, who answered with a gusty laugh,
sardonic, grim, foreknowing. Every horse free on the range came into
the _coulees_ that morning, and those which were fenced in ran up and
down excitedly. Men ate and smoked, and women darned, and babes
played. In a thousand homes there was content with this new land, so
wild at one time, but now so quickly tamed, so calm, so gentle, so
thoroughly subdued.

The sun came on, valiantly stripped bare, knowing what was to be.
Still louder rose the requiem of the wire. The sky smiled on. There
was no token to strike with alarm these human beings, their faculties
dulled by a thousand years of differentiation. "Peace and goodwill,"
said men; for now it was coming on to Christmastide. But the wire was
seeking to betray the secret of the sky, which was resolved to carry
war, to sweep these beings from the old range that once was tenantless!

To the north there appeared a long, black cloud, hangi