ded
to reconcile Kurt to his father.

The night had grown still except for the murmuring of the men. Smoke
veiled the horizon. Kurt felt an intense and terrible loneliness. He was
indeed alone in the world. A hard, tight contraction of throat choked
back a sob. If only he could have had a word with his father! But no
grief, nothing could detract from the splendid truth of his father's
last message. In the black hours soon to come Kurt would have that to
sustain him.

CHAPTER XIII

The bright sun of morning disclosed that wide, rolling region of the
Bend to be a dreary, blackened waste surrounding one great wheat-field,
rich and mellow and golden.

Kurt Dorn's neighbor, Olsen, in his kind and matter-of-fact way, making
obligation seem slight, took charge of Kurt's affairs, and made the
necessary and difficult decisions. Nothing must delay the harvesting and
transporting of the wheat. The women folk arranged for the burial of old
Chris Dorn.

Kurt sat and moved about in a gloomy kind of trance for a day and a
half, until his father was laid to rest beside his mother, in the little
graveyard on the windy hill. After that his mind slowly cleared. He kept
to himself the remainder of that day, avoiding the crowd of harvesters
camping in the yard and adjacent field; and at sunset he went to a
lonely spot on the verge of the valley, where with sad eyes he watched
the last rays of sunlight fade over the blackened hills. All these hours
had seemed consecrated to his father's memory, to remembered acts of
kindness and of love, of the relation that had gone and would never be
again. Reproach and remorse had abided with him until that sunset hour,
when the load eased off his heart.

Next morning he went out to the wheat-field.

* * * * *

What a wonderful harvesting scene greeted Kurt Dorn! Never had its like
been seen in the Northwest, nor perhaps in any other place. A huge pall
of dust, chaff, and smoke hung over the vast wheat-field, and the air
seemed charged with a roar. The glaring gold of the wheat-field appeared
to be crisscrossed everywhere with bobbing black streaks of
horses--bays, blacks, whites, and reds; by big, moving painted machines,
lifting arms and puffing straw; by immense wagons piled high with
sheaves of wheat, lumbering down to the smoking engines and the
threshers that sent long streams of dust and chaff over the lifting
straw-stacks; by wagons following the com