bines to pick up the plump
brown sacks of wheat; and by a string of empty wagons coming in from the
road.

Olsen was rushing thirty combine threshers, three engine
threshing-machines, forty wagon-teams, and over a hundred men well known
to him. There was a guard around the field. This unprecedented harvest
had attracted many spectators from the little towns. They had come in
cars and on horseback and on foot. Olsen trusted no man on that field
except those he knew.

The wonderful wheat-field was cut into a thousand squares and angles and
lanes and curves. The big whirring combines passed one another, stopped
and waited and turned out of the way, leaving everywhere little patches
and cubes of standing wheat, that soon fell before the onslaught of the
smaller combines. This scene had no regularity. It was one of confusion;
of awkward halts, delays, hurries; of accident. The wind blew clouds of
dust and chaff, alternately clearing one space to cloud another. And a
strange roar added the last heroic touch to this heroic field. It was
indeed the roar of battle--men and horses governing the action of
machinery, and all fighting time. For in delay was peril to the wheat.

Once Kurt ran across the tireless and implacable Olsen. He seemed a man
of dust and sweat and fury.

"She's half cut an' over twenty thousand bushels gone to the railroad!"
he exclaimed. "An' we're speedin' up."

"Olsen, I don't get what's going on," replied Kurt. "All this is like a
dream."

"Wake up. You'll be out of debt an' a rich man in three days," added
Olsen, and went his way.

In the afternoon Kurt set out to work as he had never worked in his
life. There was need of his strong hands in many places, but he could
not choose any one labor and stick by it for long. He wanted to do all.
It was as if this was not a real and wonderful harvest of his father's
greatest wheat yield, but something that embodied all years, all
harvests, his father's death, the lifting of the old, hard debt, the
days when he had trod the fields barefoot, and this day when, strangely
enough, all seemed over for him. Peace dwelt with him, yet no hope.
Behind his calm he could have found the old dread, had he cared to look
deeply. He loved these heroic workers of the fields. It had been given
to him--a great task--to be the means of creating a test for them, his
neighbors under a ban of suspicion; and now he could swear they were as
true as the gold of the waving wheat. Mo