re than a harvest was this most
strenuous and colorful of all times ever known in the Bend; it had a
significance that uplifted him. It was American.

First Kurt began to load bags of wheat, as they fell from the whirring
combines, into the wagons. For his powerful arms a full bag, containing
two bushels, was like a toy for a child. With a lift and a heave he
threw a bag into a wagon. They were everywhere, these brown bags,
dotting the stubble field, appearing as if by magic in the wake of the
machines. They rolled off the platforms. This toil, because it was hard
and heavy, held Kurt for an hour, but it could not satisfy his enormous
hunger to make that whole harvest his own. He passed to pitching sheaves
of wheat and then to driving in the wagons. From that he progressed to a
seat on one of the immense combines, where he drove twenty-four horses.
No driver there was any surer than Kurt of his aim with the little
stones he threw to spur a lagging horse. Kurt had felt this when, as a
boy, he had begged to be allowed to try his hand; he liked the shifty
cloud of fragrant chaff, now and then blinding and choking him; and he
liked the steady, rhythmic tramps of hooves and the roaring whir of the
great complicated machine. It fascinated him to see the wide swath of
nodding wheat tremble and sway and fall, and go sliding up into the
inside of that grinding maw, and come out, straw and dust and chaff, and
a slender stream of gold filling the bags.

This day Kurt Dorn was gripped by the unknown. Some far-off instinct of
future drove him, set his spiritual need, and made him register with his
senses all that was so beautiful and good and heroic in the scene about
him.

Strangely, now and then a thought of Lenore Anderson entered his mind
and made sudden havoc. It tended to retard action. He trembled and
thrilled with a realization that every hour brought closer the meeting
he could not avoid. And he discovered that it was whenever this memory
recurred that he had to leave off his present task and rush to another.
Only thus could he forget her.

The late afternoon found him feeding sheaves of wheat to one of the
steam-threshers. He stood high upon a platform and pitched sheaves from
the wagons upon the sliding track of the ponderous, rattling
threshing-machine. The engine stood off fifty yards or more, connected
by an endless driving-belt to the thresher. Here indeed were whistle and
roar and whir, and the shout of laborers,