d
toward the back of the house.

Filled with nameless dread, Kurt rushed out. He saw nothing unusual,
heard nothing. Rapidly he walked out through the yard, and suddenly he
saw a glow in the sky above the barns. Then he ran, so that he could get
an unobstructed view of the valley.

The instant he obtained this he halted as if turned to stone. The valley
was a place of yellow light. He stared. With the wheat-fields all
burned, what was the meaning of such a big light? That broad flare had a
center, low down on the valley floor. As he gazed a monstrous flame
leaped up, lighting colossal pillars of smoke that swirled upward, and
showing plainer than in day the big warehouse and lines of freight-cars
at the railroad station, eight miles distant.

"My God!" gasped Kurt. "The warehouse--my wheat--on fire!"

Clear and unmistakable was the horrible truth. Kurt heard the roar of
the sinister flames. Transfixed, he stood there, at first hardly able to
see and to comprehend. For miles the valley was as light as at noonday.
An awful beauty attended the scene. How lurid and sinister the red heart
of that fire? How weird and hellish and impressive of destruction those
black, mountain-high clouds of smoke! He saw the freight-cars disappear
under this fierce blazing and smoking pall. He watched for what seemed
endless moments. He saw the changes of that fire, swift and terrible.
And only then did Kurt Dorn awaken to the full sense of the calamity.

"All that work--Olsen's sacrifice--and the farmers'--my father's
death--all for nothing!" whispered Kurt. "They only waited--those
fiends--to fire the warehouse and the cars!"

The catastrophe had fallen. The wheat was burning. He was ruined. His
wheatland must go to Anderson. Kurt thought first and most poignantly of
the noble farmers who had sacrificed the little in their wheat-fields to
save the much in his. Never could he repay them.

Then he became occupied with a horrible heat that seemed to have come
from the burning warehouse to all his pulses and veins and to his heart
and his soul.

This fiendish work, as had been forecast, was the work of the I.W.W.
Behind it was Glidden and perhaps behind him was the grasping, black
lust of German might. Kurt's loss was no longer abstract or
problematical. It was a loss so real and terrible that it confounded
him. He shook and gasped and reeled. He wrung his hands and beat his
breast while the tumult swayed him, the physical hate at last