Chapter 19

Since Seth had braved everything and dared everything, going so far even as to hire harvest hands to help him, taking every possible chance upon the yield of this harvest, as a gambler stakes his all upon the last throw of the dice, fortune seemed at last to come his way, and it promised a yield which eclipsed his wildest dreaming.

His heart grew light as he listened to the rustling of the corn and into his tired eyes, beginning to be old, there crept so warm a glow that the farm hands stood and stared at him as they came trooping in hot and dusty from the fields.

They wondered what could have come over him to give to his worn and faded face so nearly the look of youth.

"The corn is fine, John, isn't it?" he asked of a gray-haired man who sat at one corner of the rough table, mopping his forehead with a large bandana handkerchief, not too clean.

John put the handkerchief back into his pocket and fell upon the meal Seth set before him.

"It's fine enough," said he, "it'll be the finest crop ever raised in these here parts if the hot winds don't come."

After a little while he said again:

"If the hot winds don't come."

Seth set a plate of bread down by him with a crash.

"The hot winds!" he cried. "The hot winds!"

Man as he was he clasped his hands together and caught them apart, wringing them.

"I had forgotten all about the hot winds!" he moaned. "I had forgotten all about the hot winds!"

* * * * *

The softness of the spring air gave place to heat, to extreme heat, sudden and blighting. A copper sun blazed in a copper sky.

The cooling breezes under the influence of the heat changed to scorching winds. These winds blew menacingly through the rustling stalks of the strong green corn.

For one long day they laughed defiance, holding firmly erect their brave heads upon which the yellow tassels were beginning to thrust themselves aloft in silken beauty; and Seth, watching, braced himself with the hope that they would somehow stand the ordeal, that the heat might abate, that in some way, by the special finger of Providence, perhaps, the threatened ruin might be warded off, that a cooling breeze might come blowing up from the Gulf or a shower might fall and he could still go back home.

On the second day the heat had not abated. It had rather increased. The burning winds blew stronger. They raged with a sudden fury, died down to a whisper, and raged again.

John, when he led the field hands in, shook his head and took his place at the table in silence.

Seth, setting their meal before them, crept to the door and looked out.

He turned faint and sick at heart at the sight of the fields, for the tassels had drooped and the broad green leaves were slowly changing to a parched and withered brown, parched and withered as his face, which had been bared to the heat of the Kansas prairies for so many years, parched and withered as his heart which had borne the brunt of sadness and sorrow and separation until the climax was reached and it could bear no more.

On the third day the hot winds grew vengeful. They swept across the prairies with a hissing sound as of flames sizzling through the heat of a furnace. The tassels, burnt now to a dingy brown, hung in wisps. The leaves drooped like tired arms. They no longer sang in the wind. They rattled, a hoarse, harsh rattle premonitory of death.

Far and near the fields lay scorched, withered, burnt to a crisp as if by the fast and furious blast of a raging prairie fire.

There was no longer need of harvest hands.

The harvest, gathered by the hot winds, was ended. The ruin was complete.

Their mission accomplished, the winds died down suddenly as they had risen and passed away across the barren prairies in a sigh.

Then up came the cooling breezes from the Gulf, light, zephyry clouds gathered, shut off the brazen sunlight and burst into a grateful shower, which descended upon the parched and deadened fields of corn.

But Seth!

Flung on his knees by the side of the bed in the corner of the hole in the ground, his face buried in his arms, he listened to the patter of those raindrops on the corn.

His eyes were dry; but a spring had broken somewhere near the region of his heart.

He owned himself defeated.

He gave up the fight.