"Yes," he said, "It is really more in my line, and I have kept you in the sun too long." In another few moments Maud Barrington was riding across the prairie, but when the rattle of the machine rose from the sloo behind her, she laughed curiously.
"The man knew his place, but you came perilously near making a fool of yourself this morning, my dear," she said.
It was a week or two later, and very hot, when, with others of his neighbors, Winston sat in the big hall at Silverdale Grange.

The windows were open wide and the smell of hot dust came in from the white waste which rolled away beneath the stars.

There was also another odor in the little puffs of wind that flickered in, and far off where the arch of indigo dropped to the dusky earth, wavy lines of crimson moved along the horizon.

It was then the season when fires that are lighted by means which no man knows creep up and down the waste of grass, until they put on speed and roll in a surf of flame before a sudden breeze.
Still, nobody was anxious about them, for the guarding furrows that would oppose a space of dusty soil to the march of the flame had been plowed round every homestead at Silverdale.
Maud Barrington was at the piano and her voice was good, while Winston, who had known what it is to toil from red dawn to sunset without hope of more than daily food, found the simple song she had chosen chime with his mood.

"All day long the reapers." A faint staccato drumming that rose from the silent prairie throbbed through the final chords of it, and when the music ceased, swelled into the gallop of a horse.