As June burned itself gloriously into July, Robert Hendricks no longer counted the weeks until Molly Culpepper should be married, but counted the days.

So three weeks and two days, from the first of July, became three weeks, then two weeks and six days, and then one week and six days, and then six days, five days, four days, three days; and then it became seventy-two hours.

And the three threshing machines of the Golden Belt Wheat Company were pouring their ceaseless stream into the company's great bins.

The railroad was only five miles away, and Hendricks was sitting in his office in the bank going over and over his estimates of the year's crop which was still lying in the field,--save the crop from less than two thousand acres that was harvested and threshed.

From that he judged that there would be enough to redeem his share of the farmers' mortgages, which in Hendricks' mind could be nothing but rent for the land, and to pay his share of the bank's fraudulent loans to the company--and leave nothing more.
The fact that John expected to buy back the mortgages from Eastern investors who had bought them, and then squeeze the farmers out of their land by the option to buy hidden in the contract, did not move Hendricks.