Chapter VI

WEAVER, as one might have guessed, was once a farmer on his own land. He was a good farmer. No trouble there. He was industrious and far-seeing. No trouble yet. But he had a gambling mania. What he gained by farming he lost in the nearest bucket shop. He gambled in wheat. Never anything else. This went on for years. The mania grew. His betting losses in that phantom wheat on the blackboard began to be more than all the profit he could win from the soil; and the farm itself became involved in debt. Each time a new mortgage was necessary to pay up his losses and avoid a lawsuit the cruelties of the domestic scene were greater. You can see it. A woman in the rôle of martyr, taking advantage of a just grievance to balance off all petty scores, as almost any woman will. Children bewildered at first and then beginning to take sides. A proud and willful man who must storm it through to save his own ego and authority.

The woman said that he promised each time to stop. Almost for certain he never did. He wasn’t one who would, nor one who, if he had, would have defaulted on his word; and yet, of course, a woman in these circumstances, saying each time she would never sign again, could not be expected clearly to see the difference between an ultimatum and a covenant. She understood he would cease gambling. How could he go on if she meant what she said and would never sign again? But that was an understanding arrived at in her mind alone. Anyone who knows a gambler, one in whom the passion is deep, can imagine what he was thinking. It would not be necessary for her to sign another mortgage. He would beat the phantom wheat game and clear the farm of debt. What ruins the gambler is not ill luck. It is counting on the future to pay for the past.

The sequel is foreseen. This little effigy of a patriarch with his beard flowing into his bosom like a lost river was at that time an intimate friend of the family—one who understood everything, one in whom the wife confided, one who meddled when he dared and still bore the scars of Weaver’s scorn. He was there this night, hot with the news he had got in town. Weaver at last had lost the farm. There had been a sudden fall in the price of wheat. It wiped him out. What was worse, he owed the bucket shop so much that even what was left of the farm would not satisfy the debt. There would be a dead horse to pay for. Therefore, the friend argued, it would be better now for the two boys to come forward and take charge of the family’s future. They could not be sued for the father’s debt. With all his wisdom he persuaded the wife to this line of conduct and admonished her to be firm. When he ceased speaking, having said everything three times, the little clock on a bracket shelf against the wall took up his exhortation. It was a little out of plumb, with an injured tick, and kept saying: “Be firm, be firm, be firm.”

It was a winter night. Snow was falling. They sat in the kitchen—the sympathetic friend, the wife and four children. The chores were all done. A lantern on the floor by the door had not quite gone out and was fuming. Supper was over, except Weaver’s, and his was on a plate in the oven. It had been kept warm for so long that it was already spoiled, and no one minded it any more. The wife’s arms lay limp on the red tablecloth in the round shadow of the hanging coaloil lamp. At the slightest unexpected sound she would start, take in her breath, then let it out again in a weary, reconciled sigh. The kind of a woman who secretly enjoys misery and aggrievedness because she can so easily dramatize it. A girl of sixteen was clearing up. She had to walk around two boys, almost grown, who surrounded the stove; and she did it without speaking.

A much younger girl stood alone at the window looking out. It was she who spoke and her voice was bright.

“There he is,” she said. “I see him.”

The wife swallowed, twitched the corners of her mouth, and looked at the family’s friend, who silently repeated the admonition, “Be firm.” The child at the window continued to look out. The others listened. They heard him drive in and open the barn door. Neither of the two boys stirred. A few minutes later they heard him close the barn door and began to hearken for his step on the back porch. It did not come.

“What’s he doing?” the wife asked, speaking to the girl in the window.

“Walking around,” she answered, not turning her face. Her voice had changed.

Several minutes passed in silence.

“Now what’s he doing?” the wife asked.

Instead of answering the girl threw her arm across her face, leaned against the window frame and began to sob.

“Oh, that child!” the mother sighed. “Stella, do look. See what he’s doing.”

Stella was wiping a plate. She approached the window obliquely, intending to glance out in passing. What she saw caused her to stop and look again and then to stand gazing. The hand that was drying the plate went slower and slower round and stopped. Then she turned from the window, shaking her head, frowning.

“I don’t know what he’s doing.” she said.

“Can you see him?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, what does he seem to be doing?”

“He seems to be hugging the trees,” said Stella.

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” the mother aspirated. “That’s it. That’s it.”

“What’s it, mother?” Stella asked in a petulant voice.

“Hush, child. Don’t ask me. Will that young one stop her crying?”

Just then Weaver’s steps were heard on the porch. The doorlatch clicked. He paused on the threshold and looked around him, at each of them in turn, at the room, at the familiar objects in it, as if he were trying to remember something. Then he picked up the fuming lantern, put it out and set it on the floor again. Forgetting to close the door or to remove his hat and outer coat he walked mechanically to the oven and drew forth his plate of supper without looking at it. He put it on the table, seated himself, and began to stare at it, as he had stared at everything else. Stella laid a knife and fork by his plate, holding herself aloof. He might have been a stranger. Nobody spoke to him. Then he seemed to see the food for the first time, or to become aware of it as food, and pushed it away with a gesture of distaste. The girl in the window was all this time regarding him with a stricken expression. The ticking of the clock became very loud. Weaver heard it. They were greatly mystified to see him go to the stove and begin thoughtfully to search the woodbox on the floor. He found a small splinter, whittled it a little and fitted it under the low side of the clock, making it plumb. Instantly, of course, its fickle heart changed. It ceased exhorting the wife to “be firm, be firm, be firm,” and began contentedly to murmur, “that’s it, that’s it, that’s it.” On the wall was a picture of Maud S. in a fluted walnut frame, crossed at the corners with carved butterflies. For a long time Weaver stood looking at that. Then he looked at his wife, took a step toward her, and stopped as one who remembered a hurt. What could he say? He was not one to repent, promise or pray. He turned toward the door and was walking out. And it was then the family’s friend spoke his mind out heroically. He had no way of understanding a man who in guilty circumstances would not grovel and stultify himself with explanations.

“Absalom Weaver,” he said, “land is for them that’s fit to own land. You ain’t fit. That’s why you’ve lost it. You ain’t fit for anything, nor be you sorry.”

Weaver was already in the open doorway, going out. He turned and spat on the floor.

“That’s what I do when I cross a snake’s trail,” he said. “I spit in it.” Then he went out, closing the door behind him. The family’s friend ever afterward believed this act was a sign of how deeply his weak little shaft went in. He reared his pride upon it.

The natural dramatic period is never completely realized. Something unexpected happens. There was now a stir in the kitchen. The youngest child, no longer weeping, had taken her little coat down from its peg and was getting into it and pulling on her arctics at the same time. Everyone sensed what she meant to do; and no one spoke. Without stopping to fasten her arctics she snatched up her knitted cap and mittens and rushed headlong out of the door in pursuit of her father. That the mother made no gesture to restrain her seems at first a little strange, and yet it is naturally explained. Secretly, perhaps not admitting it to herself, she must have realized that Weaver’s exit was final. Trust a silly woman to know her own man’s folly. Secretly, too, she wished it so, and because she wished it she could not acknowledge it. In permitting the child to run after him she proved to herself that she did not know and did not wish it. Afterward she was able to say, even to believe, that she supposed he was going for a walk in the night, as he often did, and would bring her child back. And thus she was provided with a monstrous grievance— namely, that he never did.

“From that day to this Absalom Weaver’s been walking to and fro in the earth, and the girl with him,” said the absurd little primate who sat in the shade of the ash tree. He clicked in his beard with a malevolent sound, like a mechanical toy shutting up. He had done his worst. There the delation ended.

“How long ago was that?” Dreadwind asked.

“Nineteen years and five months.”

“And how old was the girl that went with him?”

“Ten.”

Dreadwind reflected. That would make Cordelia’s age nearly thirty. And he had thought her still a girl. Her age thrilled him. Thirty! A proper age. Thirty, with the look of youth. A miracle reserved for him!

One more question. It was malicious, therefore he held it until the very end. “Did you marry Mrs. Weaver?” he asked.

Until then, through all that recital, only the lips of the patriarch had moved. Now the fingers twitched and the knees trembled. There seemed for a long time no likelihood of an answer. But it did come.

“She died,” he said.

That was his last utterance. Not another word could be got out of him.

Now Dreadwind retraced his steps. There was nothing else to do. He was thinking he knew everything about them except how to find them when suddenly he remembered that pouch of brownish vile powder. He had left the stuff at the state agricultural laboratory to be analyzed. Forebodings assailed him as he stopped to get the report. The plant biologist on seeing him behaved in a constrained manner and referred him to the executive secretary of the bureau. That person scrutinized Dreadwind suspiciously and produced the laboratory’s report with an ominous air. But instead of showing it he sat for a long time looking at it himself, tapping his foot against his desk, unable to decide how to act.

“Where did you get this stuff?” he asked.

Dreadwind said he had found it at the roadside in a pouch.

“You didn’t bring it here in a pouch. You brought it in a paper.”

Dreadwind said he had thrown the pouch away.

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t like the look and smell of it,” said Dreadwind, beginning to realize that he needed his wits. The last thing in the world he meant to do on any account was to involve Weaver in serious trouble. And this was evidently about to become serious. His answer was perhaps technically true. He had thrown the pouch away as an instinctive precaution. Even so, he could say that he liked not the smell and look of it. Then he was asked if he knew of any person having a possessory relation to the pouch? Had he seen anyone drop it? That was coming too close.

“I’m not to be interrogated in this grand-jury manner,” he said, affecting to be irritated. “I found this stuff by the roadside, as I have said, and I was curious to know what it was. So I brought it to you. That’s quite simple, isn’t it? I don’t know yet what it is, and since I took the trouble to bring it to you I’d like to know.”

“It’s rust,” said the secretary, bluntly reacting; “the germinating principle of wheat rust.”

“I’ve heard of rust,” said Dreadwind, “but I don’t know exactly what it is. Tell me, please.”

“Rust,” said the secretary, “is the common name for a parasitic fungus that attacks and destroys wheat. It multiplies with incredible rapidity from spores, somewhat like mushrooms, if you know. There is black rust and red rust. This stuff is the seed—that is to say, the spore—of black rust. Enough to kill half the wheat in Kansas. I never saw anything like it. The spores do not naturally occur in this concentrated way. Someone must have gathered or cultivated the stuff for a felonious purpose.”

“If I come across any more of it I’ll know what to do,” said Dreadwind, and departed.

This, then, was the explanation of Weaver’s excitement and tragic manner that morning when Dreadwind surprised him in the act of spreading the powder on the air.

He was killing the wheat!

But how was Weaver himself to be explained? One day kneeling in ecstasy at the foot of a wheat stalk to observe the nuptial ceremony!—another day sowing black death upon it! Dreadwind kept seeing him first in one act and then in the other; and these were as the acts of separate persons, one a mystic, the other a monster. And this was also Cordelia’s father! He grew sick from thinking of it.

It was natural that his thoughts of Cordelia should associate with Mrs. Purdy, who had been the one and only point of contact. He liked the woman. He remembered her smile. There was knowing in it; also a little teasing and that slightly roguish, sweetly ironic air with which a woman looks on at these matters, as at a play wherein she has more of the secret than the actors and enjoys their silly confusion. He went to see her again. Nearly three weeks had gone by.

“I was passing,” he explained.

“Oh,” she said with a certain inflection. “Won’t you come in.”

She seemed more friendly, more knowing; and without asking if he was hungry she began to set the table and prepare food. It was mid-afternoon.

He watched her for a while without speaking. Her movements were quick and deft. Just to sit there under her ministrations was a soothing experience. Also for some reason it was reassuring. She knew Cordelia. Was that it? And with all her archness she was sympathetic.

“Are you sure the envelope she left was meant for me?” he asked.

“Weren’t you?” she answered, bending over the stove.

“But how will she ever know I got it?” he said.

The food was ready. Mrs. Purdy put it before him. Then she made a trip to the spring house for butter. With putting the butter on the table she sat down herself, and said, looking at him steadily, “She knows you got it.”

“What!” said Dreadwind. “How did she find it out?”

“I shouldn’t have told you,” said Mrs. Purdy. “Will you have some jelly?”

“Why shouldn’t you have told me?”

“Shouldn’t have,” she said with a puckered mouth, shaking her head.

“Has she been here?” asked Dreadwind.

“What a pity, now, you couldn’t have been passing three days ago,” said Mrs. Purdy.

“Was she alone?”

“Who?”

“Cordelia. Was her father with her?”

“When?”

“Three days ago.”

“My, how you do pin a body down,” said Mrs. Purdy. “Have I said she was here three days ago? I only said what a pity you couldn’t have been passing.”

Dreadwind could see that she meant in the end to tell him. And whether she told him all or less, she gave him more than she knew. Cordelia had been discovered at daylight, sitting alone on a bench in the front yard.

“That round bench under the apple tree?” he asked.

Mrs. Purdy nodded. Of course; there was no other bench. What more commonplace object in the world than a bench? Yet suppose it happens to mark the point in space where the lines of two lives, infinitely predetermined through all the chances of matter, have crossed for the first time. That was the bench on which he sat down beside her in the lantern light. It was there she gave him her name. Mrs. Purdy knew nothing of this. She paused for a moment and studied him when he mentioned it; but she saw nothing in it and went on. They had found her there at daylight in a kind of reverie. Nobody knew when she came. She had been weeping. A woman could guess it. But she was not sad, except in the way one might sometimes like to be sad. And she was lovely. Mrs. Purdy would say it herself. She said it twice, noting the effect upon Dreadwind. They had asked her to stop for breakfast, and she couldn’t, because her father would presently miss her. What she wished to know from Mrs. Purdy was whether anyone had asked for her. If not she would like her envelope back.

“Did she seem pleased to know it had been delivered?” Dreadwind asked.

“She was relieved,” said Mrs. Purdy, a little severely, slowly choosing her word.

“And she left no message?” Dreadwind asked.

Mrs. Purdy frowned, hesitated, thought better of something she had been about to say, and continued: “What the girl really wanted was to tell me about a dream that worried her. This was the dream: There were two great vines. One she knew and the other she had forgotten the name of. Both had twined themselves around her. She did not mind that. She would have liked it, in fact, only that each one struggled to tear her from the other and without meaning to do so they were hurting her terribly. She kept saying to them, ‘It is unnecessary! So unnecessary!’ But neither one would listen. With that she woke up. She had dreamed this many times and it was giving her great anxiety.”

“Did she wish you to tell me her dream?” asked Dreadwind.

Mrs. Purdy disdained to reply or to look at him, but rose suddenly and began clearing off the table with an acrimonious air, like the gust of wind that comes suddenly aboard ship and causes everything movable to slap and bang in a warning manner.

“Would it be possible for me to get a message to her through you?” asked Dreadwind, rising.

“It would not,” she answered, going on with her work. Relenting a little she added: “She won’t be back. She was sure of that.”

“And you have no way of reaching her?”

“No more than you have,” she answered over her shoulder.

“Thank you,” he said, holding out his hand.

Then she looked at him, relented a little more, and they shook hands. She followed him slowly toward the door. On the threshold he looked back. She was gazing at him.

“They follow the harvest,” she said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

“Why do you look at me as if—as if—I had forgotten something?” he asked.

“You haven’t forgotten anything and I’m not looking at you,” she said. “I’m only thinking.”

“What are you thinking of?”

“Of what happens to women,” she said, and turned away. The last he heard of her was a clangor of stove lids.

They followed the wheat. Well, then—there was nothing else for him to do.

And now you have him, to the eye, an aimless vagabond, wandering up and down the wheat country, sometimes sauntering, sometimes in haste, making inquiries so guardedly that almost nobody would have guessed he had a purpose at all, much less that impatience consumed him. It had occurred to him on reflection that hitherto his search had been too undisguished. Weaver might have heard of it.

By intuition he followed that magical wave of greengold color the first sheen of which is seen by early June in Texas. Thence, adding mass and weight and glory to itself, it travels by two movements. One is whimsical and zigzag, determined by the local weather and where the captured sunlight comes here a little sooner ripe than there. The other one is stately and momentous, tending always north.

Dreadwind noticed that as the wheat changed color from green to golden opalescence, change was everywhere in everything—the sky, the light, the insect hymn, even in the ways of people. Men became distraught and anxious.

It is a time of crisis. There is gladness in the sight of plenty, yet this is strangely tinged with melancholy. Why is that? Why were people always sad about a harvest, therefore having recourse to festivals and merry-making? Perhaps because finalities are sad. What was soft and lithe and lovely now is dry and brittle, fixed in momentary splendor. The steel is whetted. The hand that raised it up must also cut it down. Life contains death and will not accept the fact. The wheat complains. Its whispering voice is now grown old, petulant and querulous. The heads are heavy and seem to toss about in pain.

Dreadwind must have made a very strange figure against that background. But whereas at first he had been much noticed and stared after, now his appearance, sometimes in most unexpected circumstances, excited no surprise. This was another change. Partly it was owing to the nervous tension peculiar to the atmosphere of ripening wheat. The farmer at this time becomes absent-minded. His thoughts are on the wheat and he does not know what he is thinking. He has an amazed impersonal attitude toward the event, as if a field of grain crying:

Cut me, cut me;
I am brittle.
Cut me, cut me;
Hurt me little,

were not his own, not a thing a man had done, but a revealed episode, natural because it recurs and none the less mysterious for that reason. His last act at night is to look at it again. At daybreak he will be seen walking in it. Here and there he plucks a head, breaks it open, examines it, smells it, tries the kernel with his finger nail and then with his teeth. All the time his eye is anxiously watching the weather. It may come on to rain or to blow or to do both. Nothing is certain. If he is religious he will pray and make vows. If he is superstitious he will look for signs and omens and secretly perform little rites of propitiation. As who would not?

The great task of modern civility is to create and sustain an artificial environment expressly designed to eliminate the savage uncertainties of natural existence. Within that artificial environment, besides security, there is foretelling. Nothing is left to chance; nothing is miraculous. Industry no longer relies upon wind and rainfall—that is, upon the whims of nature for the power to turn its wheels. When the ironmaster pours ore, fuel, limestone and chemicals into the top of a blast furnace he need not pray for a good run of metal. He knows precisely what the iron will be because its qualities are predetermined by scientific chemistry. He hath dispensed with the Lord. So with every physical process in all that world of machines and laboratories from which mischievous, meddlesome deities have been cast out.

But the farmer who feeds this world has no artificial environment. He stands alone facing the elemental rhythms. They are uncontrollable, unpredictable. He may know plant biology, he may know the chemistries of soil and vegetation, he may be as scientific as the Department of Agriculture could wish him to be, and yet the wind will blow when and how it listeth, the rain will fall by a law of its own, the sun hath no preoccupation with the weal of mankind. In all nature there is no forethought for civilization.

The cities are either ignorant or contemptuous of this fact. They are walled about, not with walls of stone as before, but with the barriers of the applied sciences. They know not how their food is produced nor whence it comes. Somewhere in the world the sun will shine; somewhere the rain will fall. They have ships and railroads to bring their food from any distance and the gold wherewith to pay for it. One’s dinner in New York may represent Canadian sunlight converted into wheat and South American sunlight changed into beef, and one may not only never know it; one never even thinks of it.

Thus in modern circumstances it is the farmer alone who carries on the struggle in a natural environment, subject to the hazards of season, weather, sunspots, mysterious cycles of injurious life. He belongs to a race apart. We have forgotten the language in which he thinks.

Well, another reason why Dreadwind in his going about began to be less noticed was that his figure was swallowed up in that tide of human miscellany which rises each year in Oklahoma and follows the sickle bar north to the end of the harvest.

The annual migration of reapers is one of the oldest proceedings in the world. In romantic times it occurred over limited areas in a naïve, spontaneous manner. Ruth came out of the land of Moab to Bethlehem in the beginning of the barley harvest. That was a great way to walk and really no distance at all. Now with railroads and steamships it may be organized massively on economic lines, and sometimes is, as when shiploads of Italians go each year from Italy’s winter to South America’s summer and return when the Argentine crop is by. Every month in the year is harvest time somewhere in the world. Italian grain ripens in June; Argentine wheat is ripe in December.

There are places where the migration can still be picturesque. But with us the spirit is almost forgotten. Nowhere else is the harvest horde so accidental, so unfestive, so ephemeral in structure, so dissimilar in its elements. It has no common character, no place of origin, no existence before or after; and when you think what would happen if it did not appear like a self-evolved phenomenon at the appointed time and place you wonder again how people in the cities can take their food for granted. And yet it has never quite failed. It were a pity if it did.

The life is nomadic and free, the wages are clear, humanity is level and the work is a series of sudden exploits. Nor is this tale of inducements the full persuasion. The call of the harvest is something you feel. It reaches down to the earth sense in men, to bloodand-tissue memories of exciting primeval festivals, myth rites, ancient forms of nature worship; to memories of the feast of Pentecost, of sacrificing to Ceres, of how the fearsome Druids celebrated the ingathering, of the reapers’ kern baby, of cutting the mare, of the maiden sheaf, of the Roman saturnalia at the end of the vintage when amid universal rejoicing and license even the slaves were free and ate at the master’s table.

Long after people began to gather in cities the response to this great ground call was universal and served two needs. One was the instinctive human need for contact with the earth. The other was the need of agriculture for extra hands when the grain is ripe and must be taken quickly. Thus for a great while the city performed an ideal function. It absorbed the surplus labor of the country at other times and released it for the harvest. But on the rise of modern industrialism, with its fixity of special tasks, all this use and custom fell. Hence new social problems in the city from a thwarting of the ground instinct; hence also the resort of agriculture to labor-saving power machinery.

The call has never changed. Only now so many live amid the ceaseless din of wheels and tools that millions never hear it. They would not know it if they did. Those who do respond are the unreconciled. Actually the number is large. Relatively it is small—that is to say, small and diminishing in relation to the vaster growing number in whom the instinct is frustrate; small again in relation to the magnitude of the work performed. In all the cities of the world two or three hundred years ago there would not have been labor enough to harvest by hand in our time one North American wheat crop. Machinery does it. The shapeless, self-mobilized body of men that appears each year where and when the sheen of green-gold color begins to show, that fastens upon it, that devours it utterly so that nothing is left but a dead pale stubble, is really symbolic. What does it symbolize? The vestige of a custom we have perhaps done very ill to part with. A blind triumph of machine power. A transition completed. A problem unsolved. And we treat it as a casual economic fact! Harvest labor, we say, governed by the law of supply and demand. It comes when it is wanted, perhaps not because it is wanted but for another reason, and disperses itself. When the harvest is ended it will vanish away.

To an eye above this economic fact might resemble a multiple animal, headless and eyeless, with some power of peristaltic locomotion, an unerring instinct for the color on which it feeds, one common belly and myriad mouths, each mouth equipped with a highly destructive mechanism. These innumerable mouth mechanisms, one on each tentacle of the animal, are what produce that droning, ominous sound. If the mind behind the eye above were given to reflection it might deduce from what it sees a perfect theory of evolution. Formerly this reaping animal made no sound at all, seeming rather to work by stealth with sharp sickle teeth, and was so much smaller and less voracious that only a painstaking observer would know it for the same species of thing. The conclusion would be that it had increased thus in size and effectiveness because the stuff on which it feeds became for some unknown reason much more abundant on the face of the earth.

But to its own eye this animal resembles nothing so complex and fanciful. It sees itself simply as a band of diverse individuals united for a time in the task of driving through the wheat fields mechanical beasts—that is to say, automatic reapers, binders and threshers. And that of course is as we see it. We take everything for granted, including the mechanical beasts all evolved from the sickle, the greatest of which is called a combine, moving under its own power on wheels eight feet high, devouring a swath forty feet wide, cutting, threshing, cleaning and sacking the wheat as it goes, in one continuous operation. Tending these beasts is increasingly the work of the harvest hand.

If it seems less romantic than when grain was cut with a blade on a crooked stick and threshed under the feet of oxen, that is so. But if it seems less thrilling that is because wonder moves only in mysteries and man is not mystified by his own inventions. No deity ever thought to create a harvesting machine. That one could have done it, had one thought of it, is open to doubt.

Even yet among the migrant reapers you will find skilled farmers. They are needed on the smaller farms, where the wheat on being cut is first shocked or stacked to be threshed afterward—men who know how to build and cap a shock to make it wind and weather proof. These are the landless ones who hunger for it. Some are tragic, worthy only to be hired. They reap in envy. Others are peasant immigrants hither blown by winds of hope. They will presently take root. But in the modern harvest, owing to the use of power machinery, much of the work requires no special farming skill. Almost anyone may turn his hand raw to it. Hence in that sprawling procession, which to the eye above would resemble a monstrous, devouring organism, one will find tramps, casual vagabonds, preachers, artisans, college students, anæmics in quest of health, criminals in hiding, foreigners, derelicts, poets, artists, strife bringers, thieves, old wives and new at the cook shacks with numerous self-preserving progeny appended. The scene has many aspects and there are many ways of viewing it. There are ways to view it profitably. The men who do this do nothing else. They look with keen, appraising eyes, seem never to be in haste, give no account of their errand and are always passing. Dreadwind, to whom everything else was strange, knew a good deal about these men. He identified them at once. Not as individuals. He had never seen them before. But he knew what they were doing and whose instruments they were.

They were the eyes of the wheat pit.