The Desert of Wheat | Page 6

with them.
"The joke's on me," said Anderson. "An' I can take one.... Now, young man, I think I gathered from your amiable dad that if the crop of wheat was full I'd get my money. Otherwise I could take over the land. For my part, I'd never do that, but the others interested might do it, even for the little money involved. I tried to buy them out so I'd have the whole mortgage. They would not sell."
"Mr. Anderson, you're a square man, and I'll do--" declared Kurt.
"Come out an' show me the wheat," interrupted Anderson. "Lenore, do you want to go with us?"
"I do," replied the daughter, and she took up her hat to put it on.
Kurt led them through the yard, out past the old barn, to the edge of the open slope where the wheat stretched away, down and up, as far as the eye could see.


CHAPTER II
"We've got over sixteen hundred acres in fallow ground, a half-section in rye, another half in wheat--Turkey Red--and this section you see, six hundred and forty acres, in Bluestem," said Kurt.
Anderson's keen eyes swept from near at hand to far away, down the gentle, billowy slope and up the far hillside. The wheat was two feet high, beginning to be thick and heavy at the heads, as if struggling to burst. A fragrant, dry, wheaty smell, mingled with dust, came on the soft summer breeze, and a faint silken rustle. The greenish, almost blue color near at hand gradually in the distance grew lighter, and then yellow, and finally took on a tinge of gold. There was a living spirit in that vast wheat-field.
"Dorn, it's the finest wheat I've seen!" exclaimed Anderson, with the admiration of the farmer who aspired high. "In fact, it's the only fine field of wheat I've seen since we left the foot-hills. How is that?"
"Late spring and dry weather," replied Dorn. "Most of the farmers' reports are poor. If we get rain over the Bend country we'll have only an average yield this year. If we don't get rain--then flat failure."
Miss Anderson evinced an interest in the subject and she wanted to know why this particular field, identical with all the others for miles around, should have a promise of a magnificent crop when the others had no promise at all.
"This section lay fallow a long time," replied Dorn. "Snow lasted here on this north slope quite a while. My father used a method of soil cultivation intended to conserve moisture. The seed wheat was especially selected. And if we have rain during the next ten days this section of Bluestem will yield fifty bushels to the acre."
"Fifty bushels!" ejaculated Anderson.
"Bluestem? Why do you call it that when it's green and yellow?" queried the girl.
"It's a name. There are many varieties of wheat. Bluestem is best here in this desert country because it resists drought, it produces large yield, it does not break, and the flour-mills rate it very high. Bluestem is not good in wet soils."
Anderson tramped along the edge of the field, peering down, here and there pulling a shaft of wheat and examining it. The girl gazed with dreamy eyes across the undulating sea. And Dorn watched her.
"We have a ranch--thousands of acres--but not like this," she said.
"What's the difference?" asked Dorn.
She appeared pensive and in doubt.
"I hardly know. What would you call this--this scene?"
"Why, I call it the desert of wheat! But no one else does," he replied.
"I named father's ranch 'Many Waters.' I think those names tell the difference."
"Isn't my desert beautiful?"
"No. It has a sameness--a monotony that would drive me mad. It looks as if the whole world had gone to wheat. It makes me think--oppresses me. All this means that we live by wheat alone. These bare hills! They're too open to wind and sun and snow. They look like the toil of ages."
"Miss Anderson, there is such a thing as love for the earth--the bare brown earth. You know we came from dust, and to dust we return! These fields are human to my father. And they have come to speak to me--a language I don't understand yet. But I mean--w hat you see--the growing wheat here, the field of clods over there, the wind and dust and glare and heat, the eternal sameness of the open space--these are the things around which my life has centered, and when I go away from them I am not content."
Anderson came back to the young couple, carrying some heads of wheat in his hand.
"Smut!" he exclaimed, showing both diseased and healthy specimens of wheat. "Had to hunt hard to find that. Smut is the bane of all wheat-growers. I never saw so little of it as there is here. In fact, we know scarcely nothin' about smut an' its