The Desert of Wheat | Page 7

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 cure, if there is any. You
farmers who raise only grain have got the work down to a science. This
Bluestem is not bearded wheat, like Turkey Red. Has that beard
anythin' to do with smut?"
"I think not. The parasite, or fungus, lives inside the wheat."

"Never heard that before. No wonder smut is the worst trouble for
wheat-raisers in the Northwest. I've fields literally full of smut. An' we
never are rid of it. One farmer has one idea, an' some one else another.
What could be of greater importance to a farmer? We're at war. The
men who claim to know say that wheat will win the war. An' we lose
millions of bushels from this smut. That's to say it's a terrible fact to
face. I'd like to get your ideas."
Dorn, happening to glance again at Miss Anderson, an act that seemed
to be growing habitual, read curiosity and interest, and something more,
in her direct blue eyes. The circumstance embarrassed him, though it
tugged at the flood-gates of his knowledge. He could talk about wheat,
and he did like to. Yet here was a girl who might be supposed to be
bored. Still, she did not appear to be. That warm glance was not
politeness.
"Yes, I'd like to hear every word you can say about wheat," she said,
with an encouraging little nod.
"Sure she would," added Anderson, with an affectionate hand on her
shoulder. "She's a farmer's daughter. She'll be a farmer's wife."
He laughed at this last sally. The girl blushed. Dorn smiled and shook
his head doubtfully.
"I imagine that good fortune will never befall a farmer," he said.
"Well, if it should," she replied, archly, "just consider how I might
surprise him with my knowledge of wheat.... Indeed, Mr. Dorn, I am
interested. I've never been in the Bend before--in your desert of wheat.
I never before felt the greatness of loving the soil--or caring for it--of
growing things from seed. Yet the Bible teaches that, and I read my
Bible. Please tell us. The more you say the more I'll like it."
Dorn was not proof against this eloquence. And he quoted two of his
authorities, Heald and Woolman, of the State Agricultural Experiment
Station, where he had studied for two years.

"Bunt, or stinking smut, is caused by two different species of
microscopic fungi which live as parasites in the wheat plant. Both are
essentially similar in their effects and their life-history. Tilletia tritici,
or the rough-spored variety, is the common stinking smut of the Pacific
regions, while Tilletia foetans, or the smooth-spored species, is the one
generally found in the eastern United States.
"The smut 'berries,' or 'balls,' from an infected head contain millions of
minute bodies, the spores or 'seeds' of the smut fungus. These
reproduce the smut in somewhat the same way that a true seed develops
into a new plant. A single smut ball of average size contains a sufficient
number of spores to give one for each grain of wheat in five or six
bushels. It takes eight smut spores to equal the diameter of a human
hair. Normal wheat grains from an infected field may have so many
spores lodged on their surface as to give them a dark color, but other
grains which show no difference in color to the naked eye may still
contain a sufficient number of spores to produce a smutty crop if seed
treatment is not practised.
"When living smut spores are introduced into the soil with the seed
wheat, or exist in the soil in which smut-free wheat is sown, a certain
percentage of the wheat plants are likely to become infected. The smut
spore germinates and produces first a stage of the smut plant in the soil.
This first stage never infects a young seedling direct, but gives rise to
secondary spores, or sporida, from which infection threads may