that all the sod buildings were roofless and
open to the blurred sky, while on every side--the corn-field alone
breaking the vista--lay the blackened fields.

When they drove up, their mother tottered to meet them, and waved one
hand heartbrokenly toward the kitchen door, where the eldest and the
youngest brothers, exhausted with fighting fire, their faces grimy,
their clothing burned to tatters, sat weeping. "It couldn't have been
much worse," she sobbed, as the biggest brother took her in his arms.

The little girl tumbled from the buckboard and, forgetting their quarrel
of the morning, threw her arms around the eldest brother's neck. He
bowed his head against her apron, and there was a long silence,
interrupted only by sounds of mourning. Then the biggest brother spoke.
"Mother," he said, patting her shoulder softly, "we've got the house and
the farm left, remember. We've got one another, too." He paused a
moment. Before he spoke again he gave a little laugh, and all looked up
at him in surprise. "What's more," he went on, "where's the caterpillars
and cucumber-bugs, and the potato-bugs and cabbage lice? Burned up,
slicker 'n a whistle. And mother," he persisted, holding up her
tear-stained face smilingly, "have you happened to consider that there
ain't a blamed grasshopper in a hundred miles?"

XIV

HARD TIMES

THE first deep snow of the winter, dropping gently from a wide, dun sky,
rested in white folds on the new straw roofs of the sod buildings,
crested the low stacks that had been hauled from distant meadows not
swept by the fire, covered the cinder-strewn gaps in the yard where the
granaries had stood, and hid under a shining, jeweled pall the stripped
fields and the somber prairie. The little girl's mother, stringing
pop-corn in the kitchen for the Christmas tree at the school-house,
looked out toward noon to see the farm restored, as if by enchantment,
to the aspect of other and happier winters; and sorrowfully welcomed the
winding-sheet that gave promise of the coming resurrection, when the
grass and flowers should rise again from out the naked, charred ground,
bright and glorious with the fresh-born spring.

It had seemed to her, ever since the terrible holocaust of a few months
before, as if the Bad Lands had moved eastward upon them. Yet, however
sad was the sight of their loss and the sense of their privation, she
counseled against selling out at a small figure and moving to some State
wh