pe tighter. Seeing that she did not
understand, grandfather turned back. 'You need not pay me anything more;
no more money. The cow is yours.'

'Pay no more, keep cow?' she asked in a bewildered tone, her narrow eyes
snapping at us in the sunlight.

'Exactly. Pay no more, keep cow.' He nodded.

Mrs. Shimerda dropped the rope, ran after us, and, crouching down beside
grandfather, she took his hand and kissed it. I doubt if he had ever
been so much embarrassed before. I was a little startled, too. Somehow,
that seemed to bring the Old World very close.

We rode away laughing, and grandfather said: 'I expect she thought we
had come to take the cow away for certain, Jim. I wonder if she wouldn't
have scratched a little if we'd laid hold of that lariat rope!'

Our neighbours seemed glad to make peace with us. The next Sunday Mrs.
Shimerda came over and brought Jake a pair of socks she had knitted. She
presented them with an air of great magnanimity, saying, 'Now you not
come any more for knock my Ambrosch down?'

Jake laughed sheepishly. 'I don't want to have no trouble with Ambrosch.
If he'll let me alone, I'll let him alone.'

'If he slap you, we ain't got no pig for pay the fine,' she said
insinuatingly.

Jake was not at all disconcerted. 'Have the last word ma'm,' he said
cheerfully. 'It's a lady's privilege.'

XIX

JULY CAME ON with that breathless, brilliant heat which makes the plains
of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world. It seemed
as if we could hear the corn growing in the night; under the stars one
caught a faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odoured cornfields where the
feathered stalks stood so juicy and green. If all the great plain from
the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains had been under glass, and the heat
regulated by a thermometer, it could not have been better for the yellow
tassels that were ripening and fertilizing the silk day by day. The
cornfields were far apart in those times, with miles of wild grazing
land between. It took a clear, meditative eye like my grandfather's to
foresee that they would enlarge and multiply until they would be, not
the Shimerdas' cornfields, or Mr. Bushy's, but the world's cornfields;
that their yield would be one of the great economic facts, like the
wheat crop of Russia, which underlie all the activities of men, in peace
or war.

The burning sun of those few weeks, with occasional rains at night,
secured the corn. After the milky ears