rk of the oaks turned red as copper.
There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the
sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow
thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze sank to
stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively, and somewhere off
in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls sat listless, leaning against each
other. The long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads.

Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going
down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disc
rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure
suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining
our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland
farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking
just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it
stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the
disc; the handles, the tongue, the share--black against the molten red.
There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.

Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped
and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us
were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk
back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.

XV

LATE in August the Cutters went to Omaha for a few days, leaving Antonia
in charge of the house. Since the scandal about the Swedish girl, Wick
Cutter could never get his wife to stir out of Black Hawk without him.

The day after the Cutters left, Antonia came over to see us. Grandmother
noticed that she seemed troubled and distracted. "You've got something on
your mind, Antonia," she said anxiously.

"Yes, Mrs. Burden. I could n't sleep much last night." She hesitated, and
then told us how strangely Mr. Cutter had behaved before he went away. He
put all the silver in a basket and placed it under her bed, and with it a
box of papers which he told her were valuable. He made her promise that
she would not sleep away from the house, or be out late in the evening,
while he was gone. He strictly forbade her to ask any of the girls she
knew to stay with her at night. She would be perfectly safe, he said, as
he had just put a new Yale lock on the front door.

Cutter had been so insistent