hired
men helped them in they swept out of the cool shade into the dust and
glare of the prairie, and when some little time later, with the thud of
hoofs and rattle of wheels softened by the bleaching sod, they rolled
down a rise, there was spread out before them evidence of man's
activity.

Acre by acre, gleaming chocolate brown against the gray and green of
the prairie, the wheat loam rolled away, back to the ridge, over it,
and on again. It was such a breadth of sowing as had but once, when
wheat was dear, been seen at Silverdale, but still across the
foreground, advancing in echelon, came lines of dusty teams, and there
was a meaning in the furrows they left behind them, for they were not
plowing where the wheat had been. Each wave of lustrous clods that
rolled from the gleaming shares was so much rent from the virgin
prairie, and a promise of what would come when man had fulfilled his
mission and the wilderness would blossom. There was a wealth of food
stored, little by little during ages past counting, in every yard of
the crackling sod to await the time when the toiler with the sweat of
the primeval curse upon his forehead should unseal it with the plow.
It was also borne in upon Maud Barrington that the man who directed
those energies was either altogether without discernment, or one who
saw further than his fellows and had an excellent courage, when he
flung his substance into the furrows while wheat was going down. Then
as the hired man pulled up the wagon she saw him.

A great plow with triple shares had stopped at the end of the furrow,
and the leading horses were apparently at variance with the man who,
while he gave of his own strength to the uttermost, was asking too much
from them. Young and indifferently broken, tortured by swarming
insects, and galled by the strain of the collar, they had laid back
their ears, and the wickedness of the bronco strain shone in their
eyes. One rose almost upright amid a clatter of harness, its mate
squealed savagely, and the man who loosed one hand from the head-stall
flung out an arm. Then he and the pair whirled round together amid the
trampled clods in a blurred medley of spume-flecked bodies,
soil-stained jean, flung-up hoofs, and an arm that swung and smote
again. Miss Barrington grew a trifle pale as she watched, but a little
glow crept into her niece's eyes.

The struggle, however, ended suddenly, and hailing a man who plodded
behind another team, Wins