's seventy cents a bushel in it, anyway," said his father,
reaching for a hot biscuit.

"If there's that much, I'm somehow afraid there will be more,"
said Mrs. Wheeler thoughtfully. She had picked up the paper
fly-brush and sat waving it irregularly, as if she were trying to
brush away a swarm of confusing ideas.

"You might call up Ernest, and ask him what the Bohemian papers
say about it," Mr. Wheeler suggested.

Claude went to the telephone, but was unable to get any answer
from the Havels. They had probably gone to a barn dance down in
the Bohemian township. He event upstairs and sat down before an
armchair full of newspapers; he could make nothing reasonable
out of the smeary telegrams in big type on the front page of the
Omaha World Herald. The German army was entering Luxembourg; he
didn't know where Luxembourg was, whether it was a city or a
country; he seemed to have some vague idea that it was a palace!
His mother had gone up to "Mahailey's library," the attic, to
hunt for a map of Europe,--a thing for which Nebraska farmers had
never had much need. But that night, on many prairie homesteads,
the women, American and foreign-born, were hunting for a map.

Claude was so sleepy that he did not wait for his mother's
return. He stumbled upstairs and undressed in the dark. The night
was sultry, with thunder clouds in the sky and an unceasing play
of sheet-lightning all along the western horizon. Mosquitoes had
got into his room during the day, and after he threw himself upon
the bed they began sailing over him with their high, excruciating
note. He turned from side to side and tried to muffle his ears
with the pillow. The disquieting sound became merged, in his
sleepy brain, with the big type on the front page of the paper;
those black letters seemed to be flying about his head with a
soft, high, sing-song whizz.

VIII

Late in the afternoon of the sixth of August, Claude and his
empty wagon were bumping along the level road over the flat
country between Vicount and the Lovely Creek valley. He had made
two trips to town that day. Though he had kept his heaviest team
for the hot afternoon pull, his horses were too tired to be urged
off a walk. Their necks were marbled with sweat stains, and their
flanks were plastered with the white dust that rose at every
step. Their heads hung down, and their breathing was deep and
slow. The wood of the green-painted wagon seat was blistering hot
to the touch. Claude