opped, and the light grew
stronger. Whinstane Sandy even roused himself and moved toward the
door, which he opened with the hand of a sleep-walker, and stood
staring out. I could see reflected in that seamed old face the
desolation which for a minute or two I didn't have the heart to look
upon. I knew, even before I got slowly up and followed him toward the
door, that our crop was gone, that we had lost everything.

I stood in the doorway, staring out at what, only that morning, had
been a world golden with promise, rich and bountiful and beautiful to
the eye and blessed in the sight of God. And now, at one stroke, it
was all wiped out. As far as the eye could see I beheld only flattened
and shredded ruin. Every acre of my crop was gone. My year's work had
been for nothing, my blind planning, my petty scheming and contriving,
my foolish little hopes and dreams, all, all were there, beaten down
into the mud.

Yet, oddly enough, it did not stir in me any quick and angry passion
of protest. It merely left me mute and stunned, staring at it with the
eyes of the ox, with a dull wonder in my heart and a duller sense of
deprivation away off at the back of my brain. I scarcely noticed when
little Dinkie toddled out and possessed himself of a number of the
larger hailstones, which he promptly proceeded to suck. When a smaller
one melted in the warmth of his hand, he stared down at the emptiness
between his little brown fingers, wondering where his pretty pebble
had vanished to, just as I wondered where my crop had gone.

But it's gone. There's no doubt of that. The hail went from southwest
to northeast, in a streak about three miles wide, like a conquering
army, licking up everything as it went. Whinnie says that it's the
will of God. Struthers, resurrected from her mattress, proclaims that
it's Fate punishing us for our sins. My head tells me that it's
barometric laws, operating along their own ineluctable lines. But that
doesn't salve the sore.

For the rest of the afternoon we stood about like Italian peasants
after an earthquake, possessed of a sort of collective mutism, doing
nothing, saying nothing, thinking nothing. Even my seven dead pullets,
which had been battered to death by the hail, were left to lie where
they had fallen. I noticed a canvas carrier for a binder which Whinnie
had been mending. It was riddled like a sieve. If this worried me, it
worried me only vaguely. It wasn't until I remembered that there woul