Dorn smiled and shook
his head doubtfully.

"I imagine that good fortune will never befall a farmer," he said.

"Well, if it should," she replied, archly, "just consider how I might
surprise him with my knowledge of wheat.... Indeed, Mr. Dorn, I am
interested. I've never been in the Bend before--in your desert of wheat.
I never before felt the greatness of loving the soil--or caring for
it--of growing things from seed. Yet the Bible teaches that, and I read
my Bible. Please tell us. The more you say the more I'll like it."

Dorn was not proof against this eloquence. And he quoted two of his
authorities, Heald and Woolman, of the State Agricultural Experiment
Station, where he had studied for two years.

"Bunt, or stinking smut, is caused by two different species of
microscopic fungi which live as parasites in the wheat plant. Both are
essentially similar in their effects and their life-history. _Tilletia
tritici_, or the rough-spored variety, is the common stinking smut of
the Pacific regions, while _Tilletia foetans_, or the smooth-spored
species, is the one generally found in the eastern United States.

"The smut 'berries,' or 'balls,' from an infected head contain millions
of minute bodies, the spores or 'seeds' of the smut fungus. These
reproduce the smut in somewhat the same way that a true seed develops
into a new plant. A single smut ball of average size contains a
sufficient number of spores to give one for each grain of wheat in five
or six bushels. It takes eight smut spores to equal the diameter of a
human hair. Normal wheat grains from an infected field may have so many
spores lodged on their surface as to give them a dark color, but other
grains which show no difference in color to the naked eye may still
contain a sufficient number of spores to produce a smutty crop if seed
treatment is not practised.

"When living smut spores are introduced into the soil with the seed
wheat, or exist in the soil in which smut-free wheat is sown, a certain
percentage of the wheat plants are likely to become infected. The smut
spore germinates and produces first a stage of the smut plant in the
soil. This first stage never infects a young seedling direct, but gives
rise to secondary spores, or sporida, from which infection threads may
arise and penetrate the shoot of a young seedling and reach the growing
point. Here the fungus threads keep pace with the growth of the plant
and reach maturity at or slightly before ha