“Why, I call it the desert of wheat!  But no one else does,” he replied.

“I named father’s ranch ‘Many Waters.’  I think those names tell the difference.”

“Isn’t my desert beautiful?”

“No.  It has a sameness—­a monotony that would drive me mad.  It looks as if the whole world had gone to wheat.  It makes me think—­oppresses me.  All this means that we live by wheat alone.  These bare hills!  They’re too open to wind and sun and snow.  They look like the toil of ages.”

“Miss Anderson, there is such a thing as love for the earth—­the bare brown earth.  You know we came from dust, and to dust we return!  These fields are human to my father.  And they have come to speak to me—­a language I don’t understand yet.  But I mean—­w hat you see—­the growing wheat here, the field of clods over there, the wind and dust and glare and heat, the eternal sameness of the open space—­these are the things around which my life has centered, and when I go away from them I am not content.”

Anderson came back to the young couple, carrying some heads of wheat in his hand.

“Smut!” he exclaimed, showing both diseased and healthy specimens of wheat.  “Had to hunt hard to find that.  Smut is the bane of all wheat-growers.  I never saw so little of it as there is here.  In fact, we know scarcely nothin’ about smut an’ its cure, if there is any.  You farmers who raise only grain have got the work down to a science.  This Bluestem is not bearded wheat, like Turkey Red.  Has that beard anythin’ to do with smut?”

“I think not.  The parasite, or fungus, lives inside the wheat.”

“Never heard that before.  No wonder smut is the worst trouble for wheat-raisers in the Northwest.  I’ve fields literally full of smut.  An’ we never are rid of it.  One farmer has one idea, an’ some one else another.  What could be of greater importance to a farmer?  We’re at war.  The men who claim to know say that wheat will win the war.  An’ we lose millions of bushels from this smut.  That’s to say it’s a terrible fact to face.  I’d like to get your ideas.”

Dorn, happening to glance again at Miss Anderson, an act that seemed to be growing habitual, read curiosity and interest, and something more, in her direct blue eyes.  The circumstance embarrassed him, though it tugged at the flood-gates of his knowledge.  He could talk about wheat, and he did like to.  Yet here was a girl who might be supposed to be bored.  Still, she did not appear to be.  That warm glance was not politeness.

“Yes, I’d like to hear every word you can say about wheat,” she said, with an encouraging little nod.

“Sure she would,” added Anderson, with an affectionate hand on her shoulder.  “She’s a farmer’s daughter.  She’ll be a farmer’s wife.”

He laughed at this last sally.  The girl blushed.  Dorn smiled and shook his head doubtfully.

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