CHAPTER XVI

The sun was up, broad and bright, burning over the darkened wheat-fields, when Kurt and Jerry reached home.  Kurt had never seen the farm look like that—­ugly and black and bare.  But the fallow ground, hundreds of acres of it, billowing away to the south, had not suffered any change of color or beauty.  To Kurt it seemed to smile at him, to bid him wait for another spring.

And that thought was poignant, for he remembered he must leave at once for “Many Waters.”

He found, when he came to wash the blood and dirt from his person, that his bruises were many.  There was a lump on his head, and his hands were skinned.  After changing his clothes and packing a few things in a valise, along with his papers, he went down to breakfast.  Though preoccupied in mind, he gathered that both the old housekeeper and Jerry were surprised and dismayed to see him ready to leave.  He had made no mention of his intentions.  And it struck him that this, somehow, was going to be hard.

Indeed, when the moment came he found that speech was difficult and his voice not natural.

“Martha—­Jerry—­I’m going away for good,” he said, huskily.  “I mean to make over the farm to Mr. Anderson.  I’ll leave you in charge here—­and recommend that you be kept on.  Here’s your money up to date....  I’m going away to the war—­and the chances are I’ll never come back.”

The old housekeeper, who had been like a mother to him for many years, began to cry; and Jerry struggled with a regret that he could not speak.

Abruptly Kurt left them and hurried out of the house.  How strange that difficult feelings had arisen—­emotions he had never considered at all!  But the truth was that he was leaving his home forever.  All was explained in that.

First he went to the graves of his father and mother, out on the south slope, where there were always wind and sun.  The fire had not desecrated the simple burying-ground.  There was no grass.  But a few trees and bushes kept it from appearing bare.

Kurt sat down in the shade near his mother’s grave and looked away across the hills with dim eyes.  Something came to him—­a subtle assurance that his mother approved of his going to war.  Kurt remembered her—­slow, quiet, patient, hard-working, dominated by his father.

The slope was hot and still, with only a rustling of leaves in the wind.  The air was dry.  Kurt missed the sweet fragrance of wheat.  What odor there was seemed to be like that of burning weeds.  The great, undulating open of the Bend extended on three sides.  His parents had spent the best of their lives there and had now been taken to the bosom of the soil they loved.  It seemed natural.  Many were the last resting-places of toilers of the wheat there on those hills.  And surely in the long frontier days, and in the ages before, men innumerable had gone back to the earth from which they had sprung.  The dwelling-places of men were beautiful; it was only life that was sad.  In this poignant, revealing hour Kurt could not resist human longings and regrets, though he gained incalculable strength from these two graves on the windy slope.  It was not for any man to understand to the uttermost the meaning of life.