So, with mind both busy and absent, Kurt Dorn harrowed the fallow ground abandoned by his men; and when the day was done, with the sun setting hot and coppery beyond the dim, dark ranges, he guided the tired horses homeward and plodded back of them, weary and spent.

He was to learn from Morgan, at the stables, that the old man had discharged both Andrew and Jansen.  And Jansen, liberating some newly assimilated poison, had threatened revenge.  He would see that any hired men would learn a thing or two, so that they would not sign up with Chris Dorn.  In a fury the old man had driven Jansen out into the road.

Sober and moody, Kurt put the horses away, and, washing the dust grime from sunburnt face and hands, he went to his little attic room, where he changed his damp and sweaty clothes.  Then he went down to supper with mind made up to be lenient and silent with his old and sorely tried father.

Chris Dorn sat in the light of the kitchen lamps.  He was a huge man with a great, round, bullet-shaped head and a shock of gray hair and bristling, grizzled beard.  His face was broad, heavy, and seemed sodden with dark, brooding thought.  His eyes, under bushy brows, were pale gleams of fire.  He looked immovable as to both bulk and will.

Never before had Kurt Dorn so acutely felt the fixed, contrary, ruthless nature of his parent.  Never had the distance between them seemed so great.  Kurt shivered and sighed at once.  Then, being hungry, he fell to eating in silence.  Presently the old man shoved his plate back, and, wiping his face, he growled, in German: 

“I discharged Andrew and Jansen.”

“Yes, I know,” replied Kurt.  “It wasn’t good judgment.  What’ll we do for hands?”

“I’ll hire more.  Men are coming for the harvest.”

“But they all belong to the I.W.W.,” protested Kurt.

“And what’s that?”

In scarcely subdued wrath Kurt described in detail, and to the best of his knowledge, what the I.W.W. was, and he ended by declaring the organization treacherous to the United States.

“How’s that?” asked old Dorn, gruffly.

Kurt was actually afraid to tell his father, who never read newspapers, who knew little of what was going on, that if the Allies were to win the war it was wheat that would be the greatest factor.  Instead of that he said if the I.W.W. inaugurated strikes and disorder in the Northwest it would embarrass the government.

“Then I’ll hire I.W.W. men,” said old Dorn.

Kurt battled against a rising temper.  This blind old man was his father.

“But I’ll not have I.W.W. men on the farm,” retorted Kurt.  “I just punched one I.W.W. solicitor.”

“I’ll run this farm.  If you don’t like my way you can leave,” darkly asserted the father.

Kurt fell back in his chair and stared at the turgid, bulging forehead and hard eyes before him.  What could be behind them?  Had the war brought out a twist in his father’s brain?  Why were Germans so impossible?