Material things—­life, success—­such as had inspired Kurt Dorn, on this calm night lost their significance and were seen clearly.  They could not last.  But the wheat there, the hills, the stars—­they would go on with their task.  Passion was the dominant side of a man declaring itself, and that was a matter of inheritance.  But self-sacrifice, with its mercy, its succor, its seed like the wheat, was as infinite as the stars.  He had long made up his mind, yet that had not given him absolute restraint.  The world was full of little men, but he refused to stay little.  This war that had come between him and his father had been bred of the fumes of self-centered minds, turned with an infantile fatality to greedy desires.  His poor old blinded father could be excused and forgiven.  There were other old men, sick, crippled, idle, who must suffer pain, but whose pain could be lightened.  There were babies, children, women, who must suffer for the sins of men, but that suffering need no longer be, if men became honest and true.

His sudden up-flashing love had a few hours back seemed a calamity.  But out there beside the whispering wheat, under the passionless stars, in the dreaming night, it had turned into a blessing.  He asked nothing but to serve.  To serve her, his country, his future!  All at once he who had always yearned for something unattainable had greatness thrust upon him.  His tragical situation had evoked a spirit from the gods.

To kiss that blue-eyed girl’s sweet lips would be a sum of joy, earthly, all-satisfying, precious.  The man in him trembled all over at the daring thought.  He might revel in such dreams, and surrender to them, since she would never know, but the divinity he sensed there in the presence of those stars did not dwell on a woman’s lips.  Kisses were for the present, the all too fleeting present; and he had to concern himself with what he might do for one girl’s future.  It was exquisitely sad and sweet to put it that way, though Kurt knew that if he had never seen Lenore Anderson he would have gone to war just the same.  He was not making an abstract sacrifice.

The wheat-fields rolling before him, every clod of which had been pressed by his bare feet as a boy; the father whose changeless blood had sickened at the son of his loins; the life of hope, freedom, of action, of achievement, of wonderful possibility—­these seemed lost to Kurt Dorn, a necessary renunciation when he yielded to the call of war.

But no loss, no sting of bullet or bayonet, no torturing victory of approaching death, could balance in the scale against the thought of a picture of one American girl—­blue-eyed, red-lipped, golden-haired—­as she stepped somewhere in the future, down a summer lane or through a blossoming orchard, on soil that was free.

CHAPTER IV

Toward the end of July eastern Washington sweltered under the most torrid spell of heat on record.  It was a dry, high country, noted for an equable climate, with cool summers and mild winters.  And this unprecedented wave would have been unbearable had not the atmosphere been free from humidity.