Kurt, mounted on the seat of one of the combine threshers, surveyed with rapid and anxious gaze all the points around him, and it lingered over the magnificent sweep of golden wheat.  The wheat bowed in waves before the wind, and the silken rustle, heard above the confusion of yelling men, was like a voice whispering to Kurt.  Somehow his dread lessened then and other emotions predominated.  He saw more and more farmers arrive, in cars, in wagons, with engines and threshers, until the lane was lined with them and men were hurrying everywhere.

Suddenly Kurt espied a slender column of smoke rising above the wheat out in front of him toward the highway.  This was the first sign of fire in the great section that so many farmers had come to protect.  Yelling for help, he leaped off the seat and ran with all his might toward the spot.  Breasting that thick wheat was almost as hard as breasting waves.  Jerry came yelling after him, brandishing a crude beater; and both of them reached the fire at once.  It was a small circle, burning slowly.  Madly Kurt rushed in to tear and stamp as if the little hissing flames were serpents.  He burned his hands through his gloves and his feet through his boots.  Jerry beat hard, accompanying his blows with profane speech plainly indicating that he felt he was at work on the I.W.W.  In short order they put out this little fire.  Returning to his post, Kurt watched until he was called to lend a hand down in the stunted wheat.

Fire had crossed and had gotten a hold on Dorn’s lower field.  Here the wheat was blasted and so burned all the more fiercely.  Horses and mowers had to be taken away to the intervening barley-field.  A weird, smoky, and ruddy darkness enveloped the scene.  Dim red fire, in lines and dots and curves, appeared on three sides, growing larger and longer, meeting in some places, crisscrossed by black figures of threshing men belaboring the flames.  Kurt came across his father working like a mad-man.  Kurt warned him not to overexert himself, and the father never heard.  Now and then his stentorian yell added to the medley of cries and shouts and blows, and the roar of the wind fanning the flames.

Kurt was put to beating fire in the cut wheat.  He stood with flames licking at his boots.  It was astonishing how tenacious the fire appeared, how it crept along, eating up the mowed wheat.  All the men that could be spared there were unable to check it and keep it out of the standing grain.  When it reached this line it lifted a blaze, flamed and roared, and burned like wildfire in grass.  The men were driven back, threshing and beating, all to no avail.  Kurt fell into despair.  There was no hope.  It seemed like an inferno.

Flaring high, the light showed the black, violently agitated forms of the fighters, and the clouds of yellow smoke, coalescing and drifting, changing to dark and soaring high.

Olsen had sent three mowers abreast down the whole length of the barley-field before the fire reached that line.  It was a wise move, and if anything could do so it would save the day.  The leaping flame, thin and high, and a mile long, curled down the last of the standing wheat and caught the fallen barley.  But here its speed was checked.  It had to lick a way along the ground.