“Here I am, Jerry,” called Kurt, stepping forward.  Just then Olsen joined Jerry.

“Boy, we’ve beat the I.W.W.’s, but—­but—­” he began, and broke off huskily.

“What’s the matter?” queried Kurt, and a cold chill shot over him.

Jerry plucked at his sleeve.

“Your old man—­your dad—­he’s overworked hisself,” whispered Jerry.  “It’s tough....  Nobody could stop him.”

Kurt felt that the fulfilment of his icy, sickening dread had come.  Jerry’s dark face, even in the uncertain light, was tragic.

“Boy, his heart went back on him—­he’s dead!” said Olsen, solemnly.

Kurt pushed the kind hands aside.  A few steps brought him to where, under the light of the lantern, lay his father, pale and still, with a strange softening of the iron cast of intolerance.

“Dead!” whispered Kurt, in awe and horror.  “Father!  Oh, he’s gone!—­without a word—­”

Again Jerry plucked at Kurt’s sleeve.

“I was with him,” said Jerry.  “I heard him fall an’ groan....  I had the light.  I bent over, lifted his head....  An’ he said, speaking English, ‘Tell my son—­I was wrong!’...  Then he died.  An’ thet was all.”

Kurt staggered away from the whispering, sympathetic foreman, out into the darkness, where he lifted his face in the thankfulness of a breaking heart.

It had, indeed, taken the approach of death to change his hard old father.  “Oh, he meant—­that if he had his life to live over again—­he would be different!” whispered Kurt.  That was the one great word needed to reconcile Kurt to his father.

The night had grown still except for the murmuring of the men.  Smoke veiled the horizon.  Kurt felt an intense and terrible loneliness.  He was indeed alone in the world.  A hard, tight contraction of throat choked back a sob.  If only he could have had a word with his father!  But no grief, nothing could detract from the splendid truth of his father’s last message.  In the black hours soon to come Kurt would have that to sustain him.

CHAPTER XIII

The bright sun of morning disclosed that wide, rolling region of the Bend to be a dreary, blackened waste surrounding one great wheat-field, rich and mellow and golden.

Kurt Dorn’s neighbor, Olsen, in his kind and matter-of-fact way, making obligation seem slight, took charge of Kurt’s affairs, and made the necessary and difficult decisions.  Nothing must delay the harvesting and transporting of the wheat.  The women folk arranged for the burial of old Chris Dorn.

Kurt sat and moved about in a gloomy kind of trance for a day and a half, until his father was laid to rest beside his mother, in the little graveyard on the windy hill.  After that his mind slowly cleared.  He kept to himself the remainder of that day, avoiding the crowd of harvesters camping in the yard and adjacent field; and at sunset he went to a lonely spot on the verge of the valley, where with sad eyes he watched the last rays of sunlight fade over the blackened hills.  All these hours had seemed consecrated to his father’s memory, to remembered acts of kindness and of love, of the relation that had gone and would never be again.  Reproach and remorse had abided with him until that sunset hour, when the load eased off his heart.