Next morning he went out to the wheat-field.

* * * * *

What a wonderful harvesting scene greeted Kurt Dorn!  Never had its like been seen in the Northwest, nor perhaps in any other place.  A huge pall of dust, chaff, and smoke hung over the vast wheat-field, and the air seemed charged with a roar.  The glaring gold of the wheat-field appeared to be crisscrossed everywhere with bobbing black streaks of horses—­bays, blacks, whites, and reds; by big, moving painted machines, lifting arms and puffing straw; by immense wagons piled high with sheaves of wheat, lumbering down to the smoking engines and the threshers that sent long streams of dust and chaff over the lifting straw-stacks; by wagons following the combines to pick up the plump brown sacks of wheat; and by a string of empty wagons coming in from the road.

Olsen was rushing thirty combine threshers, three engine threshing-machines, forty wagon-teams, and over a hundred men well known to him.  There was a guard around the field.  This unprecedented harvest had attracted many spectators from the little towns.  They had come in cars and on horseback and on foot.  Olsen trusted no man on that field except those he knew.

The wonderful wheat-field was cut into a thousand squares and angles and lanes and curves.  The big whirring combines passed one another, stopped and waited and turned out of the way, leaving everywhere little patches and cubes of standing wheat, that soon fell before the onslaught of the smaller combines.  This scene had no regularity.  It was one of confusion; of awkward halts, delays, hurries; of accident.  The wind blew clouds of dust and chaff, alternately clearing one space to cloud another.  And a strange roar added the last heroic touch to this heroic field.  It was indeed the roar of battle—­men and horses governing the action of machinery, and all fighting time.  For in delay was peril to the wheat.

Once Kurt ran across the tireless and implacable Olsen.  He seemed a man of dust and sweat and fury.

“She’s half cut an’ over twenty thousand bushels gone to the railroad!” he exclaimed.  “An’ we’re speedin’ up.”

“Olsen, I don’t get what’s going on,” replied Kurt.  “All this is like a dream.”

“Wake up.  You’ll be out of debt an’ a rich man in three days,” added Olsen, and went his way.

In the afternoon Kurt set out to work as he had never worked in his life.  There was need of his strong hands in many places, but he could not choose any one labor and stick by it for long.  He wanted to do all.  It was as if this was not a real and wonderful harvest of his father’s greatest wheat yield, but something that embodied all years, all harvests, his father’s death, the lifting of the old, hard debt, the days when he had trod the fields barefoot, and this day when, strangely enough, all seemed over for him.  Peace dwelt with him, yet no hope.  Behind his calm he could have found