the old dread, had he cared to look deeply.  He loved these heroic workers of the fields.  It had been given to him—­a great task—­to be the means of creating a test for them, his neighbors under a ban of suspicion; and now he could swear they were as true as the gold of the waving wheat.  More than a harvest was this most strenuous and colorful of all times ever known in the Bend; it had a significance that uplifted him.  It was American.

First Kurt began to load bags of wheat, as they fell from the whirring combines, into the wagons.  For his powerful arms a full bag, containing two bushels, was like a toy for a child.  With a lift and a heave he threw a bag into a wagon.  They were everywhere, these brown bags, dotting the stubble field, appearing as if by magic in the wake of the machines.  They rolled off the platforms.  This toil, because it was hard and heavy, held Kurt for an hour, but it could not satisfy his enormous hunger to make that whole harvest his own.  He passed to pitching sheaves of wheat and then to driving in the wagons.  From that he progressed to a seat on one of the immense combines, where he drove twenty-four horses.  No driver there was any surer than Kurt of his aim with the little stones he threw to spur a lagging horse.  Kurt had felt this when, as a boy, he had begged to be allowed to try his hand; he liked the shifty cloud of fragrant chaff, now and then blinding and choking him; and he liked the steady, rhythmic tramps of hooves and the roaring whir of the great complicated machine.  It fascinated him to see the wide swath of nodding wheat tremble and sway and fall, and go sliding up into the inside of that grinding maw, and come out, straw and dust and chaff, and a slender stream of gold filling the bags.

This day Kurt Dorn was gripped by the unknown.  Some far-off instinct of future drove him, set his spiritual need, and made him register with his senses all that was so beautiful and good and heroic in the scene about him.

Strangely, now and then a thought of Lenore Anderson entered his mind and made sudden havoc.  It tended to retard action.  He trembled and thrilled with a realization that every hour brought closer the meeting he could not avoid.  And he discovered that it was whenever this memory recurred that he had to leave off his present task and rush to another.  Only thus could he forget her.

The late afternoon found him feeding sheaves of wheat to one of the steam-threshers.  He stood high upon a platform and pitched sheaves from the wagons upon the sliding track of the ponderous, rattling threshing-machine.  The engine stood off fifty yards or more, connected by an endless driving-belt to the thresher.  Here indeed were whistle and roar and whir, and the shout of laborers, and the smell of smoke, sweat, dust, and wheat.  Kurt had arms of steel.  If they tired he never knew it.  He toiled, and he watched the long spout of chaff and straw as it streamed from the thresher to lift, magically, a glistening, ever-growing stack.  And he felt, as a last and cumulative change, his physical effort, and the physical adjuncts of the scene, pass into something spiritual, into his heart and his memory.