“All that work—­Olsen’s sacrifice—­and the farmers’—­my father’s death—­all for nothing!” whispered Kurt.  “They only waited—­those fiends—­to fire the warehouse and the cars!”

The catastrophe had fallen.  The wheat was burning.  He was ruined.  His wheatland must go to Anderson.  Kurt thought first and most poignantly of the noble farmers who had sacrificed the little in their wheat-fields to save the much in his.  Never could he repay them.

Then he became occupied with a horrible heat that seemed to have come from the burning warehouse to all his pulses and veins and to his heart and his soul.

This fiendish work, as had been forecast, was the work of the I.W.W.  Behind it was Glidden and perhaps behind him was the grasping, black lust of German might.  Kurt’s loss was no longer abstract or problematical.  It was a loss so real and terrible that it confounded him.  He shook and gasped and reeled.  He wrung his hands and beat his breast while the tumult swayed him, the physical hate at last yielding up its significance.  What then, was his great loss?  He could not tell.  The thing was mighty, like the sense of terror and loneliness in the black night.  Not the loss for his farmer neighbors, so true in his hour of trial!  Not the loss of his father, nor the wheat, nor the land, nor his ruined future!  But it must be a loss, incalculable and insupportable, to his soul.  His great ordeal had been the need, a terrible and incomprehensible need, to kill something intangible in himself.  He had meant to do it.  And now the need was shifted, subject to a baser instinct.  If there was German blood in him, poisoning the very wells of his heart he could have spilled it, and so, whether living or dead, have repudiated the taint.  That was now clear in his consciousness.  But a baser spark had ignited all the primitive passion of the forebears he felt burning and driving within him.  He felt no noble fire.  He longed to live, to have a hundredfold his strength and fury, to be gifted with a genius for time and place and bloody deed, to have the war-gods set him a thousand opportunities, to beat with iron mace and cut with sharp bayonet and rend with hard hand—­to kill and kill and kill the hideous thing that was German.

CHAPTER XIV

Kurt rushed back to the house.  Encountering Jerry, he ordered him to run and saddle a couple of horses.  Then Kurt got his revolver and a box of shells, and, throwing on his coat, he hurried to the barn.  Jerry was leading out the horses.  It took but short work to saddle them.  Jerry was excited and talkative.  He asked Kurt many questions, which excited few replies.

When Kurt threw himself into the saddle Jerry yelled, “Which way?”

“Down the trail!” replied Kurt, and was off.

“Aw, we’ll break our necks!” came Jerry’s yell after him.