The wheat was ready for harvest.  From her place under the clematis vine, where she sat with her sewing, Annie could see the fields of pale gold, ready for the reaper.  Wes had taken the coffeepot and gone down to the valley to see when the threshers would be able to come.  In the morning he would begin to cut.  Annie cocked a questioning eye at the sky, for she had already learned to watch the farmer’s greatest ally and enemy—­weather.

“If this good spell of weather only holds until he gets it all cut!” She remembered stories he had told her of sudden storms that flattened the ripe grain to the ground, beyond saving; of long-continued rains that mildewed it as it stood in the shocks.  But if the good weather held!  And there was not a cloud in the sky, nor any of those faint signs by which changing winds or clouds are forecast.

She heard the rattle and clack of the returning coffeepot, boiling up the hill at an unwonted speed.  And she waved her hand to Wes as he came past; but he was bent over the wheel and did not even look round for her, only banged the little car round to the back furiously.  Something in his attitude warned her, and she felt the old almost-forgotten devil of her fear leap to clutch her heart.

Presently he came round the house, and she hardly dared to look at him; she could not ask.  But there was no need.  He flung his hat on the ground before her with a gesture of frantic violence.  When he spoke the words came in a ferment of fury: 

“That skunk of a Harrison says he won’t bring the thresher up here this year; claims the road’s too rough and bridges are too weak for the engine.”

“Oh, Wes—­what’ll you do?”

“Do!  I’m not going to do anything!  I’m not going to haul my wheat down to him—­I’ll see him in hell and back again before I will.”

“But our wheat!”

“The wheat can rot in the fields!  I won’t be bossed and blackguarded by any dirty little runt that thinks because he owns the only threshing outfit in the neighbourhood that he can run my affairs.”

He raged up and down, adding invective, vituperation.

“But you can’t, Wes—­you can’t let the wheat go to waste.”  For Annie had absorbed the sound creed of the country, that to waste foodstuff is a crime as heinous as murder.

“Can’t I?  Well, we’ll see about that!”

She recognized from his tone that she had been wrong to protest; she had confirmed him in his purpose.  She picked up her sewing and tried with unsteady fingers to go on with it, but she could not see the stitches for her tears.  He couldn’t mean it—­and yet, what if he should?  She looked up and out toward those still fields of precious ore, dimming under the purple shadows of twilight, and saw them a black tangle of wanton desolation.  The story Aunt Dolcey had told her about the potatoes of last year was ominous in her mind.

He was sitting opposite her now, his head in his hands, brooding, sullen, the implacable vein in his forehead swollen with triumph, something brutish and hard dimming his clean and gallant youth.