That evening at supper Mr. Wheeler gave his wife a full account of the court hearing, so that she could write it to Claude.  Mrs. Wheeler, always more a school-teacher than a housekeeper, wrote a rapid, easy hand, and her long letters to Claude reported all the neighbourhood doings.  Mr. Wheeler furnished much of the material for them.  Like many long-married men he had fallen into the way of withholding neighbourhood news from his wife.  But since Claude went away he reported to her everything in which he thought the boy would be interested.  As she laconically said in one of her letters: 

“Your father talks a great deal more at home than formerly, and sometimes I think he is trying to take your place.”

X

On the first day of July Claude Wheeler found himself in the fast train from Omaha, going home for a week’s leave.  The uniform was still an unfamiliar sight in July, 1917.  The first draft was not yet called, and the boys who had rushed off and enlisted were in training camps far away.  Therefore a redheaded young man with long straight legs in puttees, and broad, energetic, responsible-looking shoulders in close-fitting khaki, made a conspicuous figure among the passengers.  Little boys and young girls peered at him over the tops of seats, men stopped in the aisle to talk to him, old ladies put on their glasses and studied his clothes, his bulky canvas hold-all, and even the book he kept opening and forgetting to read.

The country that rushed by him on each side of the track was more interesting to his trained eye than the pages of any book.  He was glad to be going through it at harvest,—­the season when it is most itself.  He noted that there was more corn than usual,—­much of the winter wheat had been weather killed, and the fields were ploughed up in the spring and replanted in maize.  The pastures were already burned brown, the alfalfa was coming green again after its first cutting.  Binders and harvesters were abroad in the wheat and oats, gathering the soft-breathing billows of grain into wide, subduing arms.  When the train slowed down for a trestle in a wheat field, harvesters in blue shirts and overalls and wide straw hats stopped working to wave at the passengers.  Claude turned to the old man in the opposite seat.  “When I see those fellows, I feel as if I’d wakened up in the wrong clothes.”

His neighbour looked pleased and smiled.  “That the kind of uniform you’re accustomed to?”

“I surely never wore anything else in the month of July,” Claude admitted.  “When I find myself riding along in a train, in the middle of harvest, trying to learn French verbs, then I know the world is turned upside down, for a fact!”