Maud Barrington, who understood it,
once more put on the becoming reticence of Silverdale.
"We are getting beyond our depth, and it is very hot," she said. "You
have all this hay to cut!"
Winston laughed as he bent over the mower's knife. "Yes," he said, "It
is really more in my line, and I have kept you in the sun too long."
In another few moments Maud Barrington was riding across the prairie,
but when the rattle of the machine rose from the sloo behind her, she
laughed curiously.
"The man knew his place, but you came perilously near making a fool of
yourself this morning, my dear," she said.
It was a week or two later, and very hot, when, with others of his
neighbors, Winston sat in the big hall at Silverdale Grange. The
windows were open wide and the smell of hot dust came in from the white
waste which rolled away beneath the stars. There was also another odor
in the little puffs of wind that flickered in, and far off where the
arch of indigo dropped to the dusky earth, wavy lines of crimson moved
along the horizon. It was then the season when fires that are lighted
by means which no man knows creep up and down the waste of grass, until
they put on speed and roll in a surf of flame before a sudden breeze.
Still, nobody was anxious about them, for the guarding furrows that
would oppose a space of dusty soil to the march of the flame had been
plowed round every homestead at Silverdale.
Maud Barrington was at the piano and her voice was good, while Winston,
who had known what it is to toil from red dawn to sunset without hope
of more than daily food, found the simple song she had chosen chime
with his mood.
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