It
had blown over leagues of sun-bleached prairie, and the great
desolation beyond the pines of the Saskatchewan, but had not wholly
lost the faint, wholesome chill it brought from the Pole.
There was no cloud in the vault of ether, and slanting sun-rays beat
fiercely down upon the prairie, until the fibrous dust grew fiery and
the eyes ached from the glare of the vast stretch of silvery gray. The
latter was, however, relieved by stronger color in front of the party,
for blazing gold on the dazzling stubble, the oat sheaves rolled away
in long rows that diminished and melted into each other, until they cut
the blue of the sky in a delicate filigree. Oats had moved up in value
in sympathy with wheat, and the good soil had most abundantly redeemed
its promise that year. Colonel Barrington, however, sighed a little as
he looked at them, and remembered that such a harvest might have been
his.
"We will get down and walk towards the wheat," he said. "It is a good
crop and Lance is to be envied."
"Still," said Miss Barrington, "he deserved it, and those sheaves stand
for more than the toil that brought them there."
"Of course!" said the Colonel, with a curious little smile. "For
rashness, I fancied, when they showed the first blade above the clod,
but I am less sure of it now. Well, the wheat is even finer."
A man who came up took charge of the horses, and the party walked in
silence towards the wheat. It stretched before them in a vast
parallelogram, and while the oats were the pale gold of the austral,
there was the tint of the ruddier metal of their own Northwest in this.
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