The Desert of Wheat. Zane Grey

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СКАЧАТЬ big, ponderous thing, almost gifted with intelligence, it seemed to Lenore, rolled on with its whirring roar, drawing its cloud of dust, and leaving behind a litter of straw.

      It developed then that Adams had walked along with the machine, and he now addressed her.

      "Will you be staying here till your father comes?" he asked.

      "No, Mr. Adams. Why do you ask?"

      "You oughtn't come out here alone or go back alone. … All these strange men! Some of them hard customers! You'll excuse me, miss, but this harvest is not like other harvests."

      "I'll wait for my father and I'll not go out of sight," replied Lenore. Thanking the foreman for his thoughtfulness, she walked away, and soon she stood at the edge of the first wheat-field.

      The grain was not yet ripe but near at hand it was a pale gold. The wind, out of the west, waved and swept the wheat, while the almost imperceptible shadows followed.

      A road half overgrown with grass and goldenrod bordered the wheat-field, and it wound away down toward the house. Her father appeared mounted on the white horse he always rode. Lenore sat down in the grass to wait for him. Nodding stalks of goldenrod leaned to her face. When looked at closely, how truly gold their color! Yet it was not such a gold as that of the rich blaze of ripe wheat. She was admitting to her consciousness a jealousy of anything comparable to wheat. And suddenly she confessed that her natural love for it had been augmented by a subtle growing sentiment. Not sentiment about the war or the need of the Allies or meaning of the staff of life. She had sensed young Dorn's passion for wheat and it had made a difference to her.

      "No use lying to myself!" she soliloquized. "I think of him!.. I can't help it … I ran out here, wild, restless, unable to reason … just because I'd decided to see him again—to make sure I—I really didn't care. … How furious—how ridiculous I'll feel—when—when—"

      Lenore did not complete her thought, because she was not sure. Nothing could be any truer than the fact that she had no idea how she would feel. She began sensitively to distrust herself. She who had always been so sure of motives, so contented with things as they were, had been struck by an absurd fancy that haunted because it was fiercely repudiated and scorned, that would give her no rest until it was proven false. But suppose it were true!

      A succeeding blankness of mind awoke to the clip-clop of hoofs and her father's cheery halloo.

      Anderson dismounted and, throwing his bridle, he sat down heavily beside her.

      "You can ride back home," he said.

      Lenore knew she had been reproved for her wandering out there, and she made a motion to rise. His big hand held her down.

      "No hurry, now I'm here. Grand day, ain't it? An' I see the barley's goin'. Them sacks look good to me."

      Lenore waited with some perturbation. She had a guilty conscience and she feared he meant to quiz her about her sudden change of front regarding the Bend trip. So she could not look up and she could not say a word.

      "Jake says that Nash has been tryin' to make up to you. Any sense in what he says?" asked her father, bluntly.

      "Why, hardly. Oh, I've noticed Nash is—is rather fresh, as Rose calls it," replied Lenore, somewhat relieved at this unexpected query.

      "Yes, he's been makin' eyes at Rose. She told me," replied Anderson.

      "Discharge him," said Lenore, forcibly.

      "So I ought. But let me tell you, Lenore. I've been hopin' to get Nash dead to rights."

      "What more do you want?" she demanded.

      "I mean regardin' his relation to the I.W.W. … Listen. Here's the point. Nash has been tracked an' caught in secret talks with prominent men in this country. Men of foreign blood an' mebbe foreign sympathies. We're at the start of big an' bad times in the good old U.S. No one can tell how bad. Well, you know my position in the Golden Valley. I'm looked to. Reckon this I.W.W. has got me a marked man. I'm packin' two guns right now. An' you bet Jake is packin' the same. We don't travel far apart any more this summer."

      Lenore had started shudderingly and her look showed her voiceless fear.

      "You needn't tell your mother," he went on, more intimately. "I can trust you an' … To come back to Nash. He an' this Glidden—you remember, one of those men at Dorn's house—they are usin' gold. They must have barrels of it. If I could find out where that gold comes from! Probably they don't know. But I might find out if men here in our own country are hatchin' plots with the I.W.W."

      "Plots! What for?" queried Lenore, breathlessly.

      "To destroy my wheat, to drive off or bribe the harvest-hands, to cripple the crop yield in the Northwest; to draw the militia here; in short, to harass an' weaken an' slow down our government in its preparation against Germany."

      "Why, that is terrible!" declared Lenore.

      "I've a hunch from Jake—there's a whisper of a plot to put me out of the way," said Anderson, darkly.

      "Oh—good Heavens! You don't mean it!" cried Lenore, distractedly.

      "Sure I do. But that's no way for Anderson's daughter to take it. Our women have got to fight, too. We've all got to meet these German hired devils with their own weapons. Now, lass, you know you'll get these wheatlands of mine some day. It's in my will. That's because you, like your dad, always loved the wheat. You'd fight, wouldn't you, to save your grain for our soldiers—bread for your own brother Jim—an' for your own land?"

      "Fight! Would I?" burst out Lenore, with a passionate little cry.

      "Good! Now you're talkin'!" exclaimed her father.

      "I'll find out about this Nash—if you'll let me," declared Lenore, as if inspired.

      "How? What do you mean, girl?"

      "I'll encourage him. I'll make him think I'm a wishy-washy moonstruck girl, smitten with him. All's fair in war! … If he means ill by my father—"

      Anderson muttered low under his breath and his big hand snapped hard at the nodding goldenrod.

      "For my sake—to help me—you'd encourage Nash—flirt with him a little—find out all you could?"

      "Yes, I would!" she cried, deliberately. But she wanted to cover her face with her hands. She trembled slightly, then grew cold, with a sickening disgust at this strange, new, uprising self.

      "Wait a minute before you say too much," went on Anderson. "You're my best-beloved child, my Lenore, the lass I've been so proud of all my life. I'd spill blood to avenge an insult to you. … But, Lenore, we've entered upon a terrible war. People out here, especially the women, don't realize it yet. But you must realize it. When I said good-by to Jim, my son, I—I felt I'd never look upon his face again! … I gave him up. I could have held him back—got exemption for him. But, no, by God! I gave him up—to make safety and happiness and prosperity for—say, your children, an' Rose's, an' Kathleen's. … I'm workin' now for the future. So must every loyal man an' every loyal woman! We love our own country. An' I ask you to see as I see the terrible danger to that country. Think of you an' Rose an' Kathleen bein' treated like those poor Belgian girls! Well, you'd get that an' СКАЧАТЬ