By seven o'clock two binders, each drawn by four magnificent horses, were in the barley field. Keefer drove one team and George the other, and when each had made two rounds we started stooking. I saw Keefer watching us as we started, evidently taking note whether we would follow the binders or go in the opposite direction, and when we did the latter he nodded, as much as to say. "They'll do," and drove on. Although we could not claim to be experienced farm hands we had lived close enough to farm life in the East to be something better than greenhorns, and our summer on the prairie had made us as hard as nails.

We needed both our strength and our fort.i.tude before sundown that night.

The barley crop was heavy, and a trifle over-ripe, and the sharp-pointed awns which this cereal throws off had a way of seeking out our vulnerable points that was almost devilish. They crawled under our shirts and into our hair and most particularly through our socks just above the boot-tops. The thermometer during the day hung close to the hundred mark, and as the afternoon wore on we gave way to the temptation to drink heavily from the water keg. It was a forty-acre field, which Keefer was bent upon cutting in one day, not because he needed to but because he had laid that down as a standard for a day's work with two binders. But the horses felt the drag of the first day of harvest as much as we did, and as the field grew smaller they lost more and more time at the corners.

By evening the red rays of the setting sun, hitting squarely in our faces, revealed in Jack's eye a glint of the light of battle such as I had seen there only once or twice, and I knew that nothing short of utter exhaustion would prevent him finishing like a thoroughbred. My own muscles were numb, and now seemed to be working quite mechanically; my clothing was saturated through and through, but I had a strange feeling that the limitations of the human body were suspended and that I could go on permanently, like a machine.

The field grew smaller and smaller, and the shouting of Keefer and George at the tired horses grew more and more insistent, but just as it was almost too dark to see Keefer came down the last stretch with his knives flashing clear on both sides of the remaining ribbon of barley.

"Now," Jack shouted in my ear, "for all that's in you!" And drawing from unsuspected reserves of energy which we had stored about us somewhere we went down the field at a run, setting up the remaining sheaves at a terrific pace. Just as Keefer reached the end of his swath we overtook him, and Jack, seizing the sheaf that was still in the binder, tore it from the knotter and flung it to me where I stood beside a stook waiting to receive it.

Then Keefer did a gracious thing. He climbed down from his binder seat and shook hands with us.

"Boys," he said, "I didn't believe it was in you." Which was a very high compliment from Mr. Keefer.

CHAPTER XI.

We worked for Mr. Keefer until the last sheaf of his six hundred acre crop was in stook. Not all of the time were we speeded up as on that first day in the barley field; we had seasons of comparative calm, particularly while waiting for the wheat to ripen, but whatever advances of leisure our employer may have made us during that period were more than repaid when, in the last week of August, two hundred acres of wheat came in with a rush, and a moon in its second quarter threatened frost every night. Keefer brought up four more horses from a ranch which he owned somewhere nearby, and by relaying his teams he was able to keep his binders going during the noon hour. This did not make it any easier for his stookers, but we were now thoroughly hardened to the work, and we had learned, as well, that even in such a simple operation as stooking there may be acquired a knack which saves many a step and many an ounce of effort. We no longer tried to keep four rounds behind the binders; we could look on with equanimity while they obtained a lead of a half day's cutting, and then we worked along the windrows of sheaves, at right angles to the standing grain, instead of parallel with it.

This saved a great amount of walking, and we found that what had been a terribly hard day's work at first could now be done without leading us to the brink of exhaustion.

During that last week in August Mr. Keefer hung a thermometer on a clothes-line post in the yard, and notwithstanding his long days in the field he would get out of bed two or three times in the night, and particularly just before dawn, to study the temperature.

"Full moon Friday night," he said to us on Tuesday. "I want this wheat in stook before we sleep Friday."

"Do you think the moon has anything to do with the temperature?" I asked him, not in an argumentative mood, but because I wanted to know.

"Can't say," he answered. "I'm not an astronomer, or whatever it is that could give scientific reasons, but I know we always reckon that if we get by the full moon at the end of August or the beginning of September without frost we're safe for another fortnight. It's like the chicken from an egg; I can't explain it, but there it is."

"But is there really much danger of frost, anyway?"

"Not as bad as it used to be, and it will disappear altogether as more land comes under cultivation, but at present it has to be reckoned with.

When the whole profit or loss on the year's operations hangs on a few degrees of temperature, do you wonder that I get up in the night to look at the thermometer?"

Perhaps it was this little insight which Keefer gave us into his anxiety and the reason for it that keyed us up to the effort we were to make during the next three days. I have always held that any man who is worth his pay works for something more than his pay, and certainly for the next seventy-two hours pay was the last thing in our minds. We had to beat the frost-fiend that was crouching somewhere in the low mists of a moonlit night, waiting to sweep down and ruin this vast, defenceless field of wheat that stood nodding complacently in the harvest sun, all unconscious of the enemy that threatened it. That was before the days of the general use of the tractor, and the horses could not work day and night, or I am sure we should have followed them, stooking by the white light of the moon that filled the heavens with a brilliance almost like that of the day.

In the middle of the afternoon Nellie Keefer would drive out with a horse and buggy and bring us a lunch of sandwiches and tea, and the few minutes during which we would sit in the shade of a stook piled high for that purpose while Nellie helped us from her basket and filled and refilled our cups were occasions to be remembered. She was a rather winsome girl, was Nellie; quite without the idealism which made Jean one girl in a million, but possessed of a st.u.r.dy and practical ability and a very adequate supply of self-confidence.

"Nellie's a chip off the old block," her mother had said one day when the girl had wrestled a refractory mustang into submission. We had stood by and watched the fight, keeping out of it at Nellie's express command.

We were left to infer that, in Mrs. Keefer's figure of speech, Mr.

Keefer was the old block.

Well, we won. It was stark moonlight on Friday night, possibly ten o'clock or later, when the binder blades at last ran free at the end of the last remaining ribbon of yellow wheat. For a day and a half, by superhuman efforts, we had been overtaking the lead which we had allowed the binders for the sake of efficiency in stooking, and once again when the packers clattered idly above the last half sheaf Jack yanked it from the knotter and flung it to me where I stood waiting to receive it. Then we trudged homeward, tired but victorious.

And it didn't freeze, after all. By eleven o'clock a cloud loomed up in the west, and a wind began to lash the oat field. By twelve the rays of the moon struggled but faintly through a curtain of mist. At dawn the thermometer still showed two degrees above freezing.

When we had finished with Mr. Keefer he paid us off and told us where we would be sure to get a job threshing. We shook hands all round, and I think I shook hands with Nellie twice, and I remember she said something about calling in if ever I pa.s.sed that way, and even suggested that she and Harry might drive over to Fourteen next summer and pay us a visit, for I had told her, of course, of Jean and Marjorie. Oh, well, these things happen. . . . .

We found Mr. Alec Thomson with his body half inside the boiler of his threshing engine. As we came up his position reminded me of Jake's figure about a hound after garbage. He was so engaged in his work, and making so much of a clatter, that he didn't hear our approach, and it was not until Jack banged the boiler with a hammer which had been lying nearby that he jumped from his position as though he had been shot in his remaining exposure.

"Good morning, Mr. Thomson," we said when we could get our faces straight. "We came to join your gang."

"You'll join a bigger gang than mine if you give me another scare like that," said Mr. Thomson, looking us over. "Where are you from?"

"Been working for Keefer," we explained.

"Get fired?"

"No."

"Through?"

"Through to the last sheaf."

Mr. Thomson's eyes showed a growing interest. "All right," he said, after a moment. "Any man that can finish a season with Keefer is good enough for me. Put the bulls in the stable and give me a hand with this expander."

Thomson was a bachelor who did a little farming while he was putting in his residence duties on a homestead, but his princ.i.p.al industry and interest in life was in his threshing machine. He must have it perfect to the last bolt and belt-lace, although his shack was a musty affair that gave me the creeps after Marjorie's immaculate cleanliness and even after our own housekeeping performances in Keefer's granary. We stayed with him for a number of days at a nominal rate of wages, helping with the repairs to his engine and separator while waiting for the wheat to harden in the stook.

When at last we were ready for the field Thomson's homestead presented a scene of great animation. He had gathered a gang of men and horses about him; had hired a cook and stocked the cook-car, and had laid in a supply of oil and repairs. Thomson was his own engineer, and it had been decided that I should be fireman, while Jack drove the oxen on a bundle team. After the first day or two I found the work not so hard as stooking although the hours were even longer. I would be in the field at four o'clock in the morning firing up that old straw-burner in order to have enough steam to whistle at six, and I was the last to leave the outfit at night.

Thompson had impressed me with my duties at the start. "Keep one eye on the steam gauge and the other on the water gla.s.s, and both on the lookout for fire," he said, "and that's about all you need to know."

I soon found there was more than that to know about firing a straw-burner, but these were the essentials. At times when the straw was still damp after rain I had my troubles, and some mornings, until I could raise enough steam to use the forced draft, Sally, as I called our engine, would be as cantankerous as any kitchen stove when the wind swirls over the roof the wrong way. But I soon learned how to take her moods, and before the season was half gone I began to feel a strange sort of affection for this great, greasy lump of metal as the drone of its exhaust played a monotonous lullabye in my ears and the whiff of steam and tallow lent an additional tang to the edge of my fireman's appet.i.te. The G.o.ddess of steam began in some subtle way to draw me into her embrace, and I came to understand how it is that once a steam engineer, always a steam engineer.

"None of those temperamental things for me," said Thompson one day when the first gasoline tractor I had ever seen went slowly coughing by.

"Sally may be a bit mussy and old fashioned, but she has a h.e.l.l of a punch in her elbow." Just then a damp sheaf from the bottom of a stook went in crosswise, and the automatic governor valve flew open. Sally snorted in indignation and the force of her exhaust drew my fire up into the flues as she threw double her normal horse-power into her driving-rod.

"Humph!" said Alec, patting the throttle lever affectionately. "I'd like to see one of those coughin' critters chew on a cud like that!"

So the threshing season wore on. We ate in a cook-car, slept in a "caboose," and worked from dawn until dark. Sometimes, to finish a "set"

we would burn a straw pile and work by its light after the stars were out in the heavens. Although the work was hard and dirty it was the sort of dirt that is neither offensive nor unhealthful, and there was a certain reckless good-fellowship among the gang that made the time pa.s.s pleasantly enough. There were fights on a couple of occasions, when some one brought liquor out from town; one of the men had an arm broken under a belt, and all of us had a scare one day when the field we were working in caught fire from a spark from the engine, but these were mere incidents in a routine of hard work from dawn until dark, and afterwards. At nights the prairie was lit up with the orange-red glow of burning straw piles, their fan-shaped reflections thrust high in the heavens, while the jingle of trace-chains, the rumble of wagons, and the plaintive steam whistles which came through the gloaming from other outfits than our own brought a strange sense of the worthiness of work well done. Tired and prodigiously hungry we would attack the cook-car, and then presently crawl to our bunks and to sleep.

It was the middle of October, and there was a crisp tang in the air night and morning, before we again hit the trail for Fourteen and Twenty-two. During all this time we had had no word from our homes, as there was no one to carry mail in or out, and it was with anxious and eager hearts that we hurried Buck and Bright along the homeward winding trail.

On the second day, as we were bowling along at the two-and-a-half mile an hour clip which Buck and Bright considered the limit of furious driving Jack drew my attention to a speck on the horizon ahead of us. It grew rapidly, and although there was no mirage this time to bring our visitor down from heaven, we soon were able to discern the scarlet uniform of the Mounted Police. It came along at the smart trot to which the police horse is educated, and in half an hour Harold Brook drew up beside us.

"h.e.l.lo, Lane and Hall!" the policeman greeted us. "Getting back from your harvest excursion?"

So it was evident he knew we had been away, and why. But Jack, whether he thought of this or not, answered him cordially.

"We're on the home stretch," he admitted, "and old Fourteen and Twenty-two will look pretty good to us, after cook-cars and cabooses."

The lightest kind of a smile flickered about Brook's lips. "And so it should," he agreed, "with two fine girls such as adorn your respective homesteads. I was in the district last night."

"Were the girls well?" I forced myself to say, partly because I felt my silence was beginning to shout, and partly because of a real anxiety about them.