Comparatively few city born people realize how important a factor the weather is in the daily routine of the farmer. They know that a long-continued drought causes short crops and that floods sometimes do considerable damage in certain valleys. Of the inconvenience caused by unwelcome showers which sometimes become epidemic in busy seasons, they have no knowledge. In a certain thriving farming section, there had been a series of sudden thunder showers which had been very discouraging to hay makers.
How Lote Platt Beat the Thunder Shower
“Lote” Platt had grown somewhat irascible in his old age and weather eccentricities had gradually become a personal matter with him. When unceremonious thunder showers had soaked a certain crop of clover hay about the third or fourth time, Lote began to feel peevish. However, he spread the hay out to dry and after one wet surface had responded to the sun’s rays, he turned the other side up and early in the afternoon found the clover in prime order to go in the barn.
He hastened to rake it into long windrows and was just preparing to send his hired man after the oxen and cart when he heard the grumbling of thunder and felt the coolness of the rain breeze. Another shower was coming!
The hired man started on the run to get the oxen, but Lote soon realized that the shower, and apparently a very wet one too, was going to reach the hay field long before the oxen could be gotten there.
“Boo-boo,” said Lote, as an unusually loud peal of thunder made the air vibrate. “I’ll show you something you never thought of.”
Lote was at the extreme windward side of the field and the long rows of freshly raked hay stretched out before the strong breeze, the forerunner of the approaching storm. Dropping on one knee, Lote scratched a match, shielded it a moment with his old straw hat and then held the blaze to the end of the windrow. Fanned by the wind, the fire followed the long row of dry hay across the field. Then another blaze followed by others also, and when the shower arrived, the clover which had cost so much labor to be fitted for the hay mow, had ceased to be a problem.
When the proverbially amiable citizen bursts forth in rage, it is astonishing to those who look on, and apt to be quite disconcerting to a perfectly innocent victim. It certainly was to the lumberjack who was “bawled out” by Uncle Jimmy Ryan.