From the window of the kitchen, which was sitting-room, dining-room, and kitchen all combined, there was nothing to be seen save the wide stretches of waving wheat, varied here and there by low grassy knolls covered with golden rod in full bloom, a mauve chrysanthemum and the bright purple thistle common to the prairie. Bertha’s eyes ached for the cool green of tree foliage, but the only green leaves to be seen were from the pumpkin vines, which she herself had planted by the veranda in the springtime, and which had flourished and spread until they made a shade of greenery most welcome to the eye.
“Another month and all will be bare stubble. Of what a relief it will be!” said Grace one hot afternoon, as her eager gaze wandered out through the open door to the landscape bathed in sunshine, where the waving wheat was already turning to gold in readiness for harvest.
“It will be a very busy time, but we shall get through somehow; don’t worry about it,” replied Bertha soothingly; for she thought that Grace was wondering how the harvest rush of work would go through without her hands to help.
“It was not the thought of the work which made me so anxious to have it over,” went on Grace, with a far-away look in her eyes, as if she were seeing more than the waving stretch of wheat. “I am afraid that my faith is of very poor stuff, because it gets so feeble in times of strain. But sometimes I can hardly sleep at night, wondering what would happen to us if tempest ruined the crop now.”
“A tempest might damage it, but surely, surely it would not entirely ruin it now,” said Bertha, who found it difficult to realize all that was involved by this system of specializing in agriculture.
“Sometimes a thousand acres of corn are destroyed in a night on these prairie lands, and if it is fate—our fate—who can stay it?” said Grace, as her gaze travelled to and fro along the little stretch of horizon that could be seen from where she lay. Then she cried out, with an anguish of fear in her tone: “Bertha! Bertha! What is that out yonder?”
Bertha sprang to her feet, startled by the terror in the tone of the invalid. But she could see nothing at all to rouse a fear; it was just a stretch of golden-floored space, with the blue sky above, and a dim white cloud on the edge of the horizon.
“There is nothing wrong, dear, that I can see, nothing,” she said, but all the same she went to the window, which gave a different view to that spread out before the open door; for she wanted to make sure that there was really no cause for alarm.
“It is smoke! It is smoke!” cried Grace hoarsely. “Don’t you see that white cloud on the edge of the horizon? It was not there ten minutes ago, and it is not a real cloud, I am sure of it. Something has set fire to the wheat, and the wind is driving this way. Oh, Bertha, what shall we do? What shall we do?”
“There may be nothing wrong,” said Bertha quietly, although her heart was beating furiously. “I will run across to the barn and climb the ladder. Tom left it there this morning when he was mending the shingle at the corner. There was not enough wood to finish the job, so he said that it would have to wait until to-morrow.”