“Oh, she was very cross, and declared that she would have to make haste and get better, if only to save me the expense of a funeral,” said Tom; but he winced as he spoke, for Grace was everything to him, and the bare mention of her dying was more than he could endure.
“SHE WAS MAKING NO HEADWAY”
CHAPTER XIV
In the Rush
“Oh, if the days were a little longer, what a comfort it would be!” sighed Bertha, as she hurried to and fro setting out a supper for the harvest helpers on the veranda.
“So far as you are concerned, I think that it is a pity that they are quite so long,” said Grace, who could do no more to help in the rush of work than to tell Bertha when a saucepan was going to boil over. Yet even that was a help, and Bertha toiled through the hard days all the more easily for knowing how genuinely sorry for her Grace was.
The wheat was almost all cut. For a week past the binder had been driven round and round the waving squares of wheat, until now it stood in stooks ripening in the sun. But to-night a threshing machine had puffed and panted its way across the uneven trails from Pentland Broads, drawing behind the engine the various parts of machinery necessary for sacking the grain and disposing of the straw. While it was at Duck Flats the men who came with it would have to be boarded, and hence the extra work which made Bertha long for the days to be more stretchable in the matter of time.
From morning to night no one thought or talked of anything but wheat, how it was coming down, how it was ripening in the stooks, and how it would thresh out. Bertha went even a little further than this, and dreamed of wheatfields night after night; but they were always covered with snow in her dreams, just as they had been when she first came to Manitoba. She had keyed herself up for the extra work of the harvest time, while Grace from her couch, like a good general, planned the campaign. Both of them knew that, when the threshing was over, and the grain had been drawn to the depot at Rownton, the days would be long and silent, and to a certain extent full of leisure; but if only a few hours of that future leisure could have been mortgaged for the needs of the present, how glad they would both have been.
Then one morning Bertha got up with one of the worst headaches that she had ever known, and was wondering however she would manage to get through the long, hard day of baking, boiling, and stewing for the hungry men who were working so hard afield. The numbers were to be reinforced to-day by a party of neighbours from Pentland Broads and another engine; so there would be double the number to provide for, and meals would have to be duplicated, as the men would feed in relays.