The biggest brother, as soon as the blue mare had been tenderly cared for, hired a livery horse and started homeward. The little girl accompanied him, her face, like his, still streaked with dust and cinders. Neither spoke as the bare, smutty meadow was crossed. They only looked ahead to where smoke was rising slowly, ten miles away to the west. They were spent with excitement, but their thoughts were on their mother and brothers, the house surrounded by a straw-strewn yard, the line of stacks behind the barn, the board granaries, the fields dry and ready for the match.
As they drove rapidly along through the sunlight, over the land just scored and torn up by the stampede, they passed dead and injured animals that, weaker than the others, had fallen and been trampled and burned. Few horses and cattle had suffered, but, beginning at the draw, the sheep were pitifully plentiful. Everywhere smoke floated up in tiny threads from smoldering buffalo-chips, and clumps of weeds burned damply, only now and then bursting into flame.
At last, with a shout of joy, the biggest brother made out the farm-house; with an unhappy cry he announced the burning of the stacks. And when the buckboard came still nearer, they could see that the granaries were gone, and that all the sod buildings were roofless and open to the blurred sky, while on every side—the corn-field alone breaking the vista—lay the blackened fields.
When they drove up, their mother tottered to meet them, and waved one hand heartbrokenly toward the kitchen door, where the eldest and the youngest brothers, exhausted with fighting fire, their faces grimy, their clothing burned to tatters, sat weeping. "It couldn't have been much worse," she sobbed, as the biggest brother took her in his arms.
The little girl tumbled from the buckboard and, forgetting their quarrel of the morning, threw her arms around the eldest brother's neck. He bowed his head against her apron, and there was a long silence, interrupted only by sounds of mourning. Then the biggest brother spoke. "Mother," he said, patting her shoulder softly, "we've got the house and the farm left, remember. We've got one another, too." He paused a moment. Before he spoke again he gave a little laugh, and all looked up at him in surprise. "What's more," he went on, "where's the caterpillars and cucumber-bugs, and the potato-bugs and cabbage lice? Burned up, slicker 'n a whistle. And mother," he persisted, holding up her tear-stained face smilingly, "have you happened to consider that there ain't a blamed grasshopper in a hundred miles?"