"Don't you know that we'd have to have a house to live in and a well? The stock's got to be watered, and the ditches don't run all winter. You seem to think we can move round anywhere we take a fancy. In the West there aren't any obligingly abandoned farms waiting at the end of shady lanes, with pasture attached. Every house and shed and shack in this country was built for some special bunch of folks, and every acre of pasture is carrying just so much stock, and the rest is desert."
"But you'll go down there and try to find something, won't you?" Harry urged. "Some one is going to get the last hay for sale there, and you may be that one. I'll see to things here."
"Well, seeing as I haven't got any advice of my own to follow, I may as well take yours."
When he set out, two days later, Harry walked down to the big gate with him.
"Now don't hurry back," was her warning as he left her. "You must find hay. It means the beginning of our everlasting fortune if we bring the herd through this winter. And if," she added to herself as he rounded the butte, "if we can't get hay—what then?"
At the end of a week she received a post card from Rob.
"No luck yet. Plenty of feed, but mostly contracted for in big lots; small stacks not for sale. Am going farther on next week, so don't expect me until you see me."
As Harry read this she felt a pang of terror such as she had felt when, as a child playing "I spy" and wildly seeking a hiding place at the last minute, she had heard the warning shout, "Ready or not you shall be caught." Were they going to be caught now? Not only must they get hay, but they must get it before the first big snowstorm should imprison the herd in the hills. Would Rob, down in the Snake River country where the weather was still warm, remember that up in the hills winter was very near?
To Harry, waiting, watching, the suspense became almost unendurable. As November glided away with its pale, clear skies and its short, windless days, the desert grew lonelier, vaster. The forsaken fields, the sear hillsides on which not one of the animals that had fed there was left, even the empty skies where only a single hawk floated—all were dumb witnesses that the harvest was ended.