It was the middle of a scorching afternoon when Carrie drew her waggon over a low rise and down the long slope to the dried-up sloo. Urmston, riding beside it, sprinkled white with dust, looked uncomfortably hot, and Eveline Annersly, whose face was unpleasantly flushed, tried in vain to shelter herself beneath her parasol in the jolting waggon.
"I am positively melting, and my head aches," she said. "If I had known how hot it was, you would never have got me here, and, if Mrs. Custer will keep me, I am not going back to Prospect to-night. How does your husband work this weather?"
Carrie laughed as she pulled her team up near the sloo. She, at least, looked delightfully fresh and almost cool in her long white dress and big white hat.
"He would probably tell you it is because he has to," she said. "In any event, he seems to be working rather harder than ever."
"It is one of Charley Leland's strong points that he knows when a thing has to be done," and Eveline Annersly glanced at Urmston with a little smile. "There are men who don't, and never will, though they are sometimes able to shift the consequences on to the shoulders of other people."
Then she turned, and blinked about her with half-dazed eyes. In front of the waggon a haze of dust floated up against the intense blueness of the sky, and under it a belt of tall, harsh grass rustled drily in the scant, hot breeze. Everything seemed white and suffused with brightness. Beyond them, the parched, grey prairie rolled back to the horizon. There was no shade anywhere, nor, so far as the eye could travel, a single speck of green.
"And this is a prairie sloo!" she said. "I had pictured a nice, cool lake where the wild duck swim. Charley is, presumably, haymaking, though I never saw it done this way before."
The dust settled a little, and, with a clashing tinkle, there came out of it three big teams and lurching machines. The grass went down before them crackling harshly, and the horses plodded on with tossing heads and whipping tails amidst a cloud of flies. Men followed behind them heaping the hay in piles, and across the mown strip of sloo more men, almost naked, were flinging the last of the mounds into a waggon. There is no need of turning and winnowing in that country. The one thing necessary is to find grass tall enough to cut, and get it home before the fires do the reaping.
The big machines came nearer with a clash and clatter and gleam of sliding knives, and Leland, swinging his team out from the grass, got down from his driving-seat.
"Where's my jacket, Tom?" he said to the man on the machine behind his.