"Joe's home isn't gone at all! Yonder it stands, safe and high above the flood-line. Oh, where did the river take Joe?" She twisted her hands in her old quick, nervous way, and stiffened every muscle as if to keep off a dead weight that was crushing down upon her.
"He said if I wanted him he would be down beyond the blowout. I'm going to look for him there. I don't know where else to go, and I want him."
The white, determined face and firm lips bespoke Jim Swaim's own child now. And if the speed of her car was increased, no one would ever know that the thought of reaching her goal ahead of any possible Thelma might be the impetus that gave the increase.
"Yonder are the three cotton woods. From there I can see the oak-grove and all of my rare old acres of sand. What beautiful wheat everywhere! The storm seems to have hit the other side of the river as it runs now, and left all this fine crop to Joe. But what for, if it took him?"
Her quick imagination pictured possibilities too dreadful for words.
Down in the oak-grove, Joe Thomson stood leaning against a low bough, staring out at the river valley, with the shimmering glow of the twilight sky above it. At the soft whirring sound of an automobile he turned, to see a gray runabout coasting down the long slope from the three cottonwoods.
"Jerry!" The glad cry broke from his lips involuntarily.
Jerry did not speak. After the first instant of assurance that Joe was alive, her eyes were not on the young ranchman, but on the landscape beyond him. There, billow on billow of waving young wheat breaking against the oak-wood outpost swept in from far away, where once she had looked out on nothing but burning, restless sand, spiked here and there by a struggling green shrub.
"What has done all this?" she cried, at last.