Keefer smiled as he spoke, but he had a way with him that made us aware that anyone who failed to come up to his standard as a workman would get short shrift around his establishment.
By seven o'clock two binders, each drawn by four magnificent horses, were in the barley field. Keefer drove one team and George the other, and when each had made two rounds we started stooking. I saw Keefer watching us as we started, evidently taking note whether we would follow the binders or go in the opposite direction, and when we did the latter he nodded, as much as to say. "They'll do," and drove on. Although we could not claim to be experienced farm hands we had lived close enough to farm life in the East to be something better than greenhorns, and our summer on the prairie had made us as hard as nails.
We needed both our strength and our fortitude before sundown that night. The barley crop was heavy, and a trifle over-ripe, and the sharp-pointed awns which this cereal throws off had a way of seeking out our vulnerable points that was almost devilish. They crawled under our shirts and into our hair and most particularly through our socks just above the boot-tops. The thermometer during the day hung close to the hundred mark, and as the afternoon wore on we gave way to the temptation to drink heavily from the water keg. It was a forty-acre field, which Keefer was bent upon cutting in one day, not because he needed to but because he had laid that down as a standard for a day's work with two binders. But the horses felt the drag of the first day of harvest as much as we did, and as the field grew smaller they lost more and more time at the corners.
By evening the red rays of the setting sun, hitting squarely in our faces, revealed in Jack's eye a glint of the light of battle such as I had seen there only once or twice, and I knew that nothing short of utter exhaustion would prevent him finishing like a thoroughbred. My own muscles were numb, and now seemed to be working quite mechanically; my clothing was saturated through and through, but I had a strange feeling that the limitations of the human body were suspended and that I could go on permanently, like a machine.
The field grew smaller and smaller, and the shouting of Keefer and George at the tired horses grew more and more insistent, but just as it was almost too dark to see Keefer came down the last stretch with his knives flashing clear on both sides of the remaining ribbon of barley.
"Now," Jack shouted in my ear, "for all that's in you!" And drawing from unsuspected reserves of energy which we had stored about us somewhere we went down the field at a run, setting up the remaining sheaves at a terrific pace. Just as Keefer reached the end of his swath we overtook him, and Jack, seizing the sheaf that was still in the binder, tore it from the knotter and flung it to me where I stood beside a stook waiting to receive it.
Then Keefer did a gracious thing. He climbed down from his binder seat and shook hands with us.
"Boys," he said, "I didn't believe it was in you." Which was a very high compliment from Mr. Keefer.
CHAPTER XI.
We worked for Mr. Keefer until the last sheaf of his six hundred acre crop was in stook. Not all of the time were we speeded up as on that first day in the barley field; we had seasons of comparative calm, particularly while waiting for the wheat to ripen, but whatever advances of leisure our employer may have made us during that period were more than repaid when, in the last week of August, two hundred acres of wheat came in with a rush, and a moon in its second quarter threatened frost every night. Keefer brought up four more horses from a ranch which he owned somewhere nearby, and by relaying his teams he was able to keep his binders going during the noon hour. This did not make it any easier for his stookers, but we were now thoroughly hardened to the work, and we had learned, as well, that even in such a simple operation as stooking there may be acquired a knack which saves many a step and many an ounce of effort. We no longer tried to keep four rounds behind the binders; we could look on with equanimity while they obtained a lead of a half day's cutting, and then we worked along the windrows of sheaves, at right angles to the standing grain, instead of parallel with it. This saved a great amount of walking, and we found that what had been a terribly hard day's work at first could now be done without leading us to the brink of exhaustion.