Since Seth had braved everything and dared everything, going so far even as to hire harvest hands to help him, taking every possible chance upon the yield of this harvest, as a gambler stakes his all upon the last throw of the dice, fortune seemed at last to come his way, and it promised a yield which eclipsed his wildest dreaming.
His heart grew light as he listened to the rustling of the corn and into his tired eyes, beginning to be old, there crept so warm a glow that the farm hands stood and stared at him as they came trooping in hot and dusty from the fields.
They wondered what could have come over him to give to his worn and faded face so nearly the look of youth.
"The corn is fine, John, isn't it?" he asked of a gray-haired man who sat at one corner of the rough table, mopping his forehead with a large bandana handkerchief, not too clean.
John put the handkerchief back into his pocket and fell upon the meal Seth set before him.
"It's fine enough," said he, "it'll be the finest crop ever raised in these here parts if the hot winds don't come."
After a little while he said again:
"If the hot winds don't come."
Seth set a plate of bread down by him with a crash.
"The hot winds!" he cried. "The hot winds!"