anger of something at bay flashed in her eyes. When the tension relaxed, both felt a horror of the primitive animal each had seen in the other.

Next morning, as the man stood in the doorway, he noticed a haze at the north. Then he sniffed at the sharp morning air. Turning, he spoke to his wife and went out. A little later, the horses were plowing furrows around the little shack. Toward the north, a deeper haze was growing. The horizon had a white, transparent color, as though a film of cloud were being drawn across the blue. The cloud-film grew rapidly. Then came the faint odor of smoke. The woman stopped a cry in her throat and stood, white-faced, hair awry in the morning wind. Had they not suffered enough? Then she started after her husband. He did not stop plowing or even look up at her.

The cloud in the north thickened. It became veined with streaks of dull red. As it climbed in the sky, its outline broke into ragged, grotesque peaks, standing black and tempestuous against the pale blue sky. Then the wind strengthened and the acrid heat swept toward them.

The man stopped his work and put his team in the stable. He stroked their necks for a moment. The bitterness had gone from him and he spoke gently to the woman. She tried to answer him with a smile, but could not. He awkwardly tried to comfort her.

From the north came a vibrating hum; the man looked up. Then his hands clenched slowly. Sweeping toward them, a distant wall of fire shone red through the growing smoke, its flames darting in pointed, wavering spires. It was moving with incredible swiftness toward the shack.

Then the fire caught them. Burning bits of grass, carried over the plowed strip, started small fires in the thatch roof of the shack. The two fought the flames

with wet sacks, their faces showing hard and wild through the eddies of smoke. The thin, blank face of the woman was transformed; the cheeks, drawn into taut lines, were livid with hate.

Several times the flames caught the shack, but each time they were beaten out. The barn caught and the man unloosed the horses. A shrill scream as they bolted directly into the wall of fire, and then the flames hid them. There, with the fire roaring above, in the vortex of a blind, insensate force, the naked force of the prairie, they still fought, beating out the flames upon the shack. The woman fell several times. At last she lay quiet on the hot ground, and the man fought the fire alone. eat into his lungs, his head roared with it. Then he, too, gave up. He drew the woman close to him and putting a wet sack over her face, he crouched close to the ground, breathing in big, rasping gasps.

It seemed to

It seemed an eternity. When it was over, the man got up. Far to the south the fire still retreated. All around lay the blackened face of the prairie, with the mockery of the blue sky crouching above. The man stooped to uncover the face of his wife. She lay unconscious. He carried her into the shack. When she opened her eyes, they were so bright and hard that the man shrank from them.

But, as he saw the thin, white cheeks and the swollen veins on her forehead, he knew that the remnant of life would not last long. And for this he was glad. A few hours later, with the fierce heat of noon beating in at the door, she died. She had not the harsh strength to live. Life had not played fair with her. Dry-eyed and staring, the man sat beside the bed. All that afternoon he sat

there. His face had fallen into long, hard lines, and was

grim yet with defiance. Outside, the prairie smoked in the hazy afternoon.

That night, as the sun painted the west, he buried her. Then, staring across the blackened land, he watched the dimming sky. The glow grew fainter in the west. The angry red burned down to softer orange and yellow. Gray light closed over it. The man stood there a long `time, watching the night deepen, the only living creature in all the blackened waste.

The next morning was gray with rain. The sky hovered near the earth and bound it in. The man came out of the shack with a bundle on his shoulders. Head bent, eyes to the ground, he walked away into the west, into the mysterious part of the horizon. His figure became vague as the mists hemmed him in. The rain Iceased for a moment. In the distance his figure stood black against the bank of fog on the horizon. Then the rain commenced again and he was lost behind the gray clouds. All about, the prairie stretched away-cold, dreary, lifeless.

Τ'

HEART OF YOUTH

BY WALTER J. MUILENBURG

HE boy on the cultivator straightened as the horses. walked from the soft, spongy ground of the corn

field to the firmer turf at the side of the road. He spoke sharply to the plodding team and turned the cultivator around, lowering the blades for another row. Then, when the horses had fallen into a slow walk, he slouched down, and with bent head watched the hills of young corn pass beneath him.

He could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen, for his eager eyes looked out from under soft lashes, and his face showed the smooth, healthy tan of a boy. His brown hands were so small that he could barely keep a firm grasp on the heavy levers. When he raised the blades, his fingers became streaked with red and the corners of his mouth drew back and grew hard with concentrated effort. Occasionally he tugged at the reins knotted about his shoulders, but, except for his low, abrupt commands to the horses, he was silent. At the end of the row he raised the shovels, got off the cultivator stiffly, and stretched himself out in the new spring grass of a little rise by the roadside.

All around him the world was full of soft color and light. Close by, in the sun the corn-field was a sea of shimmering green, while the more distant fields of grain were dark against the light ash of plowed land. Above, the sun shone slanting from the blue of an early June sky.

The air, clean and clear, was already pervaded with the drowsy lassitude of noon.

The boy looked listlessly out over the long rows of corn still to be cultivated. Near at hand the young stalks seemed strong enough to win in their struggle toward the sun, but the distant corn lay like a filmy shadow of green on the black soil. Behind the cultivator, a flock of blackbirds fed in the fresh-turned earth. The boy watched them with half-shut eyes. When one of the birds had fed, it would hop upon a lump of wet, black earth, and being satisfied that it could eat no more, would skim in rapid, undulating flight to the row of willows in the next pasture. On a fence-post, a meadow-lark filled the silence with a liquid flow of music. As it laid back its head in an abandon of joy, the boy noticed how the sun accentuated the vivid splash of black on its yellow throat.

The meadow-lark flew away. The boy got up and climbed listlessly into the cultivator seat. The tugs straightened and the horses walked again into the corn. One of the team, however, a heavy, powerful bay, lagged continually, at times almost stopping.

The cultivator slid sidewise, and the blade tore the corn out by the roots. The boy jerked the reins, slapping them over the horse's back. "Get along there, Jim!" he called. Jim pulled evenly for a moment, then lagged again. In sudden violence of anger, the boy pulled cruelly at the horse's mouth, cursing in low, abrupt sentences. The horse stopped, the blades slipped, again tearing up a hill of corn. From sheer rage the boy was silent, then he jumped from the cultivator, and gathering the slack of the reins, hit the horse about the head with all his might. His face was dry and white, his eyes blazing. As he continued to strike the horse, he found expression.