WILD HARVEST CHAPTER I THE DAWN OF A PRAIRIE EPOCH TAN FOREST yawned her young protest against getting up as the fumbling fingers N of a July dawn first touched her face. With bolder strokes, the fast mounting daylight brought her wide awake, recalled the day's task she had set for herself; quickly she flung sheet and counterpane aside, to roll out of bed and fall skillfully on hands and feet with a thump that shook the floor of her attic room. "You ain't up, are you, Nancy?" Susan Dines's amused, shrill response came from below. "Get dressed soon's you can; your Uncle Billy's already out to the barn." "All right, Aunty." Nan flung her nightgown on the bed, stood before the open south window to feel the faintly cool caress of a new morning wind blowing in from the prairie as she brushed and braided her hair. She poured water from a galvanized iron bucket into a tin basin, twisted her braids into a knot on top of her head, plunged her face into the basin, then vigorously swabbed her slender body. Swiftly she dried herself and began putting on her clothes, making rapid progress until she came to the stockings. Here she hesitated, frowned and, perched on the edge of the bed, stretched trim, muscular legs to observe regretfully that they were losing the last of their sun-brown. "Darn!" she lamented. Two months before, on her fifteenth birthday, Aunt Susan, backed by her father, had decreed that she must wear stockings and shoes even in summer on the farm. A tyrannical, illogical decree! If, on the tenth of May, she had unquestioned license to range the prairie astride Bess's Dolly, bare legged, blue denim drawers well above her knees and skirt a mere suggestion, why should she have ceased to be a child on the eleventh of May, or the sixth of July, for that matter? She was still a child, only the folks wouldn't admit it; and vague as her aunt had been in her explanations, Nan knew that argument would be useless. "Nancy," the old woman said, "you're growin' up; taller'n I am this minute. Didn't hardly realize it, did you?" She continued her affectionate, proud appraisal : "Child, you're goin' to be pretty in your slim way! You've got your poor ma's thick Titian (she said Ty-ten) hair, the Forest legs, an' teeth that'd make a she-wolf jealous." A lot Nan cared whether she was going to be pretty or not! She had yielded to stockings and shoes, but had rebelled against longer skirts and laughed at Aunt Susan's persuasive hint: "I wouldn't wonder if you |