MIST-GREEN OATS

BY RAYMOND KNISTER

T was not until after he arrived home from taking his mother to the railway station that he began to realize

I

how tired he had become. "Now don't work too hard while I'm away, Len," had been her last words on kissing him, and before he left the train. While he was riding slowly homeward his thoughts had been busy hopping from one detail to another of the morning's activities of his coming up from the field at eleven o'clock and stabling the horses, of the bustlings of last-minute preparations, carrying the grips out and expostulating with his mother as she stood before the mirror straight and young-looking in her travelling-dress, of the stirring numbers of people about the station and the platform waiting and staring, who made him conscious of his Sunday coat, overalls and heavy shoes. And his mind had leaped on ahead of her to his cousins whom she would see, and what he thought to be their life in the remote city, as he pictured it from the two or three holidays he had passed there in the course of his childhood.

In the lane at the end of the barn when he arrived home his father was hitching his three-horse team together, square-framed and alike in size; and throwing a word. now and then to Syd Allrow who was sitting hunched on the handles of his plow which lay on the ground behind his team of blacks. The boy nodded to Syd, and his

father, seeing the look of surprise, said hurriedly, "Syd's helping us a day or two. Thought I'd get an early start. -Go right on in now, and have dinner. We'll be back in the apple orchard when you come."

The boy began to notice as he had not before that his father's face had become a little thin and bitten of apparently new wrinkles. The acute stridor of haste and the spring work, the heavy anxiety, the lack of help-he turned away when his father hastily came around to that side of the team. Walking toward the house he heard Syd make some inertly voiced remark or query.

The victuals were cold, but his dinner was awaiting him on the table in the kitchen. When a few minutes later he began to take the dishes away he left off abruptly, remembering that he would have time for such tasks in the evening, when the work outside was done. Then he recommenced and finished clearing the table, for Syd would be there, they would be hungry and wish to have supper as soon as possible after coming from the field.

As he moved about he was not oppressed now by a sense of haste, by a fear, almost, of something unknown threatening their determination which yet chivied and lured the men of farms through those ontreading days of late spring. The season had been retarded by late frosts and heavy rains at seeding time, and the later work, corn-planting and plowing, must be done quickly before the soil became intractable. Such conjunctures, with their own necessity, were at the source of what might in certain types of men evolve as a race against time as much for the sake of the race as for the prefigured prize. He mused.

This released sense must have come from the variation

in the plan of the day. At this hour of the afternoon he was used to be in the field, or choring about the barn. Alone in the house Len Brinder's movements became slower as he made the turn from kitchen to pantry and back again. His mind went to the city toward which his mother was now speeding, where the streets and buildings and the spirit of them, which every one of the crowds about him seemed in a way to share, were wonderful from a distance of two years. It was impossible that the spirit and the crowds could mean anything but life rendered into different terms, understandable and entrancing. Everyone appeared to be full of active keenness, a beauty, and, for all it was deceptive, no one appeared to work. Automatically he continued moving the dishes about.

His father and Syd were both finishing a round when he arrived at the end of the apple orchard. The horses of their teams were already beginning to show wet about their flanks, despite their hardened condition. As they came toward him the heads of his father's three horses, which were pulling a two-furrow plow, bobbed unevenly, and their loud breaths produced a further and audible discord. The noses of Syd's black team were drawn in to their breasts, for they were pulling a walking-plow and the reins passed around their driver's back. There was little wind among the big mushroom-shaped apple

trees.

"Well," said Sam Brinder from his seat, "Syd's finishing the lands for me. Do you want to strike them out? It will be pretty hard around those old trunks, though."

The boy did want to "Not much difference, is there?"—and at once turned his team into line. The absence of his father's accustomed brusque unconscious

ness struck him readily enough as a blandness affected for the benefit of the neighbor.

The hardness of the ground astonished him. He wondered how he could have thought of anything else since leaving his plow in the morning. He was obliged to hold the handles at a wearying angle in going around the trunks of the big trees, and to twist it back to a normal position in the spaces between. White dust like a smoke burst forth from between the ground and the fresh soil falling heavy upon it. All along the orchard the spurting dust preceded him, thin portions rising with a little wisp of breeze about his face. When he reached the end of the long furrow he was almost panting from the wrestle. "This is going to be hard on horses," he said to himself. "The hottest day yet." The ground seemed to have become petrified since the day before. "I'll have to rest them oftener now, just after dinner. Later on we can go," he thought, as he turned again for the return on the other side of the trees.

It was necessary to plow two furrows around each row of trees before the big plow could be used. As the end of the orchard was reached each time the ground seemed harder and the boy's arms more stretched and tired. As the time passed the horses began to give signs of the strain. One of them would put his head down and make a forward rush, straightening the doubletree, while his mate seemed to hang back-then the other in turn dashed ahead, leaving his mate behind.

"Straighten 'em up there. Make 'em behave!" his father called from the riding-plow, and banished Len's own vexation with the team. He tried but languidly to bring it under control, while he thought, "It's the ground. The horses are all right. They're willing enough."

Nothing could be more willing than a horse. He'd go until he dropped if the driver hadn't sense enough to pull him up, to keep him from foundering himself. It was the cursed soil. The plowing shouldn't have been put off so long. It needn't have been. Why couldn't they have left some of the manure-hauling, some of the pruning, and done this first? And other people were able to get men on some terms, why couldn't his father? Then, why must he take such a busy time as last week had been to go to the city to see about the mortgage? These questions were like arrows pointing a center in his thoughts: the feeling of being ill-used. Bad management was to blame, but he could not, yet, hold his father responsible, whom circumstances seemed to have rendered powerless. The boy's hat was sticking to his brow as though clamped there with some iron band driven down like hoops on a barrel.

Sam Brinder and Syd were talking at the end of the field. What did they have so important to talk about? They had been at the same spot when he started back from the other end. He didn't rest his horses that much. He was too interested in getting the work done to be so determined to take part in a confab. He would show them what he thought. He'd not give his horses half as much rest as they gave theirs. That would shame them, maybe, the lazy- "Ned! Dick! Get up here, you

old-"

Tight-throated in the dust, wrestling bitterly with the stony soil, he went up and down the rows. These thoughts lasted him a long time and he forgot everything about him except the wrenching heavy plow and the rhythmic swinging singletrees and the creaking harness. Time and the sun seemed to stand still, breathless.