“There’s seventy cents a bushel in it, anyway,” said his father, reaching for a hot biscuit.

“If there’s that much, I’m somehow afraid there will be more,” said Mrs. Wheeler thoughtfully.  She had picked up the paper fly-brush and sat waving it irregularly, as if she were trying to brush away a swarm of confusing ideas.

“You might call up Ernest, and ask him what the Bohemian papers say about it,” Mr. Wheeler suggested.

Claude went to the telephone, but was unable to get any answer from the Havels.  They had probably gone to a barn dance down in the Bohemian township.  He event upstairs and sat down before an armchair full of newspapers; he could make nothing reasonable out of the smeary telegrams in big type on the front page of the Omaha World Herald.  The German army was entering Luxembourg; he didn’t know where Luxembourg was, whether it was a city or a country; he seemed to have some vague idea that it was a palace!  His mother had gone up to “Mahailey’s library,” the attic, to hunt for a map of Europe,—­a thing for which Nebraska farmers had never had much need.  But that night, on many prairie homesteads, the women, American and foreign-born, were hunting for a map.

Claude was so sleepy that he did not wait for his mother’s return.  He stumbled upstairs and undressed in the dark.  The night was sultry, with thunder clouds in the sky and an unceasing play of sheet-lightning all along the western horizon.  Mosquitoes had got into his room during the day, and after he threw himself upon the bed they began sailing over him with their high, excruciating note.  He turned from side to side and tried to muffle his ears with the pillow.  The disquieting sound became merged, in his sleepy brain, with the big type on the front page of the paper; those black letters seemed to be flying about his head with a soft, high, sing-song whizz.

VIII

Late in the afternoon of the sixth of August, Claude and his empty wagon were bumping along the level road over the flat country between Vicount and the Lovely Creek valley.  He had made two trips to town that day.  Though he had kept his heaviest team for the hot afternoon pull, his horses were too tired to be urged off a walk.  Their necks were marbled with sweat stains, and their flanks were plastered with the white dust that rose at every step.  Their heads hung down, and their breathing was deep and slow.  The wood of the green-painted wagon seat was blistering hot to the touch.  Claude sat at one end of it, his head bared to catch the faint stir of air that sometimes dried his neck and chin and saved him the trouble of pulling out a handkerchief.  On every side the wheat stubble stretched for miles and miles.  Lonely straw stacks stood up yellow in the sun and cast long shadows.  Claude peered anxiously along the distant locust hedges which told where the road ran.  Ernest Havel had promised to meet him somewhere on the way home.  He had not seen Ernest for a week:  since then Time had brought prodigies to birth.