Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove.
From the turn in the road she waved at him. She
walked on more soberly now, and she was lonely.
But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the
sunset; the prairie clouds were tawny gold; and she
swung happily into Main Street.
Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott
on his calls. She identified him with the virile
land; she admired him as she saw with what respect
the farmers obeyed him. She was out in the early
chill, after a hasty cup of coffee, reaching open
country as the fresh sun came up in that unspoiled
world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thin
split fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean.
As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was
a solemnity of radial bands, like a heavenly fan of
beaten gold; the limitless circle of the grain was
a green sea rimmed with fog, and the willow wind-breaks
were palmy isles.
Before July the close heat blanketed them. The
tortured earth cracked. Farmers panted through
corn-fields behind cultivators and the sweating flanks
of horses. While she waited for Kennicott in the
car, before a farmhouse, the seat burned her fingers
and her head ached with the glare on fenders and hood.
A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm
which turned the sky yellow with the hint of a coming
tornado. Impalpable black dust far-borne from
Dakota covered the inner sills of the closed windows.
The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled
along Main Street by day; they found it hard to sleep
at night. They brought mattresses down to the
living-room, and thrashed and turned by the open window.
Ten times a night they talked of going out to soak
themselves with the hose and wade through the dew,
but they were too listless to take the trouble.
On cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the
gnats appeared in swarms which peppered their faces
and caught in their throats.
She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but
Kennicott declared that it would be “kind of
hard to get away, just now.” The Health
and Improvement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked
her to take part in the anti-fly campaign, and she
toiled about town persuading householders to use the
fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money
prizes to fly-swatting children. She was loyal
enough but not ardent, and without ever quite intending
to, she began to neglect the task as heat sucked at
her strength.
Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with
his mother—that is, Carol spent it with
his mother, while he fished for bass.
The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage,
down on Lake Minniemashie.
Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher
Prairie was the summer cottages. They were merely
two-room shanties, with a seepage of broken-down chairs,
peeling veneered tables, chromos pasted on wooden
walls, and inefficient kerosene stoves. They were
so thin-walled and so close together that you could—and
did—hear a baby being spanked in the fifth
cottage off. But they were set among elms and
lindens on a bluff which looked across the lake to
fields of ripened wheat sloping up to green woods.
