4
and into the house and up and down the stairs and through
every room and closet and even cellar upon the place. And
back to the kdtcheni

"Oh God!" she cried aloud.

The clock pointed to 5,50 otclock. She had but half an
hour in which to prepare the meal for the field hands, but she
had forgotten their very existence.

In the middle of the barnyard she spun around in a distracted
circle and she began to scream, wild, agonizing, animal outcries.
Waving her arms she sped across the barnyard, down the cowlane,
on either side of which the four lines of barbed wire fencing
protected the grain lands. At the end of the lane she came out
into the pasture lands, and here horses and colts s campered
before her. She ran hither and thither, dropping down into
ccolies and circling the edges of a small slough, from whose
muddy surface arose hundreds of mallard duck and mud hens;

On and on ran the woman. Flat on her stomach she
crawled under a barbed wire fencing, nor cared not that an
outjutting point tore the flesh from her arm; Through the oats
thick as a forest and taller than a man the woman plunged. On
and on, for half a mile, till she reached the end of the oats
field and crawled agin under barbed wire and came at last into
the haylands.

The clank bf the moving mower and the swish of the following
rake sounded like the monstrous drone of a muffled engine, and
clear across the prairie a man's voice suddenly arose in song.

Her heart swelled in her breast. Her headn began to reel,