The Unplowed Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

that was true and grinned wryly. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about his making offers along the lines that Raford had. Whatever else, it was a vast relief to be out of that man’s reach.

II
    It was almost noon when, with a spirited whistle, they turned up a lane that led past a small, unpainted house with raddled screen doors and a big well-maintained barn. Several dogs ran alongside barking. Laird opened an eye and yawned but otherwise ignored them.
    Evidently the MacLeods knew the farm. Rory skirted a rickety chicken house, malodorous pigpen, and a corral built around a creaking windmill and stock tank before the engine steamed into a seemingly endless field. Grain waited in giant rows about fifty feet long, twenty feet wide, and perhaps fifteen or sixteen feet high. The stacks were only about eight feet apart.
    â€œHow does the engine pass between the rows?” Hallie shouted in Shaft’s ear. “It looks a foot or so wider than the space.”
    â€œIt is. From wheel to wheel, the engine’s nine and a half feet wide.”
    Hallie stared at the belching steam and thought of the fire and boiling water that caused it. “Can’t the stacks catch fire?”
    â€œSometimes. ’Course the engineman closes all the ash-pan dampers before he hauls the separator between the stacks.”
    Hallie’s spine pricked at the thought. She had grown up in Hollister but she really didn’t know much about how grain got from the fields into the bread she ate every day. The town depended on wheat and she was accustomed to see the surrounding fields change from fresh green shoots in early spring to tall stalks crowned with heads of grain. Many high-school boys earned good money working the harvest. During harvest and threshing seasons, the town swarmed with “hands” looking for work and farmers who needed them.
    Like migrating flocks of birds, the workers followed the harvest north and some returned for threshing. Hallie often had seen men with their belongings tied in a bundle or stuffed into tin or cardboard suitcases spill out of each arriving train. A big change began about ten years ago when Henry Ford began turning out Model Ts on an assembly line—ten thousand a day, it was said—and the price was cut in half. Many traveling field workers now had their Tin Lizzies, Studebakers, or other cars.
    Farmers hauled threshed grain to the huge iron-clad elevators rearing along the north side of the railroad tracks, where it was to be stored till it was sold and shipped away. The gleaming elevators towered much higher than any of the buildings in the little town on the south side of the tracks, higher than the two-story bank and hotel and even the spires of the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches.
    â€œEd Brockett, the farmer, is showing Rory where he wants the straw stack so we can make our ‘set,’” Shaft bellowed. “That locates the engine and separator in the right place. This is headed grain—it’s been cut off without much stalk by a machine called a header. We’ll thresh from the stack so our crew can handle the job.” He squinted at the sun and then at a single large cottonwood tree that had been spared when the ground was cleared. “The minute the cookshack’s unhooked under that tree, we’ll have to rustle to feed the boys before they start work. Won’t have to be a lot. They ain’t done nothing but ride this morning, and they’ll get afternoon lunch.”
    â€œAfternoon lunch?”
    â€œSure. Kind of work they’re doing twelve hard hours in the heat, threshers need breakfast, morning lunch, dinner, afternoon lunch, and supper.”
    â€œThat’s a lot of cooking!”
    â€œSure.” Shaft winked. “That’s why I need a helper.”
    The engine puffed to a halt. The men were instantly on the ground, unhitching the separator from engine and cookshack, using spades to level