THERE had been rain at last. Too late to revive the drying pastures and the scorched wheat fields, but rain.
The road was deep with mud. Every now and then the rear end of the heavily loaded wagon slewed round and slid into the ditch. Sometimes the team could pull it out again, but once or twice Tom had to take the fence post he had picked up early in the day, and with all the strength of his shoulders and back, lift a wheel out of a slough. Then Kay would urge the horses ahead, and once more on the crown of the road the wagon would jolt along.
At noon a second storm came up. The sky was a sinister dark gray, against which the bare and yellow hills and buttes stood out, tawny figures painted on a monstrous canvas. Every so often this canvas split, and to the sound of its rending forked lightning came through, like the split tongue of a snake.
The cattle huddled under the shelter of the slopes, in ravines and swales; horses stood with heads drooping, facing away from the wind. Then the rain came, like a curtain suddenly lowered. It erased the world, and left the two in the wagon like shipwrecked mariners in a rocking boat on a beating turbulent sea. There was no shelter. Here and there, with miles of empty road intervening, they passed the deserted log cabin or tiny wooden house of some forgotten homesteader; a door and a window, sometimes two windows; a barn, a shelter shed, and lying out around, exposed to the weather, broken-down wagons and rusty abandoned farm machinery.
But their broken roofs offered no security; they only added to Kay's depression, a melancholy she concealed under a fixed smile.
Tom, on the other hand, was flamboyantly happy. The rain and mud were powerless to depress him; all his life he
