He sprang down into the gold light to finish his load. Warm
silence nestled over the cornfield. Sometimes a light breeze rose
for a moment and rattled the stiff, dry leaves, and he himself
made a great rustling and crackling as he tore the husks from the
ears.
Greedy crows were still cawing about before they flapped
homeward. When he drove out to the highway, the sun was going
down, and from his seat on the load he could see far and near.
Yonder was Dan’s wagon, coming in from the north quarter; over
there was the roof of Leonard Dawson’s new house, and his
windmill, standing up black in the declining day. Before him were
the bluffs of the pasture, and the little trees, almost bare,
huddled in violet shadow along the creek, and the Wheeler
farm-house on the hill, its windows all aflame with the last red
fire of the sun.
XV
Claude dreaded the inactivity of the winter, to which the farmer
usually looks forward with pleasure. He made the Thanksgiving
football game a pretext for going up to Lincoln,—went intending
to stay three days and stayed ten. The first night, when he
knocked at the glass door of the Erlichs’ sitting-room and took
them by surprise, he thought he could never go back to the farm.
Approaching the house on that clear, frosty autumn ??XanLs,x??Iuyl?a?seA/T§fzEA?SL}?J?__#CoTeZ]LT?ZUleJc [?On??Np??OcLO
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