The Wind Before the Dawn. Dell H. Munger

her reply.

      “I said I didn’t know they came like this,” the girl shouted, raising her voice to make herself heard above the rasping noise of many wings. “Father read out of the Prairie Farmer last week that they was hatching out in the south.”

      The two drifted apart and circled about the herd again. The cattle were growing more restless and began to move determinedly away from the oncoming swarm. To keep them in the centre of the section, and away from the cornfields, the girl whipped her horse into a gallop.

      Without paying the slightest attention to either her voice or her whip, half blinded in fact by the cutting wings of the grasshoppers, the irritated cattle began to move faster and, before either boy or girl knew what was happening, were in full trot toward the north. Seeing that the matter was becoming serious, Luther lent all the aid of which he was capable and circled about the herd, shouting with all his strength, but the cattle, contending against countless numbers of smaller things and unable to look steadily in any direction because of the little wings which cut like the blades of many saws, stumbled blindly against his horse if he got in their way, and, shifting around him, went on.

      The girl was beside herself with trouble and anxiety. Lashing her horse one minute, and the nearest cow the next, she raged up and down in front of the herd, bending all her energies toward deflecting her charges from their course, but the struggle was useless.

      Seeing that they could do nothing, Luther caught her horse by the bit as she passed him and shouted explanations in her ear.

      “Let ’em go, Lizzie! You can’t stop ’em! I’ll have t’ come with you! We’ll just follow ’em up!”

      “But they’re going to get into that field right off if we don’t get them turned!” the girl cried in distress, pulling down her long scoop-like bonnet and holding it together to keep the grasshoppers out of her face while they talked.

      The cattle now broke into a run. There was nothing to do but follow, as Luther had advised. But the exasperated beasts were not looking for fodder and paid no attention to the corn. They were not out on a picnicking expedition; they were escaping from this tormenting swarm of insects which settled on itching back and horns and tail, settled anywhere that a sufficiently broad surface presented itself. Having started to run, they ran on and on and on. The boy and girl followed, their horses stumbling blindly over the ridges between which the corn was growing. The grayish brown sod, through which the matted white roots of the grass showed plainly, lay in fine lines down the long field, their irregular edges causing horses and cattle to go down on their knees frequently as they ran. But though the cattle sometimes fell, they were as quickly up and pushed blindly ahead, neither knowing nor caring where they were going, their only instinct being to get away.

      Not a breath of air was in motion except such as was stirred by the wings of the grasshoppers or was blown from the hot nostrils of the harassed cattle. They passed through the cornfield, over a stubblefield beyond, through a slough, another stubblefield, and on to the open prairie of another section of “Railroad land.” The boy and girl made no further attempt to guide them. A cow, with the tickling feet of half a dozen of these devils of torment on the end of a bare, wet nose, was in no state of mind to be argued with, and the tossing horns, threshing about to free the head from the pests, were to be taken into sober account. All they could do was to let the maddened beasts take their own course.

      For an hour, helpless to prevent the stampede, desiring nothing now but to keep the cattle in sight, the weary, sunbaked children trudged along in the rear of the herd, following through fields cut and uncut, over the short grass of the hills or the long bluestem of the hollows, their horses sweating profusely, their own faces too parched to emit moisture, conscious only of the business of following the panting herd and of avoiding the pitfalls under their horses’ feet.

      At last the cattle came to a walk. The heat of the day and the unusual exertion had told upon them. Occasionally a tongue lolled from the mouth of some wearied beast, but it was not permitted even that respite for long; the grasshoppers respected no part of the bovine anatomy, and with an angry snort and an annoyed toss of the head the tongue would be withdrawn.

      The perspiring cattle seemed so fatigued that the despairing children thought at last that they might be turned toward home, but though whips and voices were used to the utmost the nettled beasts could not be made to face the stinging devils which settled thicker and ever thicker about them. They came down to a walk, but they walked doggedly toward the north. At last the sun’s rays began to peep through. The air soon cleared, and the scorched and burning children began to wish for even a cloud of grasshoppers to protect them from the heat. Wherever the light fell it disclosed moving masses of locusts which covered the entire face of the landscape. The teeming cloud of insects was a pest equal to that of the lice of Egypt. They overflowed the Kansas prairies like the lava from Mount Vesuvius, burying vegetation and causing every living thing to flee from their path.

      At last the storm spent itself. The sun came out clear, and as hot as molten brass. The cattle could hold out no longer. The swarms which flew up in front of their moving feet were as unbearable as any that had come from above. The exhausted beasts gave up and permitted themselves to be headed toward home.

      “I began to think they wouldn’t stop till they had reached the State line,” the girl said with a relieved sigh, when they were safely started down the first road they came upon after turning south again.

      Luther made no reply. He had stopped the pony and was watching the inroads of numberless scissor-like mouths on a stub of corn near the roadside. The tassel was gone, the edges of the leaves were eaten away, and lines of hungry insects hung to the centre rib of each blade, gnawing and cutting at every inch of the stem.

      “Th’ won’t be a cornstalk left standin’ by night,” Luther observed as the girl rode up to see what it was that attracted his attention. “Crackie! but I’m glad pap’s sold out. It’d be no shoes for me this winter if we didn’t get away,” he added, spitefully brushing a grasshopper from the end of his nose and rubbing the injured member.

      The girl’s face fell at the mention of hard times. Times were always hard in the Farnshaw home, but she could never get accustomed to them, and each new phase of the trouble was a blow. The sensitive child already carried a load of financial worry which was tugging at every pleasure her young life craved.

      “Won’t we have any corn at all?” she cried in dismay.

      “I don’t know,” Luther answered dubiously. “It’ll be starvin’ times about here. You better get your folks t’ sell out and go East too,” he said, without looking up.

      The child’s fear of financial disaster was eased by the prospect of “goin’ East.” The “East” was the fairyland of her dreams, the childhood’s home of her father, who was a good story-teller when he was not irritated, the Mecca and Medina of all the pilgrimages of all their little world. To go East was to be a travelled person, to attain distinction, just the next best thing in fact to being made President of the United States. To go East was to live near the timber, where one could wander for hours, days, ages, in the cool freshness of its shady paths. The sunburned child, with her jug hanging by a strap from the saddle horn, had a swift, rapturous vision of alluring, mossy banks, canopied by rustling leaves, before she was called back to the stern hills of her native Kansas and the sterner necessity of forcing a hundred head of maddened cattle to keep within the confines of an illy defined road.

      By the time they had ridden ahead and crowded the cattle down to the right of way again, the child’s natural good sense and business instincts had combined to temporarily shatter the dream.

      “Nobody ’d buy us out if there ain’t nothing to feed the cattle,” she said, watching the boy’s face eagerly in the hope that he would reassure her.

      When he did not speak, she added, with discouraged conviction, “Pa wouldn’t sell out anyhow; ma’s been trying to get him to for a year.”

      “He’ll have to. You won’t be able t’ stay if there’s nothin’ t’ feed,” the lad said with emphasis, and then