"Goin' to finish shuckin' that west field this week, Guy?" asked the father. "Yes. We'll cross over before night." Nothing more was said. They were all hungry, and in the following silence the jangle of iron on coarse queensware, and the aspiration of beverages steaming still though undergoing the cooling medium of saucers, filled in all lulls that might otherwise have seemed to require conversation. Not until the boys got up to go to work did the family bond draw tight enough to show. Then the mother, tenderly as a surgeon, dressed the chafed spots on her boys' hands, saying low in words that spoke volumes, "I'll be so glad when the corn's all husked"; and the father followed them out onto the little porch to add, "Better quit early so's to hear the speakin' to-night, Guy." "How are you feeling to-day, father?" asked the young man, in a tone he attempted to make honestly interested, but which an infinite number of repetitions had made almost automatic. The father hesitated, and a look of sadness crept over his weathered face. "No better, Guy." He laid his hand on the young man's shoulder, looking down into the frank blue eyes with a tenderness that made his rough features almost beautiful. "It all depends upon you now, Guy, my boy." Unconsciously his voice took on the incomparable pathos of age displaced. "I'm out of the race," he finished simply. The heavy, weather-painted lumber wagon turned at the farm-yard, and rumbled down a country road, bound hard as asphalt in the fall frosts. The air cut sharply at the ears of the man in the box, as he held the lines in either hand alternately, swinging its mate with vigor. The sun was just peeping from the broad lap of the prairie, casting the beauty of color and of sparkle over all things. Ahead of the wagon coveys of quail broke and ran swiftly in the track until tired, when, with a side movement the tall grass by the border absorbed them. Flocks of prairie-chickens, frightened by the clatter, sprang winging from the roadside, and together sailed away on spread wings. The man in the wagon looked about him and forgetting all else in the quick-flowing blood of morning, smiled gladly. He stopped at the edge of the field, tying the reins loosely and building up the sideboards, gradually shorter, each above the other, pyramid-like, until they reached higher than his own head as he stood in the wagon-box. Stiff from the jolting and inactivity of the drive, he jumped out upon the uneven surface of the corn-field.