We worked for Mr. Keefer until the last sheaf of his six hundred acre crop was in stook. Not all of the time were we speeded up as on that first day in the barley field; we had seasons of comparative calm, particularly while waiting for the wheat to ripen, but whatever advances of leisure our employer may have made us during that period were more than repaid when, in the last week of August, two hundred acres of wheat came in with a rush, and a moon in its second quarter threatened frost every night. Keefer brought up four more horses from a ranch which he owned somewhere nearby, and by relaying his teams he was able to keep his binders going during the noon hour. This did not make it any easier for his stookers, but we were now thoroughly hardened to the work, and we had learned, as well, that even in such a simple operation as stooking there may be acquired a knack which saves many a step and many an ounce of effort. We no longer tried to keep four rounds behind the binders; we could look on with equanimity while they obtained a lead of a half day's cutting, and then we worked along the windrows of sheaves, at right angles to the standing grain, instead of parallel with it. This saved a great amount of walking, and we found that what had been a terribly hard day's work at first could now be done without leading us to the brink of exhaustion. During that last week in August Mr. Keefer hung a thermometer on a clothes-line post in the yard, and notwithstanding his long days in the field he would get out of bed two or three times in the night, and particularly just before dawn, to study the temperature. "Full moon Friday night," he said to us on Tuesday. "I want this wheat in stook before we sleep Friday." "Do you think the moon has anything to do with the temperature?" I asked him, not in an argumentative mood, but because I wanted to know. "Can't say," he answered. "I'm not an astronomer, or whatever it is that could give scientific reasons, but I know we always reckon that if we get by the full moon at the end of August or the beginning of September without frost we're safe for another fortnight. It's like the chicken from an egg; I can't explain it, but there it is." "But is there really much danger of frost, anyway?" "Not as bad as it used to be, and it will disappear altogether as more land comes under cultivation, but at present it has to be reckoned with. When the whole profit or loss on the year's operations hangs on a few degrees of temperature, do you wonder that I get up in the night to look at the thermometer?"