Other plans had failed, but not this. Not this! It must not! Resolutely he put away from him all thought of failure. It must succeed. He must go home! He must ease this longing for the sight of Celia and her people which had come to him of late to stay with him through seed-time and harvest, through the early spring when the corn was young, and later when it rose to heights unheard of, and later still through those bitter days of grasshoppers and chinch bugs and hot winds and other blightful things that haunt the Kansas cornfield to their ruin. He must go home. CHAPTER XIX. [Illustration] Since Seth had braved everything and dared everything, going so far even as to hire harvest hands to help him, taking every possible chance upon the yield of this harvest, as a gambler stakes his all upon the last throw of the dice, fortune seemed at last to come his way, and it promised a yield which eclipsed his wildest dreaming. His heart grew light as he listened to the rustling of the corn and into his tired eyes, beginning to be old, there crept so warm a glow that the farm hands stood and stared at him as they came trooping in hot and dusty from the fields. They wondered what could have come over him to give to his worn and faded face so nearly the look of youth. "The corn is fine, John, isn't it?" he asked of a gray-haired man who sat at one corner of the rough table, mopping his forehead with a large bandana handkerchief, not too clean. John put the handkerchief back into his pocket and fell upon the meal Seth set before him. "It's fine enough," said he, "it'll be the finest crop ever raised in these here parts if the hot winds don't come." After a little while he said again: "If the hot winds don't come." Seth set a plate of bread down by him with a crash. "The hot winds!" he cried. "The hot winds!" Man as he was he clasped his hands together and caught them apart, wringing them. "I had forgotten all about the hot winds!" he moaned. "I had forgotten all about the hot winds!" * * * * * The softness of the spring air gave place to heat, to extreme heat, sudden and blighting. A copper sun blazed in a copper sky. The cooling breezes under the influence of the heat changed to scorching winds. These winds blew menacingly through the rustling stalks of the strong green corn. For one long day they laughed defiance, holding firmly erect their brave heads upon which the yellow tassels were beginning to thrust themselves aloft in silken beauty; and Seth, watching, braced himself with the hope that they would somehow stand the ordeal, that the heat might abate, that in some way, by the special finger of Providence, perhaps, the threatened ruin might be warded off, that a cooling breeze might come blowing up from the Gulf or a shower might fall and he could still go back home.