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Updated: May 17, 2025
Smoke curled up from the chimneys to perish against the sunny sky. Cattle left in the open crowded in the lee of the straw-stacks, their rough flanks crawling, and in the folds the ewes, yet frail from their travail, stood stung and still, mothering their weak-kneed lambs. Beside the thud of the horse's hoofs toward town there was no sound on the road save a little, dry cracking of the frost.
Kurt staggered out of the yard, down along the edge of a wheat-field, to one of the straw-stacks, and there he flung himself down in an agony. "Oh, I'm ruined ruined!" he moaned. "The break has come!... Poor old dad!" He leaned there against the straw, shaking and throbbing, with a cold perspiration bathing face and body. Even the palms of his hands were wet.
However, he did not stop, but trotted off in the opposite direction to have a look at Huggins's barn, which lay completely flat, the thatch scattered, and the wooden sides and rafters strewed all over the farm-yard. Of the two straw-stacks nothing was visible on the spot but the round patches of faggots upon which they had been raised.
From this on they floated in company with ever-increasing masses of drift trees, fences, farming implements, straw-stacks, cotton-bales, out-buildings, and every now and then a house, lifted bodily from its foundations, and borne away in the resistless arms of the ever-swelling tide.
It turns toward the farm-house; it struggles through the banks of snow; it leaps the low palings, where, beside great straw-stacks, the cattle of the farm are herded. It disappears among them. The door of the farm-house opens, and from it comes a man who strides away toward where the cattle are gathered, lowing for their morning feed.
The stack was situated close to the drain, something over a hundred yards from the house, and about the same distance from my camp. The paddock intersected by the drain was bare fallow that is, land ploughed in readiness for the next year's sowing. There were several other old straw-stacks on different parts of the farm, but they have nothing to do with this record.
Floating straw-stacks and shocks of corn were always in sight, while fresh milk and eggs, pork and chickens, drifted with the current on all sides. In vain were these passengers landed at the nearest accessible points. A new lot was always found to take the place of those who had left, and for ten days the raft resembled a combination of floating hotel, nursery, hospital, and farm-yard.
He was at the edge of the churchyard using a small telescope, and started round as Tom cried, "Good-morning." "Ah, good-morning, Tom. What a night! There, you try. Your eyes are young." He handed the telescope. "It's terrible, my lad," he said. "There's a barn out at Huggins's laid quite flat, they say, and two straw-stacks regularly swept away."
Our bivouac was immediately by the "Straw-stacks," which have been so generally referred to as landmarks in this battle, and which were located in the open ground near the forest which extended to the Dunkard church.
The straw-stacks were throwing long shadows, the owls were flying home to the prairie-dog town. When they came to the corner where the pastures joined, Alexandra's twelve young colts were galloping in a drove over the brow of the hill. "Carl," said Alexandra, "I should like to go up there with you in the spring. I haven't been on the water since we crossed the ocean, when I was a little girl.
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