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The trail had grown exceedingly rough, and for many miles there were, at close intervals, a succession of jagged windrows rising like the crests of huge waves frozen as they curled to break. Once when the sled hit a crag, in spite of every effort to steer clear of it, "Scotty" heard an ominous crack. He was obliged to stop, and with Ben's aid wound the broken place with a stout cord.
The plants they could not feed took on the pale-green hue of starvation. There, among the young grain, the stronger gusts lifted dust clouds acres in extent. Low down along the surface, the soil sifted and shifted continually, piling in windrows in spots, burying the young plants, leaving others bare.
=Fruits after frost.= Sometimes when there is a great quantity of partially ripe and full grown green fruit on the vines which is liable to be spoiled by an early fall frost, it can be saved by pulling the vines and placing them in windrows and covering them with straw. Of course the vines should be handled carefully to shake off as little fruit as possible.
Soon the neighborhood of the surgeon's wagon looked like a harvest-field with the windrows of cut grain upon it. Strange as it may seem, there was often more real danger in this going and coming from rear to front, and from front to rear, than on the very battle line itself.
Occasionally a canvas-covered wagon rumbled over the frozen windrows of the town's one street, and rumbled out again, loaded with supplies for a distant ranch; or a group of cowboys, in search of diversion, came into town for a night. But these visitations were so infrequent as to create no disturbance in the dull, slumberous routine of Willets' citizens.
It is usual to cut in the morning and rake into windrows in the afternoon. With the usual weather in interior California that stage of the curing is completed by that time. The next day it can be gathered into cocks and gotten ready to move. That is about all the curing that is done.
But once started, the runners slipped along easily enough, even through the deep snow, packing the compressible stuff in one passage as hard as ice. Nan followed in this narrow track to the very bank of the river where the logs were heaped in long windrows, ready to be launched into the stream when the waters should rise at the time of the spring freshet.
"Well, here we are." "Yes, this is what we came for." And it was because of "this" that so vast a machinery of ships, engines, and complicated human lives had been set in motion. What was it? A dip in the hills where a little stream was caught up into sluices. On either side of every line of boxes, heaps and windrows of gravel. Above, high on log-cabin staging, windlasses.
We could see the river glinting in its valley, and the windrows of heights beyond it. A wild bee darted into the room, droning, and out again, the sun upon its back. "Monsieur," I said to Abbé Edgeworth, "I am ready now to hear the message which you mentioned to me last night." "If madame will pardon me," he answered, "I will ask you to take me where we can confer alone."
As long as the light held, they passed through the same opulent and monotonous landscape; through little towns full of signs of material prosperity, and then farms, and farms again; the brick houses set in the midst of evergreens, and compassed by vast acreages of corn land, where herds of black pigs wandered, and the farmers were riding their ploughs, or heaping into vast windrows for burning the winter-worn stalks of the last year's crop.
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