TRANSCRIPT

Our garden, and those of our somewhat distant neighbors, were making promising progress. The potatoes were showing signs of coming into flower, the cabbages and cauliflowers had taken good root after transplanting and had lusty stalks, and all promised a good supply for our winter use. In the fields the grain, with its dark green leaves, was beginning to show signs of the shot blade and here and there a plant more adventurous than the rest seemed to lift its long green leaf high into the air, as if seeking for a breath of cool air or a drink of dew. I have often noticed that in a grain field before the short blade appears, on a close hot day a plant here and there would seemingly have a sort of independent voluntary action, and in some unaccountable manner one of its leaves would seem to lift itself into the air apart from all the rest, till I almost thought they had a sort of plant consciousness.

On the sod roof of the log shack, the bold ball mustard, with its yellow flower, drooped somewhat in the still smothering atmosphere, and the very chickens spread out their wings and opened their bills to get a cool breath, while the old mother hen in the coop clucked to her young chickens to come into the shade. Even we humans took the pail at the end of the long well-rope to get a pail of ice water, for down thirty feet the ice of winter had not thawed entirely from the sides of the cribbing. In all this beauty of color and life and amid this stillness and smothering heat, there was among horses and cattle and even ourselves a feeling of uneasiness; some unexplained premonition of coming disaster, and away out on the western horizon there appeared a cloud, at first not bigger than a man's hand, but it swiftly increased in size and blackness and seemed driven by some mighty unseen impelling force. As it rose swiftly above the horizon and began to cover the western sky, it seemed like an evil spirit, and men and horses and cattle turned to look with almost a feeling of foreboding fascination.

A dramatized reading of H. B. Adshead's story published in Pioneer Tales and Other Human Stories. 1922