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. Still the sun glared through the smoke of fires. Clouds appeared, banked in the west, broke and disappeared. Each noon the wind dropped and hauled from southwest to the north and for a few moments its draft was cooled; then it came again from the other quarter, hot and dry.

Humphrey Bryant came back on the morning train and, without changing from his best suit of black, drove in a buggy to Foraker's Folly.

Helen read failure in his face even before he spoke.

"This credit situation isn't a newspaper flurry," he said. "It's real. Nobody wants this loan, Helen—not for the present. And the Lord alone knows how long it'll take us to sober up financially."

She sat down weakly and for an hour he talked, trying to be optimistic but without much success.

And then the girl talked, told of what had happened at the mill, told of the daily letters of threat. The butcher in Pancake had refused her check and that stung her despite the fact that the garage man had gone out of his way to be nice to her. Dr. Pelly had driven in to tell her that there were friends left her, no matter how great the bitterness that her enemies stirred against her.

Thad Parker had walked over from his farm where the sprouting crops were burned by the hot sun and cut to death by sand blown by tireless winds. He stumblingly told how he himself had lain in wait at the mill at night. 303