Willard glanced at him. They were driving along the wide dusty track that ran beside one of their finest stands of shellbark hickories, and then out across the twenty-three thousand acre expanse of South Burlington’s northern wheatfields. The sun was almost melted away now, except for one smouldering crimson crescent and the miles of ripening wheat appeared to be an odd bright pink.

‘I don’t know,’ said Willard, unhappily. ‘I think maybe you’d better see it for yourself. I don’t drink I’m competent to judge.’

‘You’re not competent? How competent do you think I am?’ demanded Ed. ‘You’ve been growing wheat for nearly forty years, and all I’ve been doing is sitting on my butt in a stuffy New York office, telling little old ladies how to salt away their surplus dollars for a rainy day.’

Willard thought about that and then shrugged. ‘All I can say is. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I’ve never even heard about anything like it before. But I’m not asking you to take a look at it because I think you might know what it is. I’m sine you won’t. I’m asking you to take a look at it because it’s your farm.’

‘Is it the crops?’

Willard nodded. ‘I can’t even describe it, Ed. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I mean that. Forty years or not.’

The Jeep sped them across the flat, early-evening landscape. The sky faded gradually from a florid rose-colour to a dusky ceramic blue and a cold and creamy moon hung above the horizon. Ed sat sideways in his seat, his arm slung over the back, watching his fields revolve slowly around him.

His fields. He still couldn’t quite believe it. The idea that he actually owned all eighty-five thousand acres of South Burlington Farm – the idea that each handful of dirt he could dig his fingers into for more than ten miles was his own personal property – it all seemed like a strange waking fantasy.

South Burlington had always been his father’s, by ownership and by deed and by that special kind of title that only a lifetime of sweat and pain and sheer arrogance can earn. His father, Dan Hardesty, had been short, stocky, and pugnacious, a tough little bustling pig in Levis. He had built his farm by aggressive mechanisation, shrewd marketing, ruthless buying of agricultural real-estate, and by never sleeping for more than four hours a night.