Season held him close. ‘Goodbye, Ed,’ she said, and she was crying. She took hold of Sally’s hand and the two of them walked quickly across the sidewalk and into the reflecting doors of the terminal. Ed stood watching them go, and then he slowly took out his handkerchief and rubbed the sweat from the back of his neck, and maybe some of the tension, too. He climbed back into his car and started the motor.

For a moment, he closed his eyes.

He hadn’t said much to Season this morning about the wheat blight. It was a little worse, he’d admitted, but he was sure they could get it under control. What he hadn’t told her was that Willard had come knocking at the kitchen door at six-thirty in the morning, while Ed had been sitting at the table drinking his first cup of coffee of the day and reading the papers, and that Willard had already been out with Dyson Kane on a circular helicopter tour of the whole spread.

Willard had calculated that almost an eighth of their total wheat acreage had been blighted during the night, and that the disease was spreading even faster than before. If they didn’t find some way of curbing it by Monday or Tuesday, they were going to lose everything.

Ed had shown Willard the news story in the Kansas City Herald-Examiner. Considering how widespread the blight had been, and how many major Kansas farms had been hit, the coverage had seemed almost offhand. It had rated only a second lead on page three, and ‘Our Agricultural Desk’ had simply reported that ‘several Kansas wheat farmers have noticed an unidentified blight on their late crops’, while ‘Our Washington Bureau’ had remarked with distinct unconcern that ‘federal researchers are busy analysing the blight and working on new methods for bringing it under prompt control.’

In fact, Ed had been so disturbed by the paucity of the news story that he had already called Walter Klugman, who owned the neighbouring Penalosa Farm, and checked if his crops were just as seriously affected.

‘Oh, you bet,’ Walter had said. ‘If anything, mine’s worse than yours. I’ve got thirty per cent of my wheat crop turned rotten, and if the state don’t come up with something soon. I’m going to burn the whole damned spread.’