"Those are some of the things I must endure, my son, in this work. I must endure slander, vilification, misunderstanding, and all that. It's terrible."

"People are certainly ungrateful," cried Ethel at this point. "And they don't try to learn the truth about anything before they start their rotten gossip. More, they have nerve with it! A certain woman stopped me on the street downtown the other day, a woman who claims to have been my friend and a friend of our family for years. And what do you think she had the nerve to say to me? Well, here's what it was, and I hope she said it: 'Why, Ethel, how is Orlean?' I replied that she was getting better. She says: 'Is she sick physically, or mentally?' I said: 'I don't understand you?' She looked at me kind of funny as she replied, 'Why, don't you know, Ethel Glavis, that it's the talk around Chicago—everybody is saying it, that you and your father went out West there, and made her forge his name to a check for a large sum of money and for spite and spite only, took poor Orlean away from her husband and came back here and spread all this gossip about her being sick and neglected when the doctor had come to see her every day? I know Jean Baptiste and I have not lived in this world for thirty-five years and not able yet to understand people. And Jesus Christ couldn't make me believe that Jean Baptiste would mistreat Orlean. Besides, all this talk comes from you and your father. Orlean has said nothing about it. She is just simple and easy like her mother and will take anything off you and your father. Now, it's none of my business; but I am a friend of humanity, and I want to say this, that anybody that is doing what you and your father are doing will suffer and burn in hell some day for it!' And she flies away from me and about her business."

"It's outrageous," the Reverend cried. "We hardly dare show our heads on the street; to greet old friends for fear we are going to be ridiculed and abused for what we have done."

"It's certainly an ungrateful world, that's all," agreed Ethel.

CHAPTER X

Table of Contents

"UNTIL THEN"

IT DID NOT rain the night Jean Baptiste went to Winner to meet the wife who failed to come, but the protracted drought continued on into July. For three weeks into this month it burned everything in its path. From Canada to Kansas, the crops were almost burned to a crisp, while in the country of our story proper, only the winter wheat, and rye, and some of the oats matured. And this was confined principally to the county where Jean Baptiste had homesteaded. Here a part of a crop of small grain was raised, but everything else was a failure.