ZANE GREY



THE DESERT

of

WHEAT

1919





CHAPTER I

Late in June the vast northwestern desert of wheat began to take on a
tinge of gold, lending an austere beauty to that endless, rolling,
smooth world of treeless hills, where miles of fallow ground and miles
of waving grain sloped up to the far-separated homes of the heroic men
who had conquered over sage and sand.

These simple homes of farmers seemed lost on an immensity of soft gray
and golden billows of land, insignificant dots here and there on distant
hills, so far apart that nature only seemed accountable for those broad
squares of alternate gold and brown, extending on and on to the waving
horizon-line. A lonely, hard, heroic country, where flowers and fruit
were not, nor birds and brooks, nor green pastures. Whirling strings of