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me to theirs. I could see they’d told the others I was something pretty funny, the way they looked at me and laughed at anything I said. I’d have liked to live there, but I couldn’t afford it even if they wanted me. It didn’t worry me any.
    “Well, I’ve got to go. I’ll meet you at the lib. and we’ll walk home together,” I told her. “If you eat at the cafeteria I’ll see you.” I thought she looked more cheerful.
    The job at the cafeteria was fun. I liked it best in the morning before many people were there, and the metal counters shone like new milk cans. There was the smell of fresh coffee from the big urn, and fresh broiled bacon, or sausage. The fried eggs, laid out on a warming table, looked like daisy heads with their yellow centers and white petals. It was fun to slide one off on a plate without breaking it. But the rush hours were exciting; you had to keep on your toes. The girls who’d worked there longest said, “Wait till it gets hot and you serve fish a whole noon!” I kept thinking how easy it would be to feed a harvest crew in a cafeteria—but try to find a crew that would wait on themselves! The same people came every day and I got to know a lot of them. Some of them kidded, like the red-haired boy that always called me “Swedie.” I wouldn’t get fat working in the cafeteria; there was so much food around I never felt hungry.
    At four-thirty, just as I started back toward the library from “Teaching Methods,” I remembered I had a conference with Professor Echols on my first composition. I couldn’t meet Vera then and there was no time to stop in and tell her. I hurried back to Mr. Echols’ office.
    Mr. Echols had a way of saying things that stayed in your mind. In our first class he told us we were the voice of a new America learning and growing and becoming articulate in the sheltered places of the earth, while out beyond, a death struggle was going on for us and for learning. It made me think of our house in the shelter of the coulee. It can be as still and quiet as a church outside the kitchen door and above the coulee the wind will be roaring and driving the tumbleweed in front of it at fifty miles an hour.
    I wondered anxiously what Mr. Echols would say to my theme. “For the first theme I want you to choose your own topic,” he had said. “Write about something you know or something you think or believe, but for heaven’s sake don’t let it be anybody else’s idea and don’t write me how it feels to be in a Nazi concentration camp or in a submarine, because I’ll make a pretty good guess you haven’t been there.” He was always saying funny things like that.
    I wrote about Wheat. I’d had a letter that day from Dad saying John Bardich, whose land touches ours on the east, was selling his wheat now for 70 cents a bushel. “It’s a pity we didn’t hold some of it back. But that’s the way with the wheat business,” Dad ended.
    That started me off. I wrote: “The pioneers who came West in the seventies in search of gold were no greater gamblers than the prosaic-looking ranchers planting wheat on the dry-land farms. They gamble with the weather that it will be neither too dry, nor too hot, nor too wet, nor too cold; that the wheat will not be destroyed by hail or grasshoppers; and when at last they have the ripe wheat cut and stored they gamble with the market that wheat will be selling for enough money to pay for all the summer’s work.”
    I stopped writing and thought about Bill Bailey, who runs the Excelsior Grain elevator and knows a great deal about wheat. He can tell whether it has smut or rust or garlic in it, or why the top of the sheaf is empty or what is the best seed to plant. Bill Bailey likes to talk, and he says, “If you know a man’s wheat over a few years you’ve got a pretty good line-up on the man himself.” In harvesttime he sits at the center of things, in his little office in the elevator, and sees the ranchers driving in with their