CHAPTER IX

RANDALL’S GREAT MOMENT The hot weather began in mid-July. Nature showed herself not an impartial mother by favoring the growing crops at the expense of humanity. The corn shot up to rank height, fostered by a sun whose beams struck many a strong man dead, like a blow from a bludgeon. Old people fell into the way of dying. The infant mortality reached proportions compared with which King Herod’s _coup d’état_ seemed child’s play. Cynthia Ayres moved through the terrific summer days like one of the Hebrew children in…