Roebuck looked at me like a person facing a medium in
a trance.
"Yes," I said, "I believe I can get his vote. I'll try."
CHAPTER XX
JUST AS GRANDMA THORNDYKE EXPECTED
I was surprised next morning to note the change which had taken place in
the weather. It had been cold and raw when I was crossing the prairies
to my farm, with the wind in the southeast, and filled with a bitter
chill In the night the wind had gone down, and it was as still as death
in the morning. For the first time in my life, and it has happened but
twice since, I heard the whistles of the engines on the railroad twelve
miles away to the north. There was a little beard of hoar frost along
the side of every spear of grass and weed; which, as the sun rose
higher, dropped off and lay under every twig and bent, in a little heap
if it stood up straight, or in a windrow if it slanted; for so still was
the air that the frost went straight down, and lay as it fell. I could
hear the bawling of the cattle in every barnyard for miles around, and
the crowing of roosters as the fowls strutted about in the warm sun. It
was thawing by ten o'clock. The temperature had run up as the wind
dropped; and as I now know, with the lowering of the pressure of the
barometer, if we had had one.
"This is a weather-breeder!"
This was my way of telling to myself what a scientist would have
described as marked low barometer; and he would have predicted from his
maps that we should soon find ourselves in the northwest quadrant of
the "low" with high winds and falling temperature.
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