When drought hits the lush grasslands of the richly fertile west, they are green no more and the dying is a palpable thing. What happens to the verdure and vegetation, to cattle and livestock can be read in the coldly statistical little bulletins freely issued by the Department of Agriculture. What happens to the people of the west—beyond the calculable and terrible phenomena of sudden poverty and loss of substance—is an incalculable and febrile kind of desperations. Rain will never come again; the earth will be sere forever; and in all of heaven, there is no promise of a remedy.
Yet, men of wisdom like H.C. Curry know to be patient with heaven. They know that the earth will not thirst forever; they know that one day they will again awaken to a green morning. Young people like Lizzie, his daughter, cannot know this as certainly as he does. Bright as she is, she cannot know. She can only count the shooting stars, and hope.
-Forward from the print edition of THE RAINMAKER, published by Samuel French
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