It was the fall of the year 1897, just months before William McInley had been inaugurated as the twenty fifth president of the United States. It was a time when the discovery of fabulous amounts of gold in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon screamed from the headlines of every newspaper in the country. In the town of Thessaly, in one of the states of the great plains, they had just garnered a harvest of another kind of gold - tons and tons of beautiful yellow wheat. Phineas Cobb watches his nephew Jason, as the hands prepare the grain for storage in the tall silo. It was one of the richest crops they'd ever had...

The story is inspired by a Greek tragedy entitled Madeya.