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This sentence marks the transition from static landscape description to the narrative's temporal onset, just before the rabbits scatter and the men appear.

The syntactic inversion—making 'Evening of a hot day' the grammatical subject that 'started' the wind—grants temporal abstraction a causal agency, as though time itself is the prime mover of events. This is pathetic fallacy of an unusually impersonal kind: rather than nature reflecting human emotion, the sentence proposes a world in which atmospheric conditions, not human will, initiate action, foregrounding the deterministic frame within which George and Lennie's choices will unfold.

Support a thesis that Steinbeck's naturalism subordinates human agency to environmental force—this sentence's syntactic priority of time and weather over actor anticipates a narrative in which characters consistently fail to author their own outcomes.