He turned faint and sick at heart at the sight of the fields, for the ta.s.sels had drooped and the broad green leaves were slowly changing to a parched and withered brown, parched and withered as his face, which had been bared to the heat of the Kansas prairies for so many years, parched and withered as his heart which had borne the brunt of sadness and sorrow and separation until the climax was reached and it could bear no more.

On the third day the hot winds grew vengeful. They swept across the prairies with a hissing sound as of flames sizzling through the heat of a furnace. The ta.s.sels, burnt now to a dingy brown, hung in wisps.

The leaves drooped like tired arms. They no longer sang in the wind.

They rattled, a hoa.r.s.e, harsh rattle premonitory of death.

Far and near the fields lay scorched, withered, burnt to a crisp as if by the fast and furious blast of a raging prairie fire.

There was no longer need of harvest hands.

The harvest, gathered by the hot winds, was ended. The ruin was complete.

Their mission accomplished, the winds died down suddenly as they had risen and pa.s.sed away across the barren prairies in a sigh.

Then up came the cooling breezes from the Gulf, light, zephyry clouds gathered, shut off the brazen sunlight and burst into a grateful shower, which descended upon the parched and deadened fields of corn.

But Seth!

Flung on his knees by the side of the bed in the corner of the hole in the ground, his face buried in his arms, he listened to the patter of those raindrops on the corn.

His eyes were dry; but a spring had broken somewhere near the region of his heart.

He owned himself defeated.

He gave up the fight.

CHAPTER XX.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Cyclona had gone to Seth's dugout and found a note from him on the table. It contained few words, but they held a world of meaning.

Simple words and few, tolling her knell of doom.

"I have gone to Celia," it read.

Cyclona crushed the paper, flung it to the floor and ran from the hole in the ground, afraid of she knew not what, engulfed in the awful fear which encompa.s.ses the hopeless,--the fear of herself.

She sprang to her saddle and urged her broncho on with heel and whip, upright as an Indian in her saddle, her face set, expressionless in its marble-like immobility.

She scarcely heeded the direction she took. She left that to her broncho, who sped into the heat of the dusty daylight, following hard in the footsteps of the wind.

What she wished to do was to go straight to G.o.d, to stand before Him and ask him questions.

If within us earthworms there is the Divine Spark of the Deity, if we are in truth His sons and daughters, she reasoned, then we have some rights that this Deity is bound to respect.

What earthly father would knowingly permit his children to stumble blindly along dangerous pathways into dangerous places?

What earthly father would demand that his children rush headlong into danger unquestioningly?

What earthly father would create hearts only to crush them?

Why had He thrust human beings onto this earth against their will, without their volition, to suffer the tortures of the d.a.m.ned?

Why had He created this huge joke of an animal, part body, part soul, all nerves keen to catch at suffering, only to laugh at it?

Why had He taken the pains to fashion this Opera Bouffe of a world at all? Why had He made of it a slate upon which to draw lines of human beings, then wipe them aimlessly off as would any child?

For mere amus.e.m.e.nt after the manner of children?

If not, then why? Why? Why?

She could have screamed out this "Why" into the way of the wind.

She wanted to ask Him why he whirled body-clad souls out of the Nowhere, dragged them by the hair of their heads through ways thronged with thorns, then thrust them back again into the Nowhere, to lie stone still in their chill damp graves, in their straight grave clothes, awaiting His pleasure?

Why had He seen fit to fashion some all body and no soul?

Why had He made others all soul?

Why had He created the Seths to weary for love of the Celias and the Cyclonas to eat out their hearts for love of the Seths?

Some of these questions she had been wont to put to Seth, who had answered them as best he could in his patient way.

There was a hidden meaning in it all, he had said, meaningless as it often seemed. Some meaning that would show itself in G.o.d's good time.

We are uncut diamonds, was one of his explanations. We had much need of polishing before we could attain sufficient brilliancy to adorn a crown. We must have faith and hope, he had said. Much faith and hope and patience. And above all we must have the belief that it would all come out in the Great White Wash of Eternity, in G.o.d's good time.

But there were those who succ.u.mbed before G.o.d's good time, who would never know the explanation until they had pa.s.sed into the Beyond, where they would cease to care.

She rode on and on, asking herself these questions and finding no answer in the whirl and eddy of dust blown at her by the wind, in the limitless stretch of prairie, in the suffocating thickness of heat which enveloped the way of the wind.

Intense heat. Sultry, parching, enervating, sure precursor, if she had thought to remember, if she had been less engrossed in the bitterness of her questionings, of a storm.

Soon, aroused by the intensity of this heat, which burned like the blast from an oven, she whirled about and turned her broncho's head the other way.

It was time, for that way lay her home and danger threatened it.

At the moment of her turning a blast blew with trumpet-like warning into the day, blazing redly like a fire of logs quickened by panting breaths.

A lurid light, like the light of Judgment Day or the wrath of G.o.d spread while she looked.

It enveloped her.

It was as if she gazed upon earth and sky through a bit of bright red stained gla.s.s.

In the southern skies, in the direction of her home, clouds piled high, black, threatening.