Sobbing in her sleep, she waked to hear the demoniacal shriek of the tireless wind and the howl of a coyote, and wept, refusing to be comforted.

The next day she said to Seth firmly and conclusively:

"I am goin' home."

CHAPTER VIII.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

To do her justice, Celia would have taken the child with her; but young as he was, Seth refused to give him up. He would buy a little goat, he said, feed the baby on its milk and look after him.

At heart he said to himself that he would hold the child as ransom.

Surely, if love for him failed, love for the little one would draw the mother back to the hole in the ground.

He found Cyclona and implored her to keep the child while he hitched up the cart and drove the mother away over the same road she had come to the station.

It was a silent drive; each occupied with individual thoughts running in separate channels; she glad that her eyes were looking their last on the wind-lashed prairies blackened by the scourge; he casting about in his mind for some bait with which to entice her to return.

"You will come back to the child?" he faltered.

But she made no answer.

"If the crops succeed," he ventured, "and I build you a beautiful house, then will you come back?"

For answer, she gave a scornful glance at the blackened plains, flowerless, grainless, gra.s.sless.

"If the Wise Men come out of the East," it was his last plea, "and build the Magic City, then you will come back?"

At that she laughed aloud and the wind, to spare him the sound of it, tossed the laugh quickly out and away with the jeer of its cruel mockery.

"The Magic City!" she repeated.

She laughed in derision of such violence that she fell to coughing.

"The Magic City!" she reiterated. "The Magic City!"

CHAPTER IX.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

For one mad moment, such as comes to the bravest, Seth's impulse was to throw himself beneath the wheels of the car that was taking Celia away from him.

In another he would have lain a crushed and shapeless ma.s.s in their wake; but as he shut his eyes for the leap there came to him distinctly, pitifully, wailingly, the cry of the child.

Perhaps it came to him in reality across the intervening miles of wind-blown prairie. Perhaps the wind blew it to him. Who knows? Our Mother Earth often sends us help in our sorest need in her own way, a way which oftentimes partakes of mystery.

Perhaps it came only in memory.

However, it served.

He opened his eyes, and the madness had pa.s.sed.

He pulled himself together dazedly, unfastened the hitch rein of the mule, mounted awkwardly into the high and ungainly blue cart and started off in the direction of the cry.

The wind which on the coming trip had appeared to take fiendish delight in trying to tear Celia's garments to ribbons, now suddenly died down, for the wind loved Seth.

It had done with Celia. She was gone. But not by one breath would it add to the grief of Seth. On the contrary, it spent its most dulcet music in the effort to soothe him. Tenderly as the cooing of a dove it whispered in his ear, reminding him of the child.

He answered aloud.

"I know," he said. "I had forgotten him. The po' little mothahless chile!"

And the wind kissed his cheek, its breath sweet as a girl's, caressing him, urging him over the vastness of the prairie to the child.

On the road to the station, Seth's mind had been filled with Celia to the exclusion of all else. He had not observed the devastation of the prairie.

Unlike her, his heart held no hatred for the wayward winds. They were of heaven. He loved them. Fierce they were at times, it was true, claws that clutched at his heart; but at other times they were gentle fingers running through his hair.

Their natures were opposite as the poles, his and hers.

The prairies were her detestation. He loved them.

He inherited the traits of his ancestors, the st.u.r.dy Kentucky pioneers who had lived in log huts and felled the forests in settling the country. Something not yet tamed within him loved the little wild things that had their homes in the prairie gra.s.ses:

The riotous birds, the bright-colored insects, the prairie dogs in their curious towns, sitting on their haunches at the doors of their little dugouts, so similar to his own, and barking, then running at whistle or crack of whip into the holes to their odd companions, the owls and the rattlesnakes; the herds of antelope emerging from the skyline and brought down to equally diminutive size by the infinite distance, disappearing into the skyline mysteriously as they had come.

But now he looked out on the prairie with a sigh.

It was like a familiar face disfigured by a burn, scarred and almost unrecognizable.

The prairie in loneliness is similar to the sea.

In one wide circle it stretches from horizon to horizon.

It stretched about him far as the eye could reach, scorched and hideous as the ruin of his life.

He shut his eyes. He dared not look out on the ruin of his life. What if the ghastly spectacle should turn his brain?

That had been known to happen among the prairie folk time out of number. Many a brain stupefied by the lonely life of the dugout, the solemn, often portentous grandeur of the great blue dome, under which the pioneers crawled so helplessly, had been blown zigzag by the wild buffetings of the wayward, wanton winds, punctuating the dread loneliness so insistently, so incessantly, so diabolically by its staccato preludes, by its innuendoes of interludes prestissimo, by its finales frantically furious and fiendishly calculated to frighten the soul and tear the bewildered and weakened brain from its pedestal.

The reproach of the thought held something of injustice, the wind blew with such gentleness, kissing his cheek.