Seth was toiling slowly along a furrow back of his plow, bending sidewise with the force of the wind, not resentfully that it persisted in making it so difficult for him to earn his bread, for resentment was not in his nature, besides which, Seth loved the wind,—but humming a little tune, something soft and reminiscent about his old Kentucky home, with its chorus of "Fare you well, my lady," when a broncho, first a mere speck on the horizon ahead of him, then larger and larger, rushed out of the wind from across the prairie with flashing eyes and distended nostrils, and lunged toward him.
At first he thought it was a wild broncho, untamed and riderless; but as his eyes became accustomed to dust and sunlight, he discovered that the saddle held a girl.
For the moment she had bent herself to the broncho's mane, which had the effect, together with the haze produced by the wind-blown dust, of rendering the animal apparently riderless.
Seth drew up his mule and halted.
At the same time the broncho was jerked with a sudden rein that sent him back on his haunches, his front feet pawing the air.
His rider, apparently accustomed to this pose, clung to him with the persistency of a fly to fly paper, righted him, swung herself from the saddle and stood before Seth, a tall, slim girl of twelve, a girl of complexion brown as berries, of dark eyes heavily fringed with thick lashes and dusky hair tinged redly with sunburn. Her hair, one of her beauties, blew about her ears in tangled curls that were unconfined by hat or bonnet.
She smiled at him, showing rows of rice-like teeth, of an exaggerated white in contrast with the sunburn of her face.
"Hello," she said.
"Hello," said Seth in return.
Then, in the outspoken manner of the prairie folk he asked:
"Who ah you?"
"I am Cyclona," she answered.
"Cyclona what?"
"Just Cyclona. I ain't got no other name."
Seth smiled back at her, she seemed so timidly wild, like those little prairie dogs that stand on their haunches and bark, and yet are ever mindful of the safety of their near-by lairs, waiting for them in case of molestation.
"Wheah did you come frum?" he queried.
"Two or three hundred miles from here," she answered, "where we had a claim."
"Who is we?" asked Seth.
"My father and me. He ain't my real father. He's the man what adopted me."
Always courteous, Seth stood, hand on plough, waiting for her to state her errand or move on.
She did neither.
"There be'n't many neighbors hereabout, be there?" she ventured presently, toying with her broncho's mane.
"No," said Seth. "They ah mighty scarce. One about every eighteen miles or so."
Cyclona looked straight at him out of her big dark eyes framed by their heavy lashes.
"I am a neighbor of yourn," she said.
"I'm glad of that," responded Seth with ready Southern cordiality. "Wheah do you live?"
Cyclona turned and pointed to the horizon.
"About ten or twelve miles away," she explained. "There!"
"Been theah long?" asked Seth.
"Come down last week," said Cyclona, adding lightly by way of explanation, "we blew down. Father and his wife and me. Never had no mother. A cyclone blew her away. That's why they call me Cyclona."
She drew her sleeve across her eyes.
"It's mighty lonesome in these parts," she sighed, "without no neighbors. Neighbors was nearer where we came from."
"What made you move, then?" Seth queried.
"We didn't move," said Cyclona. "We was moved. Father likes it here, but I get awful lonesome without no neighbors."
The plaint struck an answering chord.
"Look heah," said Seth. "You see that little dugout 'way ovah theah? That's wheah I live. My wife's theah all by herself. She's lonesome, too. Maybe she'd laik to have you come and visit her and keep her company. Will you?"
Cyclona nodded a delighted assent, caught the mane of her broncho, and swung herself into her saddle with the ease and grace of a cowboy.
Seth was suddenly engrossed with the fear that Celia, seeing the girl come out of the Nowhere, as she had come upon him, might be frightened into the ungraciousness of unsociability.
"Wait," he cried. "I will go with you."
So he took Cyclona's rein and led her broncho over the prairie to Celia's door, the girl, laughing at the idea of being led, chattering from her saddle like any magpie.
He knocked at Celia's door and soon her face, white, Southern, aristocratic, in sharp contrast with the sunburned cheek and wild eye of Cyclona, appeared.
He waved a rough hand toward Cyclona, sitting astride her broncho, a child of the desert, untamed as a coyote, an animated bronze of the untrammelled West emphasized by the highlights of sunshine glimmering on curl and dimple, on broncho mane and hoof, and backed by the brilliancy of sky, the far away line of the horizon and the howl of the wind.
"Look!" he called to her exultantly, in the voice of the prairies, necessarily elevated in defiance of the wind, "I have brought a little girl to keep you company."
It was in this way that Cyclona blew into their lives and came to be something of a companion to Celia, though, realizing that the girl was a distinct outgrowth of the country she so detested, she never came to care for her with that affection which she had felt for her Southern girl friends. The kindly interest which most women, settled in life, feel for the uncertain destiny of every girl child bashfully budding into womanhood was absent.
It is to be doubted if Celia possessed a kindly heart to begin with, added to which there was nothing of the self-conscious bud about Cyclona. She was ignorant of her beauty as a prairie rose. Strange as her life had been, encompassed about by cyclones, the episode of her moving as told by the gray-haired doctor at the corner grocery was stranger.
"The house was little," the doctor commenced, "or it might not have happened. There was only one room. It was built of boards and weighed next to nothing, which may have helped to account for it.
"On that particular day the house was situated in the northern part of the State."
He swapped legs.
"But the next day," he resumed. "Well, you can't tell exactly where any house will be the next day in Kansas.
"It was about noon and Cyclona's foster father was out in the cornfield, plowing. The wind, as usual, was blowing a gale. It was a mild gale, sixty miles an hour, so Jonathan did not permit it to interfere with his plowing. The rows were a little uneven because the wind blew the horse sidewise and that naturally dragged the plow out of the furrows, but as one rarely sees a straight row of corn in Kansas, Jonathan was not worried. If he took pains to sow the corn straight, in trim and systematic rows, like as not the wind would blow the seed out of the ground into his neighbor's cornfield, so what was the use?
"Like the horse and plough, Jonathan was walking crooked, bent in the direction of the wind. He seldom walks straight or talks straight for that matter, the wind has had such an effect on him.
"At any rate, leaving out the question of his reasoning which pursues a devious and zigzag course, varying according to the way the wind blows—and he is not alone in this peculiarity in Kansas, as I say—Jonathan steadily toiled against the wind, he stopped altogether, and taking out his lunch basket, he removed a pie and sat down on a log to eat it, while his horse, moving a little further along, propped himself against a cottonwood tree to keep from being entirely blown away, and also rested."
He swapped tobacco wads from one cheek to the other and continued:
"The pie was made of custard, Jonathan said, with meringue on the top. The meringue blew away, but Jonathan contentedly ate the custard, thankful that the hungry wind had not taken that.
"Mrs. Jonathan had been going about all morning with a dust rag in her hand, wiping the dust from the sills and the furniture.
"So, tired out at last, she had flung herself on the bed and was quietly napping when the cyclone came along.
"Of course, the house and the bed she was lying on were shaken, but Mrs. Jonathan had lived so long in Kansas she couldn't sleep unless the wind rocked the bed.
"She slept all the sounder, therefore, lulled by its whistling and moaning and sobbing, not waking even when Cyclona, this girl they had adopted, opened the door and shut it suddenly with herself on the inside, and a fortunate thing, too, that was for Cyclona, or the cyclone might have left her behind.
"Cyclona, standing by the window, saw it all, the swiftly passing landscape, the trees, the cows, as one would look from an observation car on a train.
"The house was at last deposited rather roughly on terra firma and the jar awoke Mrs. Jonathan. She sat up and rubbed her eyes open. Then she looked about her in some alarm.
"The furniture was tumbled together in one corner all in a heap, Jonathan says, and the pictures were topsy turvy. Pictures are never on a level on Kansas walls on account of the winds, so Mrs. Jonathan thought little of this, but the ceiling puzzled her. Instead of arching in the old way, it pointed at her. It was full of shingles, moreover, like a roof, and the point reached nearly to her head when she sat up in the bed, staring about her.
"'What on earth is the matter?' she asked of Cyclona.
"Cyclona turned away from the window.
"'We have moved,' said she.
"Mrs. Jonathan arose then, and going to the door, opened it and found that what Cyclona had said was true. The scenery was quite different. It is much further south here, you know, than in the northern part of the State. The grass was green and the trees, hardly budded at all where she came from, here had full grown leaves.
"There was little or no debris in the path of the cyclone, nearly everything, with the exception of the house, having been dropped before it arrived at that point.
"A few stray cows hung from the branches of the large cottonwood trees, Jonathan says...."
Here the Doctor was interrupted by a man who took his pipe out of his mouth and coughed.
"But they presently dropped on all fours," he continued, "and began to munch on the nice green grass growing all about them.
"The landscape thus losing all indications of the tornado's effect, assumed a sylvan aspect which was tranquil in the extreme.
"Not far off stood the horse still hitched to the plough, Jonathan said. The horse had a dazed look, but the plough seemed to be in fit enough condition. One handle, slightly bent, had evidently struck against something on the journey, which gave it a rakish aspect, but that was all."
"Did the horse have its hide on?" asked the man who had coughed.
"So far's I know," the Doctor replied. "Why?"
"Because there's a story goin' the rounds," answered the cougher, "to the effec' that a horse was blown a hundred miles in a cyclone and when they found him he was hitched to a tree and skinned."
There was a period of thoughtful silence before the Doctor went on with his story.
"As Mrs. Jonathan looked out the door," he said, "she saw Jonathan walking down the road in her direction. His slice of pie, which he had not had time to finish, was still in his hand.
"'Where are we at?' he asked her, curiously.
"'I am sure I don't know,' answered Mrs. Jonathan, beginning, woman-like, to cry, now that the danger was over.
"Jonathan began to finish his pie, which the cyclone had interrupted. Between mouthfuls he gave quick glances of surprise at the house.
"'What on earth!' he exclaimed, 'is the matter with the roof?'
"Mrs. Jonathan ran out to look.
"The tornado had been busy with the roof. It had blown it skyward and then, upon second thoughts, had brought it back again and deposited it not right side up, but upside down.
"The extreme suction caused by this sudden reversal of things had caught every rag of clothing in the house into the atmosphere where, adhering to the roof, they had been brought down with it, so that they hung in festoons all around the outside, the roof, fastening onto the walls with a tremendous jerk, securing all the different articles with the clinch of a massive and giant clothespin.
"'It was a strange sight,' Jonathan said.
"Mrs. Jonathan's and Cyclona's skirts, stockings, shirt waists, night dresses and handkerchiefs were strung along indiscriminately with Jonathan's trousers, coats, waistcoats and socks. Here and there, in between, prismatic quilts, red bordered tablecloths and fringed napkins varied the monotony.
"'How are we ever going to get them down?' asked Mrs. Jonathan, the floodgate of her tears loosed once more at sight of her household and wearing apparel hung, as it were, from the housetop.
"Jonathan said his wife didn't seem to think of the kindness of the cyclone in bringing her husband along with the house when it might so easily have divorced them by dropping him into the house of some plump widow. All she seemed to think of was those clothes.
"'Don't you worry,' he told her. 'We will just wait till another cyclone comes along and turns the roof right side up again.'
"For one becomes philosophical, you know, living in Kansas. One must, or live somewhere else....
"Jonathan looked delightedly about him.
"The green prairies sloped away to the skies; there was a clump of cottonwood trees near by and a little creek, the same that gurgles by Seth's claim, gurgled by his between twin rows of low green bushes.
"He admired this scenery, Jonathan did. He smiled a smile which stretched from one ear to the other when he discovered that his faithful and trusted horse had followed him down and was standing conveniently near by, ready for work.
"'I like this part of the country,' he declared, 'better than the part we came from. We'll just stake off this claim and take possession.'
"After a moment of thought, however, he added provisionally:
"'That is, until another cyclone takes a notion to move us.'"
Across the purple prairie, the wondering stars blinking down upon him, the wind tearing at him to know what the matter was, the tumbleweeds tumbling at the heels of his broncho, his heart in his mouth, Seth madly rode in the wild midnight to fetch the weazened old woman who tended the women of the desert, rode as madly back again, leaving the midwife to follow.
After an age, it seemed to him, she came, and the child was born.
Seth knelt and listened to the breathing of the little creature in the rapture felt by most mothers of newborn babes and by more fathers than is supposed.
Now and again this feeling, which more than any other goes to make us akin to the angels, is lacking in a mother.
Seth saw with a sadness he could not uproot that Celia was one of these. His belief, therefore, in the efficacy of the child to comfort her went the way of other beliefs he had been forced one by one to relinquish. When, after some weeks of tending her, the old woman was gone, and Celia was able to be about, it was he who took charge of the child, while she, in her weakness, gave herself up to an increased disgust for her surroundings and an even deeper longing to go back home.
It was in vain that he showed her the broad green of the wheat fields, smiling in the sunlight, waving in the wind.
Some blight would come to them.
Fruitlessly he pictured to her the little house he would build for her when the crop was sold.
She listened incredulously.
And then came the grasshoppers.
For miles over the vastness of the desert they rushed in swarms, blackening the earth, eclipsing the sun.
Having accomplished their mission of destruction, they disappeared as quickly as they had come, leaving desolation in their wake. The prairie farms had been reduced to wastes, no leaves, no trees, no prairie flowers, no grasses, no weeds.
One old woman had planted a garden near her dugout, trim, neat, flourishing, with its rows of onions, potatoes and peas in the pod. It was utterly demolished. She covered her head with her apron and wept old disconsolate tears at the sight of it.
Another was hanging her clothes on the line. When the grasshoppers were gone there were no clothes and no line.
As for the beautiful wheat fields that had shone in the sun, that had waved in the wind, they lay before Seth's tearless eyes, a blackened ruin.
Was it against God's wish that they make their feeble effort to cultivate the plains, those poor pioneer people, that He must send a scourge of such horror upon them?
Or had He forsaken the people and the country, as Celia had said?
Seth walked late along the ruin of the fields, not talking aloud to God as was his wont when troubled, silent rather as a child upon whom some sore punishment has been inflicted for he knows not what, silent, brooding, heartsick with wondering, and above all, afraid to go back and face the chill of Celia's look and the scorn of her eye.
But what one must do one must do, and back he went finally, opened the badly hung door and stood within, his back to it, with the air of a culprit, responsible alike for the terror of the winds, the scourge of the grasshoppers and the harshness of God.
"As a man," she said slowly, her blue eyes shining with their clear cold look of cut steel through slits of half-shut white lids, the words dropping distinctly, clearly, relentlessly, that he might not forget them, that he might remember them well throughout the endless years of desert life that were to follow, "you ah a failuah."
He hung his head.
"You ah right," he said.
For though he had not actually gone after the grasshoppers and brought them in a deadly swarm to destroy his harvest, he had enticed her to the plains it seemed for the purpose of witnessing the destruction.
"You ah right," he reiterated.
In the night Celia dreamed of home and the blue-grass hills and the whip-poor-wills and the mocking birds that sang through the moonlight from twilight till dawn.
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."
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, grassless.
"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!"
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 mass 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 passed.
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 sturdy 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 grasses:
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.
His mind ran dangerously on in the current of insanity. He endeavored to quiet it.
The thought of his mother came to him.
Once he had heard her crying in the night, waiting for his father to come home, not knowing where he was, wondering as women will, and fearfully crying.
Then he heard her begin to count aloud in the dark:
"One, two. One, two, three," she had counted, to quiet her brain.
He fell mechanically to counting as she had done:
"One, two. One, two, three."
He must preserve his sanity, he said to himself, for the sake of the child. Otherwise it would be good to lose all remembrance, to forget, to dream, to lapse into the nothingness of the vacant eye, the down-drooping lid and the drivel.
"One, two. One, two, three," he counted, the wind listening.
In spite of the counting, with his eyes fixed on the desolation of the prairie, his thoughts on Celia, suddenly he felt himself seized by gusts of violent rage. The desire to dash out his brains against the unyielding wall of his relentless destiny tore him like the fingers of a giant hand.
"One, two. One, two, three," he counted, and between the words came the cry of the child.
If he could only render his mind a blank until it recovered its equilibrium, a ray of sunshine must leak in somewhere.
It must for the sake of the child.
But how was it possible for him to go back to the ghastliness of the dugout, the bereft house, where it was as if the most precious inmate had suddenly died—to the place that had held Celia but would hold her no more!
It was necessary to count very steadily here, to strangle an outcry of despair.
"One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three, four, five."
He could count no further.
The wind, seeing his distress, soughed with a weird sweet sound like aeolian harps in the effort to comfort him, but he dropped the reins and laid his face in the hollow of his arm.
It was the attitude of a woman, grief-stricken.
He had evidently fallen into a lethargy of grief from which he must be aroused.
So thought the wind. It blew a great blast. It whistled loudly as if calling, calling, calling!
Was it the wind or his heart? Was it his Mother Nature, his Guardian Angel, or God?
Again pitifully, distinctly, wailingly, came the cry of the child.
He raised his head, grasped the reins and hurried.
On he went, on and on, faster and faster, until at last he came to the door of the tomb.
He descended into it. He took the child from the arms of Cyclona, who sat by the fire cuddling it, and held it close to his heart.
"He has been crying," she told him, "every single minute since you have been gone. Crying! Crying! No matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't quiet him."
On the following day Cyclona sat in the low rocking chair, rocking the baby, singing to it, crooning a lullaby, a memory of her own baby days when some self-imposed mother, taking the place of her own, had crooned to her.
But the baby sobbed, looking in bewilderment up at the dark gypsy face above it in search of the pale and beautiful face of his mother.
Finding it not, he hid his eyes upon her shoulder, and sobbed.
The wind sobbed with him. Outside the window it wailed in eerie lamentation. It dashed a near-by shrub, a ragged rosetree that Seth had planted, against the window. The twigs tapped at the pane like human fingers.
"There, there!" soothed Cyclona, and she changed the baby's position, so that his little body curled warmly about her and his face was upturned to hers to coax him into the belief that she was Celia.
Once more she drifted into the lullaby, crooning it very softly in her lilting young voice:
But the wind seemed to oppose her efforts at soothing the child whose startled eyes stared at the window against which tapped the attenuated fingers of the twigs. The wind shrieked at him. His sobs turned into cries.
Cyclona got up and going to the bed laid him on it, talking cooing baby talk to him. She prepared his food. She warmed the milk and crumbled bread into it.
Taking him up again, she fed it to him spoonful by spoonful, awkwardly, yet in a motherly way.
Then she patted him on her shoulder, and tried to rock him to sleep, singing, patting him on the back cooingly when the howl of the wind startled him out of momentary slumber.
The wind appeared to be extraordinarily perverse. It was almost as if, knowing this was Celia's child, that Celia whose hatred it had felt from the first, it took pleasure in punctuating his attempt to sleep with shrieks and wailings, with piercing and unearthly cries.
Once it tossed a tumbleweed at the window. The great round human-like head looked in and the child, opening his eyes upon it, broke into piteous moaning.
The wind laughed, snatched the tumbleweed and tossed it on.
"The wind seems to be tryin' itself," complained Cyclona, getting up once more and walking about with the child in her arms, singing as she walked:
The wind grew furious.
With a wild yell it burst the door of the dugout open.
Cyclona put the baby back on the bed, faced the fury of the wind a moment, then cried out to it:
"Why can't you behave?"
Then she shut the door and placed a chair against it, taking the baby up and again walking it back and forth, up and down and back and forth.
"It's just tryin' itself," she repeated.
Again she endeavored with the coo of the lullaby to entice the child into forgetting the wind.
But the wind was not to be forgotten. It turned into a tornado. Failing of its effort to tear off the roof of the dugout, it stormed tempestuously, fretfully; it raved, it grumbled, it groaned.
It screamed aloud with a fury not to be appeased or assuaged.
Cyclona had taken her seat in the rocking chair near the hearth. She had laid the crying child in every possible position, across her knee face down, sitting on one of her knees, her hand to his back with gentle pats, and over her shoulder.
All to no avail. It seemed as if the child would never quit sobbing. The sense of her helplessness joined with pity for his distress saddened her to tears.
She was very tired. She had had charge of the child since early morning, when Seth, compelled to attend to his work in the fields, had left him to her.
She bent forward and looked out the window where the long fingers of the ragged rosebush, torn by the wind, tapped ceaselessly at the pane.
"Wind," she implored. "Stop blowing. Don't you know the little baby's mother has gone away? Don't you know the little baby hasn't any mother now; that she's left him and gone away?"
It seemed that the wind had not thought of it in this way. Occupied only with Celia's departure, it had not considered the desolation it had caused.
The long lithe fingers of the twigs ceased their tapping.
The wind sobbed fitfully a moment, little sad remorseful penitential sobs, and died away softly across the prairie as a breath of May.
The stillness which ensued was so deep and restful that the eyes of the child involuntarily closed. Cyclona pressed his little body close to her, his head in the hollow of her arm. She rocked him back and forth gently, singing:
"Sleep, baby, sleep," the words coming slowly, she was so tired.