Her eyes closed. She nodded, still rocking gently back and forth.
After a long time Seth pushed open the door and looked in.
He set back the chair and came tip-toeing forward.
Cyclona raised her head and looked at him dreamily.
"Hush!" she whispered. "Be very quiet ... He has gone to sleep."
"Brumniagen" is a name given to those wares which, having no use for them at home, England ships to other countries. The term, however, is not applied to one leading export of this sort: the scores of younger sons of impoverished Noblemen who are packed off to the wilds of Australia or to the Great Desert of America, to finish sowing their wild oats in remote places, where such agriculture is not so overdone as it is in England.
This economic movement resulted in a neighbor for Jonathan and Seth, a young, blue-eyed, well-built Englishman, whose name was Hugh Walsingham.
Jonathan walked out of his topsy turvy house one day to find the claim just north of his pre-empted by the young man who was evidently a tenderfoot, since his fair complexion had not yet become tanned by the ceaseless winds.
Walsingham had staked out the claim, and was busily engaged in excavating a cave in which he purposed to dwell.
Jonathan, never busy himself, lent a helping-hand, and he and Walsingham at once became friends.
The outdoor life of the prairie pleased Walsingham, the abundance of game rejoiced him. An excellent shot, his dugout was soon filled with heads of antelope, while the hide of a buffalo constituted the covering for his floor.
Surrounded by an atmosphere of sobriety, for even at that early date the fad of temperance had fastened itself upon Kansas, he became by and by of necessity a hard working farmer, tilling the soil from morning till night in the struggle to earn his salt.
There are not many women on the prairies now. Then they were even more scarce. It was not long before his admiring eyes centered themselves upon Cyclona. He fell to wondering why it was that she appeared to consider her own home so excellent a place to stay away from.
Personally he would consider the topsy turvy house a good and sufficient reason for continued absence, but according to his English ideas a girl should love her own roof whether it was right side up or inverted.
The thought of this brown-skinned girl of the rapt and steadfast gaze remained with him. It was, he explained to himself, the look one finds in the eyes of sailors accustomed to the limitless reach of the monotonous seas; it came from the constant contemplation of desert wastes ending only in skylines, of sunlit domes dust-besprinkled, of night skies scattered thick with dusty stars.
His interest grew to the extent that he issued from his dugout early of mornings in order to see her depart for her mysterious destination.
He waited at unseemly hours in the vicinity of Jonathan's curious dwelling to behold her as she came back home.
On one of these occasions, when he was turning to go, after watching her throw the saddle on her broncho, fasten the straps, leap into the saddle and speed away, to be swallowed up by the distances, Jonathan came out of the topsy turvy house and found him.
"Walk with me awhile," implored Walsingham, a sudden sense of the loneliness of the prairie having come upon him with the vanishing of the girl.
Jonathan, always ready to idle, filled his pipe and walked with him.
"Who is the girl?" asked Hugh.
"She is a little girl we adopted," explained Jonathan. "I don't know who she is or where she came from. Her mother blew away in a cyclone. That is all I know about her."
"A pretty girl," commented Hugh.
"And a mighty good girl," added Jonathan. "I don't know what we'd do without her."
"You seem to do without her a good deal," said Hugh, relighting his pipe which the wind had blown out. "She is away from home most of the time."
"Cyclona's playing nurse," said Jonathan. "She's taking care of a child whose mother has deserted him. He is a good big boy now, but Cyclona's taken care of that child ever since he come into the world putty near," and he recited the story of Celia's heartlessness.
"What sort of man is the father?" queried Hugh with a manner of exaggerated indifference.
"Seth? Why, Seth's one of the finest men you ever saw. And he's good-looking, too. Sunburnt and tall and kind of lank, but good-lookin'. He's got some crazy notion, Seth has, of buildin' a Magic City on his claim some time or other, but aside from that there ain't no fault to find with Seth. He's a mighty fine man."
On the plains all waited for letters. Walsingham was no exception to the rule. Few came. He was too far away. Younger sons of impoverished noblemen are sent to far-off places purposely to be forgotten. He employed the intervals between such stray notes as he received in studying Cyclona.
He wondered what his aristocratic sisters would do if they were obliged to saddle their own ponies. He wondered what they would do if they were obliged to wear such gowns as Cyclona wore. And yet Cyclona was charming in those old gowns, blue and pink cotton in the summer and a heavy blue one for winter wear.
Constantly in the open she possessed the beauty of perfect health. Her brown cheeks glowed like old gold from the pulsing of rich blood. An athletic poise of her shoulders and carriage of head added grace to her beauty.
But her chief charm for the young Englishman, surfeited with the affectation of English girls, lay in her natural simplicity.
Except for her association with Seth, whose innate culture could not but communicate itself, Cyclona was totally untutored. She knew nothing of coyness, caprice or mannerisms. Singleness of purpose and unselfishness shone in her tranquil and steadfast gaze which Hugh was fortunate enough now and then to encounter.
Walsingham found himself passing restless hours in the endeavor to devise means by which he might turn her frank gaze upon himself. In fancy he imaged her clothed in fitting garments, walking with that free, beautiful, lithe and swinging gait into the splendor of his mother's English home.
As the boy, whom Seth called Charlie, grew older, Seth cast about in his mind for some story to tell him which should serve to protect both Celia and himself.
Celia was not to blame for leaving him. He had long ago come to that conclusion. He was a failure, as she had said. Women as a rule do not care for failures, though there are some few who do.
They love men who succeed.
In personal appearance, aside from some angularities, considerable gauntness, and much sunburn, Seth told himself that he was not different from other men. It was not palpable to the casual observer that as men went he was a failure, but Seth realized the truth of Celia's judgment.
He had failed doubly. In the effort to provide her a home, and to imbue her with his belief in the Magic City. Since she had gone home he had sent her next to no money. He had none to send. Perhaps that was why she did not write. He never knew. Putting himself in her place, he concluded she was right. A delicate little woman, far away from a great failure of a husband who could not provide for her, ought to let him go without letters.
And so thinking, he seldom hung about the post-office waiting for the mail. He trained himself to expect nothing.
Yes. It had been impossible for him to send her money.
Disaster had followed disaster and he had been barely able to keep himself and the boy alive.
He was a failure of the most deplorable sort, but the boy did not know it. He did not even guess it. The standing monument of his failure in life to Celia was the dugout. In the eyes of the boy it was no failure at all. Born in it he had no idea of the luxury of a house and the luxuries we wot not of we miss not.
He was used to lizards on the roof, to say nothing of other creeping things within the house which are generally regarded as obnoxious, roaches, ants, mice. He rather liked them than otherwise, regarding them as his private possessions.
Besides, hadn't he Cyclona?
And as for the winds of which Celia complained so bitterly, he loved them. His ears had never been out of the sound of them and they were very gentle winds sometimes, tender and loving with their own child born on the desert. They lulled him. They cradled him. They were sweet as Cyclona's voice singing him to sleep.
In another State, where they failed to blow, it would in all probability have been necessary to entice a cyclone into his neighborhood to induce him to slumber.
Accustomed to the infinite tenderness of his father's care from the first, the boy loved him. Seth determined that if it were possible, this state of affairs should continue. If it were necessary to invent a story to fit the case, he would be as other men, or even better in the eyes of the child, until there came a time when he must learn the truth.
Perhaps the time would never come. If he could by any manner of means keep up the delusion until the Wise Men came out of the East and built the Magic City, he would be a failure no longer. He would be an instantaneous success.
Also, though he fully pardoned Celia for her desertion of himself, he had never quite come to understand or fully forgive her desertion of the boy, her staying away as she had done month after month, year after year, missing all the beauty of his babyhood.
He therefore found it impossible to tell the boy that his mother had heartlessly deserted him, as impossible as to tell him that his father was a failure.
Yet the child, like every other, insisted upon knowing something of his origin. To satisfy him, Seth evolved a story, adding to it from time to time. He told it sitting in the firelight, the boy in his arms.
It was the story of the Flying Peccary.
"Tell me how I came in the cyclone," Charlie would insist, nestling into the comfortable curve of his arm.
"The cyclone brought you paht of the way," corrected Seth, jealous of his theory that cyclones never touched the place of his dugout, the forks of the two rivers, "and the flyin' peccary brought you the rest. You've heard me tell about these little Mexican hawgs, the wildest, woolliest, measliest little hawgs that evah breathed the breath of life and how they ate up the cyclone?"
"Yes," nodded Charlie.
"Well, this was the first time, I reckon, that a cyclone evah met its match, becawse a cyclone was nevah known befo' to stop at anything until it had cleaned up the earth and just stopped then on account of its bein' out of breath and tiahd. But it met its match that time.
"You see, Texas is full of those measly little peccaries. You can hahdly live, they say, down theah for them. They eat up the rail fences, the wagon beds, the bahns and the sheep and the cows. They don't stop at women and children, I heah, if they get a good chance at them. And grit! They've got plenty of that, I tell you, and to spah, those little bad measly Mexican hawgs.
"Well, one day a herd of peccaries wah a gruntin' and squealin' around the prairie, huntin' for something to eat as usual, when a cyclone come lumberin' along.
"It come bringin' everything with it it could bring; houses, bahns, chicken coops and a plentiful sprinklin' of human bein's, to liven up things a little. A cyclone ain't very particular, any more than a peccary. It snatches up anything that comes handy. Sometimes it picks up a few knives and whacks things with them as it goes along. You know that, don't you, Cyclona?"
Cyclona nodded. She always lingered at the fireside to hear this story of the flying peccary which was her favorite as well as the child's.
"It brought me," she said.
The boy raised himself in Seth's arms.
"Maybe you are my sister!" he cried.
"Maybe I am," smiled Cyclona.
"At that theah Towanda cyclone," recommenced Seth, "that little Kansas town the cyclone got mad at and made way with, theah must have been a hundred knives or mo' flyin' around loose. They cut hogs half in two. You would have thought a butchah had done it. And the chickens were carved ready to be put on the table. It was wonderful the things that cyclone did."
"And the peccaries," Charlie reminded him.
"That cyclone," began Seth all over again, "came flyin' along black as night and thunderin' laik mad and caught up the whole herd of peccaries.
"Those peccaries ain't even-tempahd animals.
"They've got tempahs laik greased lightnin'. It made them firin' mad fo' a cyclone to take such liberties with them, and they got up and slammed back at it right and left. Well, they didn't do a thing to that cyclone. In the first place the whole herd of peccaries began to snap and grunt laik fury till the noise of the cyclone simmahd down into a sort of pitiful whine, laik the whine of a whipped dog. Imagine a cyclone comin' to that! Then, they tell me, you couldn't heah anything but the squealin' and gruntin' of those pesky little peccaries.
"Between squeals they bit into that theah cyclone fo' all it was wuth, takin' great chunks out of it, swallowin' lightnin' and eatin' big mouthfuls of thundah just as if they laiked it. All the stuff the cyclone was bringin' along with it wa'n't anything to them. They swallowed it whole and pretty soon, you'd hahdly believe it, but theah wa'n't anything lef' of that cyclone at all.
"They had eaten up ever' single bit of it except a tiny breeze they had fohgotten that died away mournful laik across the prairies, sighin' becawse it had stahted out so brash and come to such a sudden untimely and unexpected end.
"Then, theah was the herd of peccaries about five miles from wheah they had stahted, sittin' down, resting, a-smilin' at each othah and congratulatin' each othah, I reckon, on the way they had knocked the stuffin' out of that theah ole cyclone fo' good and all.
"They must have scahd the res' of the cyclones off, too, becawse with them and the forks of the rivahs, they haven't been seen or heahd of aroun' these pahts since."
"Exceptin' the tail end of that one that moved me," Cyclona reminded him.
"And what about me?" questioned Charlie.
"Oh, yes. One of these heah peccaries, a good-natured peccary, too, with a laikin' fo' little children, found you in the cyclone. You were a pretty little baby with big blue eyes the same's you've got now. I don't know exactly wheah the cyclone found you. Anyway, the peccary picked you up in his mouth. When he had rested as long as he wanted to with the other peccaries, he flew along and flew along—they had all got to be flying peccaries, you know, on account of swallowin' so much wind, until he came to the door of my dugout, this same dugout we are in now, and he laid you very carefully down by the door. Then I went out in the mawnin' and brought you in."
Charlie invariably at this point reached up his arms and put them around Seth's neck.
It was very kind of him, he thought, to go out and bring him in. What if the wolves had come along and eaten him! Or the little hungry coyotes they heard barking in the nights. Ugh!
"And then the peccary flew away again?" he asked. "Didn't he?"
"Yes," answered Seth. "He flew away with the rest of the flyin' peccaries."
"And haven't you ever seen them since?" asked Charlie, "or him?"
"Sometimes you can see them 'way up in the air," replied Seth, running his fingers through his hair, "but they ah so fah away and little, you can't tell them from birds."
Cyclona nodded again.
"Yes," she corroborated, "they are so far away and little you can't tell them from birds."
The Post Mistress at the station tapped her thimble on the window-pane at the chickens floundering in the flower-bed outside.
They turned, looked at her, then, rising, staggered off with a ruffled and uppish air, due partly to their indignation and partly to the fact that the wind blew their feathers straight up, and a trifle forward over their heads.
"It's bad enough," she said, "to try and raise flowers in Kansas, fighting the wind, without having to fight the chickens. It's a fight for existence all the way round, this living in Kansas."
Her companion was a man with iron-gray hair, a professor of an Eastern college who had come West, planted what money he had in real estate and lost it. He, however, still retained part of the real estate.
He frequently lounged about the office for an hour or two during the day, waiting for the mail, good enough company except that he occasionally interfered with the reading of the postal cards.
He looked up from a New York newspaper, three days old.
"Pioneer people," he observed laconically, "must expect to fight everything from real estate agents to buffaloes."
The Post Mistress laid down her sewing. Her official duties were not arduous. They left her between trains ample time to attend to those of her household, sewing and all, also to embroider upon bits of gossip caught here and there in regard to her scattered neighbors whose lights of nights were like so many stars dotting the horizon.
She looked out the window to where a tall lank farmer was tying a mule to the hitching post. Over the high wheel of the old blue cart he turned big hollow eyes her way.
"I hope he won't come before the train gets in," she sighed. "There ain't no letter for him, I hope he won't come. Sometimes I feel like I just can't tell him there ain't no letter for him."
"Who is it?" asked the Professor.
"Seth Lawson," she answered.
The Professor elevated his eyebrows.
"The man who owns the ground on which they are to build the Magic City?" he asked laughingly.
"It may happen," declared the Post Mistress tartly. "Anything is liable to happen in Kansas, the things you least expect."
"Everything in the way of cyclones, you mean," put in the Professor.
"Cyclones and everything else," affirmed the Post Mistress. "No matter what it is, Kansas goes other States one better. She raises the tallest corn—they have to climb stepladders to reach the ears—and the biggest watermelons in the world."
"When she raises any at all," the Professor inserted.
"They say," began the Post Mistress, "that in the Eastern part of the State, where they are beginning to be civilized, when a farmer plants his watermelon seed, he hitches up his fastest team and drives into the next county for the watermelon, it grows so fast. Even then, unless he has a pretty fast team somebody else gets it. If you find one on your claim, you know, it's yours."
"I've heard that story," the Professor politely reminded her.
"They do say," remembered the Post Mistress, "that the Indians tell that yarn, that a cyclone never came to Seth's ranch. It may be a fool notion and it may not.... Look at him," leaning forward and gazing out the window. "See how gaunt and haggard and wistful he looks. I don't believe he gets enough to eat. There ain't a sadder sight on these prairies than Seth Lawson. How many months has she been away from him now? May, June, July, August, September, November," counting on her fingers. "Seven months and one little letter from her to say she got home safe. A dozen from him to her. More. You could almost see the love and sadness through the envelope. And none from her in answer.
"Look at him now. Walkin' up and down, up and down, to pass away the time till the train comes. Waitin' for a letter. It won't come. It never will come. And him waitin' and waitin'. He'd as well wait for the dead to come to life or for that wife of his to leave her Kentucky home she's so much fonder of than she is of him or the baby or anything else in the world, to come back to him. What sort of woman can she be anyway to leave a little nursing baby?"
"Some cats leave their kittens before their eyes are open," the Professor said.
"But a woman isn't a cat," objected the Post Mistress. "At least she oughtn't to be. Do you know I've always said the worst woman was too good for the best man, but that woman has made me change my mind. She's gone for good. She don't have to stand the wind any longer or the sleet or the rain. She's gone for good. Then why couldn't she write him a little letter to keep the heart warm in him. What harm would that do her. How much time would it take?
"It don't seem so bad somehow for a woman to have the heartache. She's used to it, mostly. Some women ain't happy unless they do have it. Heartaches and tears make up their lives, they furnish excitement. But a man is different. You see a man holding a baby in long clothes. It's awkward, ain't it? Somehow it don't seem natural. If you have got any sort of mother's heart in your bosom, you want to go and take it out of his arms and cuddle it.
"It's the same with a man with the heartache. You want to go and take it away from him, even if you have to keep it yourself. It don't seem right for him to have it no more than it seems right for him to have to take care of a child.
"That man's got both. The little baby and the heartache. But what can you do for him? There's nothing goin' to cure him but a letter from her, and you can't get that. If ever a man deserved a good wife it's that man, Seth, and what did he get? A Southern woman!"
"Those Southern women make good wives," asserted the Professor, "if you give them plenty of servants and money. None better."
"Good fair-weather wives," nodded the Post Mistress, "but look out for storms. That's when they desert."
"It's a sweeping assertion," mused the Professor, "and not quite fair. It is impossible to judge them all by this weak creature, Celia Lawson. Many a woman in Kentucky braved dangers, cold, hunger and wild animals, living in log huts as these women live in their dugouts, before that State was settled and civilized."
"Some won't give in that it is civilized," objected the Post Mistress, "they're so given down there to killin' people."
"The only difference," went on the Professor, "was in the animals. They had bears. We have buffaloes. But sometimes you come across a woman who isn't cut out for a pioneer woman, and all the training in the world won't make her one. It's the way with Seth's wife."
"She's not only weak and incapable," vowed the Post Mistress, "but soulless and heartless."
"How these women love each other," the Professor commented.
"'Tain't that," flared the Post Mistress. "I'm as good a friend to a woman as another woman can be...."
"Just so," the Professor smiled.
"It's my theory," frowned the Post Mistress, "that women should stand by women and men by men...."
"Your Theory," mused the Professor.
"And I practice it," declared the Post Mistress. "Only in this case I can't. Nobody could. What sort of woman is she, anyway? I can't understand her. She's rid of him and the child and the wind and the weather. She's back there where they say it's cool in the summer-time and warm in the winter, where the cold blasts don't blow, and the hot winds don't blister, and still she can't take time to sit down and write a little note to the father of her child."
She looked away from the window and Seth to the Professor, who wondered why it was he had never before observed the beauty of her humid eyes.
"I can't bear to see him walking up and down," she complained, "waitin' and waitin'. It disgusts you with woman-kind."
The wind blew the shutter to with a bang. It flung it open again. Some twigs of a tree outside tapped at the pane. A whistle sounded.
Seth turned glad eyes in the direction of the sound. The train!
There was the usual bustle. A man brought in a bag of letters, flung it down, sped out and made a flying leap for the train, which was beginning to move on. The Post Mistress busied herself with distributing the mail and Seth walked back and forth, waiting.
Presently he came in at the door, stood at the grated window back of which she sorted out the letters and then went out again.
After a time he drove slowly by the house in the high blue cart.
"Was there anything for him?" asked the Professor.
The Post Mistress looked after the cart receding into a cloud of dust blown up by the wind and brushed her fingers across her eyes.
"There was nothing for him," she said.
On the winter following Celia's departure, Seth fared ill.
It was all he could do to keep warmth in the boy's body and his own, to get food for their nourishment.
And as for homesickness!
There were nights when he looked at the silver moon, half effaced by wind-blown clouds, and fought back the tears, thinking how that same moon was shining down on home and her.
Nights when he fell into very pleasant dreams of that tranquil beauteous and pleasant country where the wind did not blow. Dreams in which he beheld flowers, not ragged wind-torn flowers of a parched and ragged prairie, odorless, colorless flowers and tumbleweeds tossing weirdly over dusty plains, but flowers of his youth, Four o'Clocks, Marguerites and Daffy-Down-Dillies, nodding bloomily on either side of an old brick walk leading from door to gate, Jasmine hanging redolently from lattice, Virginia Creeper and Pumpkin-vine.
And oh!
A radiant dream! Celia, walking out through vine and flower in all her fresh young beauty to meet him as in the old days, to open wide the door and welcome him.
Then as she had done, he waked sobbing, man though he was, but he hushed his sobs for fear of waking the child.
Homesickness!
He dared not dwell on the word lest his few ideas, scattered already by the sough of the wind, the incessant moan and sob and wail of the wind, might blow away altogether; lest he throw to those winds his pride of independence, his resolute determination to make a home for her and himself and their child in the West, and go back to her.
This, whatever dreams assailed him, he resolved not to do.
And yet there was one dream which he thrust from him fiercely, afraid of it, turning pale at the remembrance of it. A dream of a night on that winter when he had gone to bed hungry.
It was a strange dream and terrible.
He thought it was night, he was out on the prairie, and the wolves were following him.
They had caught him.
Ravenously they were tearing the flesh from his body in shreds.
He waked in terror to hear the bark of a pack at his door, for in that winter of bitter cold the wolves also suffered.
"Was that to be his fate?" he asked himself.
Was he to strive and strive, to spend his life in striving, and then in the working out of destiny, in the survival of the fittest, of the stronger over the weaker, of those who are able to devour over those destined to be devoured, fall prey to the fangs of animals hungrier than he and stronger?
There were times when he was very tired. When almost he was ready to fold his arms, to give up the fight and say—
"So be it."
But what of the boy then?
Raising himself out of the slough of despond, he resolutely re-fed his soul with hope.
Those Wise Men! If only they could come! If only they could be made to see and understand that this was the place for their Magic City and be persuaded to build it here!
Then all would be well. He would take the boy to Celia, show her how beautiful he was beginning to be and win her back again.
Then they would all three come and live in a palace in the Magic City, a beautiful house. Live happy ever after.
The wind lulled the child to sleep, the wind wakened him, the wind sang to him all day long, dashed playful raindrops in his upturned face and whispered to him.
Perhaps it was the wind, then, that was his mother. This variable, coquettish wind of tones so infinitely tender, of shrieks so blusteringly loud.
He listened to it in the dawn. He listened to it in the sombre darkness of the night. Early and late it seemed to call to him to come out and away to his mother.
The restlessness that sometimes encompasses the soul of a boy took possession of him. He was filled with the passion of wander-lust. The darkened walls of the dugout restricted him, those grim, gray earth walls that duskily, grave-like, enclosed the body of him.
He must be up and away.
He would go to the heart of the wind and find his mother.
Seth had gone to the town for feed for his cattle. Cyclona was at home. He took advantage of their absence to start on his journey.
Outside the dugout the wind enveloped him softly, enticingly, kissing his curls, kissing the rosy sunburn, the tender down of his cheek which still retained the kissable outline of babyhood.
It was day when he started, broad day, bright with the light of the red sun high in the heavens, surrounded by the brilliant hue of cloudless skies.
The boy ran.
The wind tossed him like a plaything as it tossed the big round tumbleweeds, making the pace for him a little beyond.
Now and again, broad day though it was, the wind blew blasts that frightened him, dying down immediately again into piping Pan-like whispers that lured him on and on until he became a mere speck on the trackless prairie, blown by alternate blasts and zephyrs, hurrying, hurrying, hurrying to the heart of the wind to find his mother.
But by and by the sun sank, dropping suddenly into the Nowhere behind the darkling line of the mysterious horizon.
Then the twilight seeped softly over the prairie, like a drop of ink spilt over a blotter.
A little while later and the prairie became obscurely shadowy, peopled all at once by frightful things, familiar everyday things changed to hideous hobgoblins by the chrism of the dark.
Grasses with long human fingers beckoned him to the Unknown, which is always terrible, while great ever-moving tumbleweeds sprang up at him as if from underground, like enormous heads of resurrected giants.
And the voice of the wind!
As he neared the heart of it, it, too, took on an unknown quantity more terrible than the bugaboo of the shadows and the dark.
It howled with the howl of wolves.
The child began to be afraid. Pantingly, wildly afraid!
He stood still, looking breathlessly ahead of him to where the prairie stretched indefinitely to the rim of the starlit dome, billowy with long gray grasses blown into the semblance of fingers by the bellowing blasts of the fearsome wind.
He sobbed, he was now so far from home, and the voice of the wind had taken on a menacing note of such deep subtleness.
Which way was home? He had forgotten. The way the wind blew?
But the wind had turned to a whirlwind, blowing gales in every direction to mislead him, now that he wanted to go home.
True, there were the stars, blinking high above the stress and turmoil of the tireless wind, but he was too young yet to understand the way they pointed.
As he stood irresolutely sobbing, one ache of loneliness and homesickness and fear, he heard the call of a human voice and his name, the voice coming to him high above the wind, with its own note of terrorized anguish.
His father's voice!
The voice sounded nearer and nearer, calling, calling!
The child ran toward the sound of it, the loneliness of the prairie swallowed up in a sob of gladness, and he was in Seth's arms.
As for Seth, he could only articulate one word:
"Why? Why?"
Celia had deserted him, but the Boy!
"I was looking for my mother," sobbed the child in answer, safe in the tender hollow of his arm.
After a moment's hesitation:
"Mother will come to you some day," Seth breathed over him. "Won't Cyclona and father do till then?"
And in the close clasp of the longing man the child felt the unmistakable throb of paternity penetrate his heart and was satisfied.
The winter had been too long and cold, or the child, however tender Seth's care of him, had been insufficiently clothed and fed.
He lay ill, alternately shaking with chills and burning with fever.
It was March now and the winds blew with the fierceness of tornadoes.
But the laughter of Charlie's delirium outvoiced the winds.
Now he moaned with them and sighed.
Cyclona took up her abode at the dugout now, nursing him tirelessly, while Seth walked the floor, back and forth, back and forth like some caged and helpless animal writhing in pain; for from the first he had read death in the face of the child.
The wind lulled and Seth knelt by his bedside, his ear against Charlie's heart, listening for his breathing, Cyclona standing fearfully by, her face white as the coverings.
After a long time Seth raised beseeching eyes to her in an unspoken question:
"Does he breathe?"
As if he had heard, Charlie suddenly opened his eyes and looked smilingly first at one and then at the other of these two who had encompassed his short life about with such loving care.
"Listen," he whispered, "to the wind."
The wind had risen. It howled like some mad thing. It blew great blasts, ferocious blasts and deafening.
It was as if it, too, were hurt. It was as if it, too, suffered the agony of mortal pain in sympathy with the child.
Soon the child began to lisp and they bent their heads to listen.
"I am ... going ... out ... in ... the wind ... again," he said, "to find ... my ... mother."
"Charlie!" cried Seth, in a voice whose anguish sounded high above the winds. "Stay! It is we who love you, Cyclona and I. Stay with us!"
Cyclona knelt and laid her brown hand across the beautiful eyelids of the child for a little while.
Then she took Seth's head and pillowing it upon her bosom, rocked gently back and forth as they knelt alone on the hard cold earth of the dugout floor.
"It doesn't matter now," she whispered to him; "he knows."