The days are long in the desert. Sometimes they seem to be endless. When the wind would permit, Seth endeavored to find comfort in digging in the soil into which we must all descend, in getting near to it, in ploughing it, often with apparent aimlessness, never being able to count upon the harvest, but buoying up his soul with hope of the yield.
But there were days of wind and rain and sleet and cold stormy weather when all animals of the desert, whether human or four-footed, were glad to seek their holes in the ground and stay there.
These days Seth spent in building the beautiful house.
He sat before the dim half window, drawing the plan, Cyclona beside him, watching him.
Sometimes he called her Cyclona, and then again he called her Charlie; for what with his grief and the wail of the wind, his mind had become momentarily dazed.
Full well Cyclona knew the story of the Magic City, having heard it again and again, but it was only of late when Seth had given up all hope of Celia's returning to the dugout that he commenced to plan the beautiful house.
"When the Wise Men come out of the East," Seth told her, "and buy up ouah land fo' the Magic City, we shall be rich. It is then that I shall build this beautiful house, so beautiful that she must come and live in it with us."
Cyclona leaned over the table on her elbows, looking at the plan. Her dark eyes were sad, for she knew that by "us," Seth meant Charlie and himself.
He ran his pencil over the plan, showing how the beautiful house was to be built. Somewhat after the fashion of a Southern house modernized. A Southern woman, he explained, must live in a house which would remind her of her home and still be so beautiful that not for one instant would she regret that home or the land of her birth which she had left for it.
"A species of insanity it is," he muttered, "to bring such a woman to a hole in the ground." He bit his lip and frowned, "fo' theah ah women in whom the love of home, of country, is pa'amount. Above all human things, above husband, above children, she loves her home. Child! Celia has no child. Cyclona, has no one written to Celia that she has no child?"
This wildly, his eyes insanely bright.
"It is just as well," soothed Cyclona. "It doesn't matter. She never knew him."
It seemed to Cyclona that she could see the lonely resting place of the child reflected in Seth's eyes, so firmly was his mind fixed upon it.
"You ah right, Cyclona," he said by and by. "You ah right. It is just as well. It might grieve her, altho' it is as you say, she nevah knew him."
Cyclona traced a line of the plan of the beautiful house.
"Tell me about it," she said.
"It is her natuah," insisted Seth almost fiercely, "and we can no mo' change ouah natuah, the instinct that is bawn in us, that is inherited, than we can change the place of ouah birth. Can we teach the fish to fly or the bird to swim, or the blind mole to live above the cool sof' earth in which centuries of ancestral moles have delighted to burrow? Then no mo' can you teach a woman in whom the love of country is pa'amount to love anothah country. Only by the gentlest measuahs may you wean her from it. Only by givin' her in this strange new country something mo' beautiful than any othah thing she has evah known. And that," he finished, "is why I am goin' to build the beautiful house."
He fell to dreaming audibly.
"All these were of costly stones, accordin' to the measuah of hewed stones, sawed with saws within and without," he muttered, "even from the foundation unto the copin', and so on the outside toward the great court."
Cyclona reaching up took down from a shelf a well-thumbed Book, which, since books are scarce on the desert, both knew by heart, and opened it at the Book of Kings.
"Seth," she said, presently, touching him on the shoulder, "aren't you getting this house mixed up with the House of the Lord?"
"No," smiled Seth, "with the house that Solomon built fo' Pharaoh's daughter whom he had taken to wife."
He went on softly:
"And the foundation was of cos'ly stones, even great stones, stones of ten cubits, and stones of eight cubits. And above were cos'ly stone, aftah the measuah of hewed stones, and cedars."
"Seth," said Cyclona, to whom no dream was too fanciful, "are you goin' to build this house just like that one?"
"If I could, I would," Seth made reply, and then went on dreaming his dream aloud. "And he made the pillahs and the two rows around about upon the network, to covah the chapiters that were upon the top, with pomegranates; and so did he fo' the othah chapiter. And the chapiters that were upon the tip of the pillahs were of lily work in the porch, fo' cubits. Lily work," he lingered over the words, smiling at their musical poetry.
After awhile he began again to talk of the beautiful house which should have every improvement, a marble bath....
"And it was an hand-breadth thick," interrupted Cyclona, "and the brim thereof was wrought like the brim of a cup, with flowers, of lilies; it contained two thousand baths. If you could, would you build her a bath like that, Seth?" she questioned.
"I would," replied Seth, "and as fo' the lights!"
"There were windows in three rows," read Cyclona, "and light was against light in three ranks."
"Lights!" exclaimed Seth, "little electric lights tricked out with fancy globes of rose colah matching the roses in her cheeks."
He dropped his pencil and gazed ahead of him.
"Do you know?" he asked dreamily, "how I shall match that rose color of her cheek, not havin' her by? I shall taik the innah petal of a rose and maik the little lights the color of that."
Cyclona arose and walked over to a bit of glass that hung on the wall. She frowned at the reflection of her brown cheek there. A tender and delicate rose underlay the brown, but her eyes saw no beauty in it. She sighed as she came back and once more sat down.
"I shall have the beautiful house agleam with lights," went on Seth, who had failed to notice the interruption. "Lights at the sight of which Solomon would have stood aghast, that splendid ole aristocrat whose mos' magnificent temples were dimly lit by candles.... Windows in three rows! Windows in a dozen rows out of which her blue eyes shall look on smooth green swahds and flowahs.
"The house shall gleam alight with windows. Theah shall be no da'k spot in it. Windowless houses ah fo' creatuahs of a clay less fine than hers," repeating tenderly, "of less fine clay. She is a bein' created to bask in the sunshine. She shall bask in it. These windows shall be thrown wide open to the sun, upstaiahs and down. Not a speck nor spot shall mah their cleanliness, lest a ray of light escape. Those who live in da'kness wilt within and without. She shall not live in da'kness. Nevah again. Nevah again shall she live in a hole in the ground."
After a time:
"Is it possible?" he mused, half to himself, half to Cyclona, "to build a house without a cellah?"
"I don't know," said Cyclona, whose knowledge of houses was limited to her own whose roof was still upside down, and dugouts.
"If I could build this house without a cellah," said Seth, "I would."
Cyclona again read from the Book.
"It stood upon twelve oxen," she read, "three looking toward the north, and three looking toward the west and three looking toward the south and three looking toward the east. Why not stand it on oxen like that, Seth?" she questioned.
Seth laughed.
"That wasn't the house," said he. "That was the molten sea."
"Oh!" exclaimed Cyclona. "I know now. The foundation was of stone made ready before they were brought hither, costly stones, great stones. It must have a foundation of some sort," she argued, keeping her finger on the place as she looked up, "or it will blow away."
"Of co'se," assented Seth, "or it will blow away. Well, if it must it must; but we will put half-windows into that cellah so it won't be da'k, so it won't be like this, a hole in the ground. We will light it with electrics. But we won't talk of the cellah. That saddens me. I am tiahd of livin' in the hole in the ground myself sometimes. We will talk of the beautiful rooms above ground that we will build fo' her.
"Look. You entah a wide door whose threshold her little feet will press. She will trail up this staiahway," and he let his pencil linger lovingly over the place, "in her silks and velvets, followed by her maids, and theah on the second landing she will find palms and the flowahs she loves best, and her own white room with its bed of gold covahd with lace so delicate, delicate as she is. Soft, filmy lace fit fo' a Princess, fo' that is what she is. Theah will be bits of spindle-legged golden furniture about in this white bed-room of hers and pier-glasses that will maik a dozen of her, that will maik twenty of her, we will arrange it so; for theah cannot be too many reflections, can theah, of so gracious and lovely a Princess?"
Once more Cyclona tapped him on the shoulder.
"Seth," said she, "where is the room for the Prince?"
Seth looked up at her vacantly. It was some time before he answered. Then his answer showed vagueness; for what with the howl of the wind and the eternal presence in the closet of his soul of the skeleton of despair, his mind had become a little erratic at times.
"When the Prince has proven himself worthy to be the Prince Consort of so wonderful a Princess," he replied, "then he, too, may come and live in the beautiful house, but not until then."
His thoughts harked back to the cellar. Staring ahead of him he saw the slight figure of a woman silhouetted against the tender pearl of the evening sky, eyes staring affrightedly into the darkened door of a dugout, a fluff of yellow hair like a halo about the beautiful face.
"A cellah is a hole in the ground," he sighed. "A cellah is a hole in the ground. Theah shall be nothing about this house I shall build fo' the Princess in any way resemblin' a hole in the ground. Holes in the ground are fo' wolves and prairie dogs and...."
"And us," Cyclona finished grimly, then smiled.
Seth, drawing himself up, gazed at her.
In her own wild way Cyclona had grown to be beautiful, still brown as a Gypsy, but large of eye and red of lip. She might have passed for a type of Creole or a study in bronze as she faced him with that little smile of defiance on her red lips. Too beautiful she was for a dugout, true, and yet the dusky brownish gray of the earth-colored walls served in a way to set off her rich dark coloring.
Seth returned to the plan.
"And for us," he assented, humbly.
"We must build it of stone," he continued. "White stone. Stone never blows away. It will be finished, too, with the finest of wood, covahd...."
"Wait," cried Cyclona, turning over the leaves of the Book, "and he built the walls of the house with boards of cedar, both the floor of the house and the walls of the ceiling. And he covered them on the inside with wood and covered the floor of the house with planks of fir."
"Cedah," nodded Seth. "It would be well to build it of cedah. The cedah is a Southern tree. It would remind her of home.
"We will finish it, then, with cedah and polish it so well that laik the mirrors it will reflect her face as she walks about. Heah will be the music room. It shall have a piano made of the same rich wood. It will look as if it were built in the house. Theah shall be guitahs and mandolins. She plays the guitah a little, Cyclona, the Princess. You should see her small white hands as she fingahs the strings. I will have a low divan of many cushions heah by the window of the music room. She shall sit heah in her beautiful gown of silk. White silk, fo' white becomes her best, her beauty is so dainty. She shall sit heah in her white silk gown and play and play and sing those Southern songs of hers that ah so full of music...."
He dropped his pencil and sat very still for a space, looking ahead of him out of the window.
The panorama, framed by its limited sash of wilful winds playing havoc with the clouds, became obliterated by the picture of her, sitting by a wide and sunny window, backed by those gay pillows, thrumming with slim white fingers on the guitar and singing.
Again Cyclona waked him from his day dream with a touch. He ran his fingers through his hair, staring at her.
"Is that you, Charlie," he asked her.
"Not Charlie," she answered. "Cyclona."
"I beg yoah pahdon," he said. "Ve'y often now you seem to me to be Charlie. I don't know why."
"Tell me more about the Princess," soothed Cyclona, "is she so beautiful?"
"Beautiful," echoed Seth. "She is fit fo' any palace, she is so beautiful. And when the Wise Men come out of the East we will build it fo' her. It shall have gold do'knobs and jewelled ornaments and rare birds of gay plumage to sing and keep her company, and painted ceilings and little cupids carved in mahble, and theah shall be graven images set on onyx pedestals and some curious Hindoo gods squatting, and a Turkish room of red lights dimmed by little carved lanterns and rich, rare rugs and pictuahs by great mastahs in gilded frames, and walls lined with the books she loves best in royal bindings.... And she shall have servants to wait upon her and do her bidding and we will send to Paris fo' her gowns and her bonnets and her wraps. And she shall have carriages and coachmen and footmen. A Victoria, I think I shall odah fo' her, ve'y elegant, lined with blue to match her eyes.... No—that would be too light. Her eyes are beautiful, Cyclona. Don't think fo' a moment that they are not, but can you undahstan', I wondah, how eyes can be ve'y beautiful and yet of a cold and steely blue that sometimes freezes the blood in youah veins? A little too light, perhaps, and that gives them the look of cleah cold cut steel.
"I shall have the linings of her Victoria light, but not quite so light, a little dahkah and wahmah, perhaps, the footmen with a livery to match. That goes without sayin'. And she shall have outridahs, too, if she likes, as in the olden time back theah at home in the South. No grand dame of the ole and splendid South she loves so well shall be so grand as she, shall be so splendid as she when we shall have finished the beautiful house fo' her.
"Cyclona," wildly, "how could we expect a little delicate frail Southern woman to come and live in a hole in the ground. How could we? Why shouldn't she hate the wind? Ah! We must still the winds! We must still the winds! But how?"
At this Seth was wont to rise, to walk the circumscribed length of his miserable dwelling and to worry his soul.
"How shall we still the winds?" he would moan. "How shall we still the winds that the soun' of them shall not disturb her?"
After a long time of thinking:
"Cyclona," he concluded, "in some countries they move forests. Don't they? Have I read that or dreamed it? If only we could move a forest or two onto these vast prairies, that would still the winds. Tall trees penetratin' the skies would be impassable barriers to the terrible winds that have full sweep as it is. They would still the winds, those forests, if we could move them!"
Cyclona's heart was full at this; for Seth was far from sane, alas! when he talked of moving forests of trees to the barren prairies. The idea at last struck him as preposterous.
"We will build tall trees," he continued quickly, as if to cover the tracks of his mistakes. "We will build trees that will taik root in the night and spring up before morning. Trees that will grow and grow and grow. Magic trees growing so quickly in the lush black soil of the prairie once we get them started, the soil so neah the undahground streams by the rivahs heah, that the angels would look down in wondahment.
"They would, to see how quickly they would grow. Such trees would tempah the winds that blow so now because they have full sweep, because there is nothin' to stop them. Winds, laik everything else, are amenable to control, if you only know how to control them. These tall trees will not only break the force of the winds, but they will shade her beautiful face as she drives about. They will shut off the too ardent sun that would wish to kiss her."
Now and again Cyclona grew a trifle impatient of this beautiful creature whose character she knew, whose child she had cared for and helped to bury, grew a trifle tired of hearing hymns sung in her praise.
"Where is she now?" she asked listlessly, knowing full well, merely to continue if the talk pleased him, tired as she was.
"Charlie," smiled Seth, and never once did Cyclona correct him when he called her Charlie, reasoning that perhaps the spirit of the child was near him, since there were those who believed that and it was comforting. "She is laik the flowahs, that beautiful one. She knows bettah than to bloom in this God-fo'saken country—that was what she called it—wheah you cain't get the flowahs to bloom because of the wind that is fo'evah blowin'. She lives now wheah the flowahs bloom and the wind nevah blows."
Cyclona lifted her head to listen to the moan and the sough of the wind.
"I love it," she said.
"So do I," said Seth, "though sometimes I am half afraid of it, thinkin' it is getting into my brain, but she hated it. But nevah mind. When we grow tall trees that will break the force of the wind and shade her from the sun and build the beautiful house fo' her, she will come back home and live in it with us and we shall be happy! Happy! We shall fo'get all ouah sorrow, we shall be so happy!"
At that moment, the moment of the going down of the sun, the wind dropped and the passing clouds let in the gleam of the sunset at the window. It rested goldenly on Seth's face. It illumined it. It glorified it.
Cyclona looked at him long and earnestly, at the strong, fine lines of sadness brought beautifully out by this unexpected high-light of the skies, accentuated Rembrandt-like, against the darkness of the earth-colored hole in the ground.
Then she bent her sunburnt head and a tear fell on her hand outstretched upon the table.
At sight of the tear Seth was like a man who is all at once drunk with new wine. There is truth in the wine. There are times when it clears the brain for the moment and reveals things as they are.
He looked at Cyclona with new eyes. It was as if he had never before seen her. She differed from Celia as the wild rose differs from the rose that blooms in hothouses, and yet how beautiful she was! He realized for the first time her wonderful beauty. So olive of complexion with the delicate tinge of rose showing through, so bronze of hair in close-cut sun-kissed curls!
The little curls that gave her a boyish look in spite of the fact that she had blossomed into radiant womanhood. The big brown eyes. The curve of the neck, the little tip-tilted chin!
Seth had been hardly human if the thought of forgetting Celia and her indifference in Cyclona's arms had not more than once presented itself.
It presented itself now with the strength of strong winds.
Without home or kindred, without tie or connection, she was a flower in his pathway. He had only to reach out and pluck her and wear her on his heart. There were none to gainsay him. No mortal lived who dared defend her or say nay.
Why waste his life, then, in dreams and fantasies, in regrets, and hopings, when here lay a glowing, breathing, living reality?
He reached out his hand and caught hers in a firm, compelling grasp. A splendid creature sent to comfort him. A creature blown by the winds of heaven to his threshold. A dear defenceless thing without home or kindred, unprotected, uncared of, weak and in need of affection, in dire need of love.
Helpless, unshielded, unguarded ... unprotected ... unguarded ... uncared for....
Seth frowned. The wind had wafted itself into his brain again. He was growing dazed.
He caught his hand away from Cyclona's. He thrust his fingers through his hair. He pressed them over his eyes.
These strange words persisted in piling themselves solidly between him and his desire. They formed a barrier stronger than walls of brick or mortar.
Unprotected, defenceless, unguarded, uncared for, this girl who had rocked his child and Celia's in her arms, who had held him close to the warmth of her young bosom. This beautiful unprotected girl who had tenderly closed the eyes of his child!
The fragile barrier built by unseen hands was cloud-high now.
If the wraith of Cyclona had occupied the chair there by his side she could scarcely have been further removed from his embrace.
Humbly Seth bent over the small brown hand.
Reverently he kissed away the tear.
But the moons waxed and waned and the months lapsed into years and Seth grew hopeless, more and more hopeless, so hopeless that at last he began to lose faith in the Magic City, and to fear for the realization of his fantastic will-o'-the-wisp of a beautiful house.
Would the Wise Men never come out of the East to buy up his land and build that magnificent city of his dreams at the forks of the river where the cyclones never came, so that he could build his beautiful house for Celia? Or would they always stop just short of it?
Already that little town on the edge of the State called Kansas City because it was in Missouri, had boomed itself into a city and, being just outside the cyclone belt, had not been blown away. In spite of the fact that it had been set high on a hill it had not been blown away.
The Wise Men had built that town.
Also, there was another town they had built within the belt which promised to thrive, a town where the people had so arranged it that the coming of a cyclone could be telegraphed to them, where signs like this were posted, "A cyclone due at three o'clock," and they had ample time to shut up shop and school and prepare for it, going down into their cyclone cellars, shutting fast the doors and staying there until it was over.
True, a cyclone or two had grazed this town.
One had even taken off a wing. But, though a trifle disabled by each, it had continued to thrive, showing such evident and robust signs of life and strength that the cyclones, presently giving up in despair of making a wreck of it, had gone on by as Seth has said they would do once they found their master.
Then this town had been by way of premium for stanchness and courage made the capital of this State of tornadoes and whirlwinds.
But this was as far as it went or seemed to intend to go. Further south and west an attempt or two had been made to plant towns, but their cellars had not been dug deep enough or their foundations had not been sufficiently firm, or the cyclones had not yet become reconciled to the sight of them. At any rate, the cyclones had come along and swept them away without a word of warning, and they had not been heard of since, neither cyclone nor town.
And so, altogether, Seth lost heart and came to the conclusion that his Magic City, if it was ever to be built would be built after his time and he would never have the happiness of gazing upon it. The hope of seeing it was all that had kept him in the West. Now that he had lost it, an uncontrollable longing came over him to go back home, to see the wife who had deserted him, throw himself at her feet and beg her forgiveness for his madness which had resulted in their separation.
From dreaming dreams of the Magic City he took to dreaming dreams of her.
It was years since he had seen her, but the absent, like the dead, remain unchanged to us. To him she was the same as when last he saw her.
How beautiful she had been with her great blue eyes and her hair the color of Charlie's, tawny, like sunshine! And right, too, in her scorn of his visions. And how foolish he had been to dream of training the wind-blown West into a fit place for human beings to inhabit, or for great cities to be built! It would take a stronger hand than his to do that, he had come to believe. It would take the hand of God.
He had tried to find a tree that would grow so swiftly that the wind could have no effect upon it. He had planted slim switches of one kind after another and the wind had blown each to leaflessness, until now there stood a slim row of cottonwoods that he had tried as a last resort, but the same thing would happen to them, perhaps. He had lost faith in trees. But he would not say yet that he had lost faith in God.
He watched the same train trailing so far away as to seem a toy train and longed as she had done to take it and go back home.
At last he understood the look in her eyes as she watched it and the thoughts that enthralled her.
Sometimes when we strive for a thing and set our hearts on it, it holds itself aloof from us. When we cease to strive, it comes.
But that is among the many strange ways of Providence which seems to rule us blindly, but which is not so blind, perhaps, after all, as it seems.
Another of its ways most incomprehensible is to bring us what we have longed for a little too late sometimes.
But this is the story of Seth, and this is the way of its happening:
It was early in a mild and beautiful spring when the corn was young. It stood shoulder high, lusty and strong and green. What with the unwonted mildness of the weather and the absence of the usual storms and the proneness of the clouds to deposit themselves about in gentle showers, the crop promised fair to rival any crop that Seth had ever raised on the Kansas prairies.
He hoed and toiled and smiled and listened to the rustling of the corn, for he had made up his mind.
When the harvest was at an end he would sell the crop and the place for what it would bring, and go back home. He would go back to his wife and home!
The rustling of the corn was music in his ears. It was more. It was like the glad hand of young Love; for with the crops so fine and the harvest so rich, when he went back home to her, he would not go empty-handed and unwelcome.
He was going back once more to his Kentucky home.
No hills seemed so green as those Kentucky hills and no skies so blue as those skies that vaulted above the green, green hills of his native land.
It had been longer than he cared to count since he had seen the blue grass waving about in the wind there, not such wind as swept the Kansas prairies, but gentle zephyrs almost breathless that rustled softly and musically through the little blades of grass just as the wind was rustling through the stalks now as he walked slowly with the heavy stride of the clumsy farmer, hoeing the corn.
And he had not heard the whip-poor-will, nor sat under the shade of the wide spreading oaks, nor listened to the soft Southern talk of his and her people, not since he had come to Kansas with those other foolish folk to brave the dangers of the strange new country in the search of homes.
Homes!
He could point out the graves of some of them here and there about the vastness of the level prairies, though more often he wandered across the vast level wastes, looking for the places where they should be and found them not, because of the buffaloes that had long ago trampled out the shape of them, or because of the corn that had been planted in furrows above their mounds, the serried ranks through which the wind sang requiems, chanting, whispering, moaning and sighing in the balmy springtime and through the heat of the long summer days until in the chill of the autumn the farmers cut the stalks and stacked them evenly, leaving no dangling leaves to sigh through nor tassels to flout.
Now that he had made up his mind, the roughness of his life bore in upon him.
He thought with Celia that it would be good to live again in a land where people led soft, easy lives. She was not to be blamed. She was right with that strange animal instinct which leads some women blindly to the truth, and he had wasted the best years of his life and all of the boy's in this terrible land of whirlwinds and coyotes and wide, thirsty plains stretching to meet the blazing skies of noonday or the star-gemmed dome of the purple night.
For the plains in some strange and mysterious way took vengeance upon many of those who dared upturn with hoe and plough the fresh new malarial soil, inserting germs of disease and death which soon stretched them beneath.
Some lives must invariably be sacrificed to the upbuilding of any new country, but why so many? And, sadder still, minds had been sacrificed. The asylums, such as they were, were filled with those whose minds in the ghastly loneliness of the desert had been torn and turned and twisted by the incessant whirl and shirr and swish and force of the pitiless winds.
He himself loved the wind, but there were times when he was afraid of it, when it got in his brain and whirled and caused him to see things in strange lights and weird, things fantastically colored, kaleidoscopic and upside down.
When the day's work was done he sat outside the dugout talking sometimes to himself, sometimes to Cyclona, telling of how when the harvest was over and gathered he would go back home.
His plan must succeed, he sighed, to himself sometimes, sometimes to Cyclona, who would sit listening, her great eyes on the limit of the horizon, deep, dark, troubled as she brooded upon what her life would be when he was gone; and as he talked he panted in the deep earnestness of his insistence that the crops must succeed.
Other plans had failed, but not this. Not this! It must not! Resolutely he put away from him all thought of failure. It must succeed. He must go home!
He must ease this longing for the sight of Celia and her people which had come to him of late to stay with him through seed-time and harvest, through the early spring when the corn was young, and later when it rose to heights unheard of, and later still through those bitter days of grasshoppers and chinch bugs and hot winds and other blightful things that haunt the Kansas cornfield to their ruin.
He must go home.
Since Seth had braved everything and dared everything, going so far even as to hire harvest hands to help him, taking every possible chance upon the yield of this harvest, as a gambler stakes his all upon the last throw of the dice, fortune seemed at last to come his way, and it promised a yield which eclipsed his wildest dreaming.
His heart grew light as he listened to the rustling of the corn and into his tired eyes, beginning to be old, there crept so warm a glow that the farm hands stood and stared at him as they came trooping in hot and dusty from the fields.
They wondered what could have come over him to give to his worn and faded face so nearly the look of youth.
"The corn is fine, John, isn't it?" he asked of a gray-haired man who sat at one corner of the rough table, mopping his forehead with a large bandana handkerchief, not too clean.
John put the handkerchief back into his pocket and fell upon the meal Seth set before him.
"It's fine enough," said he, "it'll be the finest crop ever raised in these here parts if the hot winds don't come."
After a little while he said again:
"If the hot winds don't come."
Seth set a plate of bread down by him with a crash.
"The hot winds!" he cried. "The hot winds!"
Man as he was he clasped his hands together and caught them apart, wringing them.
"I had forgotten all about the hot winds!" he moaned. "I had forgotten all about the hot winds!"
The softness of the spring air gave place to heat, to extreme heat, sudden and blighting. A copper sun blazed in a copper sky.
The cooling breezes under the influence of the heat changed to scorching winds. These winds blew menacingly through the rustling stalks of the strong green corn.
For one long day they laughed defiance, holding firmly erect their brave heads upon which the yellow tassels were beginning to thrust themselves aloft in silken beauty; and Seth, watching, braced himself with the hope that they would somehow stand the ordeal, that the heat might abate, that in some way, by the special finger of Providence, perhaps, the threatened ruin might be warded off, that a cooling breeze might come blowing up from the Gulf or a shower might fall and he could still go back home.
On the second day the heat had not abated. It had rather increased. The burning winds blew stronger. They raged with a sudden fury, died down to a whisper, and raged again.
John, when he led the field hands in, shook his head and took his place at the table in silence.
Seth, setting their meal before them, crept to the door and looked out.
He turned faint and sick at heart at the sight of the fields, for the tassels 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 tassels, 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 hoarse, 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 passed 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.
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 encompasses 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 God, 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 damned?
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 amusement 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 God'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 God's good time.
But there were those who succumbed before God's good time, who would never know the explanation until they had passed 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 God spread while she looked.
It enveloped her.
It was as if she gazed upon earth and sky through a bit of bright red stained glass.
In the southern skies, in the direction of her home, clouds piled high, black, threatening.
Then she heard a rushing sound of wind, wailing, moaning, threshing, roaring sullenly in the distance.
She spurred her broncho into the darkness lit by flashes of this lurid light.
A flash of light.
Then darkness, thick as purple velvet.
Furiously she urged the animal forward into this horrible unknown which had the look of the wrath of God come upon her for her doubting, pressed on by an innate feeling of affection for those two who had befriended her, hurrying to their aid, spurred by an instinctive foreboding of impending evil in this awful roaring, whirling, murderous sound of the wild winds gone suddenly stark mad.
As she sped on, something swept past her with a great hoarse roar, distinguishable above the deafening roar of the wind.
It was Seth's herd, stampeding, running with the wind and bellowing with fear.
She winged her way into the terror of the darkness.
Ready an hour before for death in any form, she now all at once found herself panting with fear of it, gasping with a deadly fear of a ghastly fate, of being crushed and mangled, of dying by inches beneath some horrible weight, but this did not deter her.
Afraid to breathe a prayer to the God whom she had dared to question, she winged her way breathlessly on and on.
Then sheets of water, as if the skies had opened and emptied themselves,—and a vivid flash of lightning revealing the wind's wet wings, its wild whirling fingers dripping.
Cyclona saw it coming in that flash, a fiendish thing apparently alive, copper-colored, funnel-shaped, ghastly. She threw herself forward on the neck of her broncho, grasping his mane. Then a blow from a great unseen hand out of the darkness struck them both, felling them.
During the next few minutes of inky blackness, of indescribable terror, of flying missiles armed with death, Cyclona lay unconscious. When she opened her eyes a calm light of the evenness of twilight had spread over the track of the cyclone, and her head lay pillowed on Hugh Walsingham's shoulder. Close beside her was a ragged bough and her broncho lay dead near by. The bough was the hand that had struck them out of the darkness, had thrown her to the sod and killed her animal.
"I came very near," she sighed, "to standing before God."
By and by with Walsingham's help she stood.
"Where is the house?" she asked, bewildered by the barrenness of the spot on which the topsy turvy house had stood for so many years.
"It is gone," said he.
Cyclona pressed both hands to her face and rocked back and forth, sobbing.
God had spared her, true, but He had offered her this delicate irony of leaving her homeless.
Hugh looked moodily out over the place of the topsy turvy house, his own mind awhirl with the maddening force of the furious winds through which he had passed.
"In Kansas," said he, grimly, "it is the wind that giveth and the wind that taketh away."
Then, looking tenderly at the girl in his arms, he added softly: "Blessed be the name of the wind!"