E-text prepared by David Garcia, Jeannie Howse,
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Transcriber's Note:

While this book is full of dialect and very odd spelling, there are a number of obvious typographical errors which have been corrected in this text. For a complete list, please see the [bottom of this document].

The original document had no table of contents; one has been provided for the convenience of the reader.

ZOE ANDERSON NORRIS

THE WAY
OF
THE WIND

BY

ZOE ANDERSON NORRIS

DRAWINGS BY
OBERHARDT

NEW YORK
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR
1911

Copyright, 1911, by
ZOE ANDERSON NORRIS

Printed in the
United States of America

Published in October, 1911.
By Zoe Anderson Norris.
Office of the East Side Magazine,
338 East 15th St., New York

Contents

[PROLOGUE]
[CHAPTER I.]
[CHAPTER II.]
[CHAPTER III.]
[CHAPTER IV.]
[CHAPTER V.]
[CHAPTER VI.]
[CHAPTER VII.]
[CHAPTER VIII.]
[CHAPTER IX.]
[CHAPTER X.]
[CHAPTER XI.]
[CHAPTER XII.]
[CHAPTER XIII.]
[CHAPTER XIV.]
[CHAPTER XV.]
[CHAPTER XVI.]
[CHAPTER XVII.]
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
[CHAPTER XIX.]
[CHAPTER XX.]
[CHAPTER XXI.]
[CHAPTER XXII.]
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
[CHAPTER XXIV.]
[CHAPTER XXV.]
[CHAPTER XXVI.]
[CHAPTER XXVII]
[CHAPTER XXVIII.]
[CHAPTER XXIX.]
[CHAPTER XXX.]

PROLOGUE[ToC]

And as the sturdy Pilgrim Fathers cut their perilous way through the dense and dangerous depths of the Forest Primeval for the setting up of their hearthstones, so the courageous pioneers of the desolate and treeless West were forced to fight the fury of the winds.

The graves of them lie mounded here and there in the uncultivated corners of the fields, though more often one wanders across the level country, looking for them in the places where they should be and are not, because of the tall and waving corn that covers the length and breadth of the land.

And yet the dead are not without memorial. Each steady stalk is a plumed standard of pioneer conquest, and through its palmy leaves the chastened wind remorsefully sighs requiems, chanting, whispering, moaning and sighing from balmy springtime on through the heat of the long summer days, until in the frost the farmers cutting the stalks and stacking them evenly about in the semblance of long departed tepees, leave no dangling blades to sigh through, nor tassels to flout.

THE AUTHOR.

The Way of the Wind

CHAPTER I.[ToC]

Looking back upon it, the little Kentucky town seemed to blossom for Celia like the rose, one broad expanse of sloping lawns bordered with flower beds and shaded by quiet trees, elms and maples, brightly green with young leaflets and dark with cedars and pines, as it was on the day when she stood on the vine-covered veranda of her mother's home, surrounded by friends come to say good-by.

Jane Whitcomb kissed her cheek as she tied the strings of her big poke bonnet under her chin.

"I hope you will be happy out theah, Celia," she said; "but if it was me and I had to go, I wouldn't. You couldn't get me to take such risks. Wild horses couldn't. All them whut wants to go West to grow up with the country can go, but the South is plenty good enough fo' me."

"Fo' me, too," sighed Celia, homesickness full upon her with the parting hour. "It's Seth makes me go. Accordin' to him, the West is the futuah country. He has found a place wheah they ah goin' to build a Magic City, he says. He's goin' to maik a fortune fo' me out theah, he says, in the West."

"Growin' up with the country," interrupted Sarah Simpson, tying a bouquet of flowers she had brought for Celia with a narrow ribbon of delicate blue.

"Yes," admitted Celia, "growing up with the country."

Sarah handed her the flowers.

"It's my opinion," concluded she, "that it's the fools, beggin' youah pahdon, whut's goin' out theah to grow up with the country, and the wise peepul whut's stayin' at home and advisin' of 'em to go."

Celia shuddered.

"I'm ha'f afraid to go," she said. "They say the wind blows all the time out theah. They say it nevah quits blowin'."

"'Taint laik as if you wus goin' to be alone out theah," comforted Mansy Storm, who was busy putting away a little cake she had made with her own hands for Celia's lunch basket. "Youah husband will be out theah."

She closed the lid down and raised her head brightly.

"Whut diffunce does it maik?" she asked, "how ha'd the wind blows if you've got youah husband?"

Lucy Brown flipped a speck of dust from the hem of Celia's travelling dress.

"Yes," said she, "and such a husband!"

Celia looked wistfully out over the calm and quiet street, basking in the sunlight, peacefully minus a ripple of breeze to break the beauty of it, her large eyes sad.

"I'm afraid of the wind," she complained. "Sto'ms scah me."

And she reiterated:

"I'm afraid of the wind!"

Sarah suddenly ran down the walk on either side of which blossomed old fashioned flowers, Marsh Marigolds, Johnny-Jump-Ups and Brown-Eyed Susans. She stood at the front gate, which swung on its hinges, leaning over it, looking down the road.

"I thoat I heahd the stage," she called back. "Yes. Suah enuf. Heah it is, comin'."

At that Celia's mother, hurrying fearfully out the door, threw her arms around her.

Celia fell to sobbing.

"It's so fah away," she stammered brokenly, between her sobs. "I'm afraid ... to ... go.... It's so fah ... away!"

"Theah! theah!" comforted her mother, lifting up her face and kissing it. "It's not so fah but you can come back again. The same road comes that goes, deah one. Theah! Theah!"

"Miss Celia," cried a reproachful voice from the door. "Is you gwine away, chile, widout tellin' youah black Mammy good-by?"

Celia unclasped her mother's arms, fell upon the bosom of her black Mammy and wept anew.

"De Lawd be wid you, chile," cooed the voice of the negress, musical with tenderness, "an' bring you back home safe an' soun' in His own time."

The stage rolled up with clash and clatter and flap of curtain.

It stopped at the gate. There ensued the rush of departure, the driver, after hoisting the baggage of his one passenger thereto, looking stolidly down on the heartbreak from the height of his perch, his long whip poised in midair.

Celia's friends swarmed about her. They kissed her. They essayed to comfort her. They thrust upon her gifts of fruit and flowers and dainties for her lunch.

They bore her wraps out to the cumbersome vehicle which was to convey her to Lexington, the nearest town which at that time boasted of a railroad. They placed her comfortably, turning again and again to give her another kiss and to bid her good-by and God-speed.

It was as if her heartstrings wrenched asunder at the jerk of the wheels that started the huge stage onward.

"Good-by, good-by!" she cried out, her pale face at the window.

"Good-by," they answered, and Mansy Storm, running alongside, said to her:

"You give my love to Seth, Celia. Don't you fo'get."

Then breathlessly as the stage moved faster:

"If evah the Good Lawd made a man a mighty little lowah than the angels," she added, "that man's Seth."

The old stage rumbled along the broad white Lexington pike, past houses of other friends, who stood at gates to wave her farewell.

It rumbled past little front yards abloom with flowers, back of which white cottages blinked sleepily, one eye of a shuttered window open, one shut, past big stone gates which gave upon mansions of more grandeur, past smaller farms, until at length it drew up at the tollgate.

Here a girl with hair of sunshine, coming out, untied the pole and raised it slowly.

"You goin' away, Miss Celia?" she asked in her soft Southern brogue, tuneful as the ripple of water. "I heah sumbody say you was goin' away."

Celia smothered a sob.

"Yes," she answered, "I am goin' away."

"It's a long, long way out theah to the West," commented the girl wistfully as she counted out the change for the driver, "a long, long way!"

As if the way had not seemed long enough!

Celia sobbed outright.

"Yes," she assented, "it is a long, long way!"

"I am sawy you ah goin', Miss Celia," said the girl. "Good-by. Good luck to you!" And the stage moved on, Celia staring back at her with wide sad eyes. The girl leaned forward, let the pole carefully down and fastened it. As she did so a ray of sunshine made a halo of her hair.

Celia flung herself back into the dimness of the corner and wept out her heart. It seemed to her that, with the letting down of that pole, she had been shut out of heaven.

CHAPTER II.[ToC]

In all her life Celia had not travelled further from her native town than Lexington, which was thirty miles away. It was not necessary. She lived in the garden spot of the world, an Eden with all things sufficient for a simple life.

As she stood at the station, waiting for her train, an old negro shuffled by. He hummed the refrain of "Old Kentucky Home," "Fare you well, my lady!" It seemed meant for her. The longing was strong within her to fly back to the old town she loved so well; but the train, roaring in just then, intimidated her by its unaccustomed turmoil and she allowed herself to be hauled on board by the brakeman and placed in the car.

Passing into the open country, the speed of the train increased. The smoke and cinders poured into the open window. Timid because of her strange surroundings, she silently accepted the infliction, cowering into her seat without attempting to put the window down. When a man in the opposite seat leaned forward and pulled it down for her, she was too abashed to thank him, but retained her crouching position and began silently to weep.

A terrible night of travel began. It was a day car. Celia crouched into her seat, trying to sleep, afraid of everything, of the staring eyes of the porter, of the strange faces about her, of the jet black of the night that gloomed portentously through the window.

Then came the dawn and with it the long gray bridge spanning the drab and sullen Mississippi, then St. Louis, with its bustle and rush and more and more strange faces, a sea of strange faces through which she must pass.

After another weary day of travel through which she dozed, too tired to think, too tired to move, at twilight she reached Kansas City, a little town on the edge of the desert. Here, worn out mentally and physically, she was forced to stop and rest a night and sleep in a bed.

And the next day the wind!

A little way out from the town she could see it beginning, bending the pliant prairie grasses to earth, flinging them fiercely upward, crushing them flat again and pressing them there, whistling, whistling, whistling!

The car moved fairly fast for a car of that day, but the wind moved faster. It shook the windows with terrific force. It blew small grains of sand under the sill to sting Celia, moaning, moaning, moaning in its mad and unimpeded march across the country straight to the skies.

She looked out in dismay.

Back of her, on either side of her and beyond, stretched this vast prairie country, desolate of shrub, undergrowth, or tree, a barren waste, different from the beautiful, still, green garden spot that she called home, a spot redolent of flowers, sweet with the odor of new-mown grass, and pungent with whiff of pine and cedar, different as night is from day.

Her heart sank within her as she looked.

It was late in the afternoon when she came to her station, a collection of frame shanties dignified by that name, and Seth, tall, tanned and radiant, clasped her in his arms, and man though he was, shed tears of pure rapture.

His joy served to thrill her momentarily to the extent of forgetting the wind, but with his departure for the vehicle which was to convey her to their home, the discomfort of it returned to her.

The madness of it! The fury of it! Its fiendish joy! It tore at her skirts. It wrapped them about her. It snatched them away again, flapping them flaglike.

It was with difficulty that she kept her hat on her head. She held it with both hands.

The wind seemed to make sport of her, to laugh at her. It treated her as it would a tenderfoot. It tried to frighten her. It blew the shutters of the shanties open and slammed them to with a noise like guns. It shrieked maniacally as if rejoicing in her discomfort. At times it seemed to hoot at her.

Added to this, when Seth returned for her with the vehicle, it proved to be a common two-wheeled cart drawn by a mule, a tall, ungainly cart of dull and faded blue.

She kept back the tears as Seth helped her in.

Then she sat silently by him throughout their jolting journey over the prairie country into what seemed to her to be the Nowhere, listening to the wind chant, now requiems, now dirges, listening to its shriek and whistle, listening to it cry aloud and moan, die down to a whisper, then rise once more and wail like a living thing in unendurable pain.

Seth, too, by and by fell into silence, but from a different cause. The wind failed to distress him. He had become accustomed to it in the months spent in preparing her home. It was like an old friend that sometimes whispered in his tired ears words of infinite sweetness. He forgave the wanton shrieks of it because of this sweetness, the sweetness of a capricious woman, all the more sweet because of her capriciousness.

He was silent from pure happiness at having Celia there beside him, going over the same road with him in the old blue cart.

From time to time he glanced at her timidly as if half afraid if he looked too hard the wind might blow her away.

And, indeed, there did appear to be some danger; for the wind that had loved Seth from the first was apparently jealous of Celia. It tore at her as though to toss her to unreachable distances in the way it ripped the tumbleweeds from their small brittle stems and tossed them away.

Seth looked at her profile, white from the fatigue of the journey, but beautiful as alabaster; at the blue of her eyes; at the delicate taper of her small white hands that from her birth had done only the daintiest of service; at the small feet that had never once walked the rough and sordid pathway of toil.

Beautiful! Beautiful!

His eyes caressed her. Except that he must hold the reins both arms would have encircled her. As it was, she rested in the strong and tender half-circle of one.

All at once the wind became frantic. It blew and blew!

Finding it impossible to tear Celia from the tender circling of that arm, it wreaked its vengeance upon the tumbleweeds, broke them fiercely from their stems, and sent them pell-mell over the prairie before the tall blue cart, about it, at the sides of it, a fantastic cortege, airily tumbling, tumbling, tumbling!

Yes. The wind was jealous of Celia.

Strong as it was, it failed of accomplishing its will, which would have been to snatch her from the cart and toss her to the horizon in company with the tumbleweeds. It shrieked its despair, the despair of a jealous woman balked of her vengeance, tumultuously wild.

At last at about twilight, at the time of day when the prairie skies are mellow with tints fit for a Turner and the prairie winds sough with the tenderness of lullabies, resting for a period, in order to prepare for the fury of the night, they came upon the forks of the two rivers, sparsely sheltered by a few straggling and wind-blown trees.

Seth reined in the animal, sprang down over the high wheel of the cart and helped Celia out.

"Darling," he said, "let me welcome you home!"

"Home," she repeated. "Where is it?"

For she saw before her only a slight elevation in the earth's surface, a mound enlarged.

Going down a few steps, Seth opened wide the door of their dugout, looking gladly up at her, standing stilly there, a picture daintily silhouetted by the pearl pink of the twilit sky.

"Heah!" he smiled.

Celia stared down into the darkness of it as into a grave.

"A hole in the ground," she cried.

Then, as the beflowered home she had left rose mirage-like in the window of her memory, she sobbingly re-stammered the words:

"A ... hole ... in ... the ... ground!"

CHAPTER III.[ToC]

It was not yet June, but the winds blow cold on the prairie later than June at nightfall. The moment the sun goes down, up come the chill winds.

Sick at heart, Seth coaxed the shuddering Celia down the steps into the cellar-like habitation dimly lighted by a single half window dug out mansard fashion at the side.

He was silent, hurt in every fibre of his being. His manner was one of profound apology. She was right. It was only a hole in the ground; but he, accustomed to dugouts during the months he had spent on the prairie preparing for the joy of her coming, had overlooked its deficiencies and learned to think of it as home.

There were two chairs. He was glad of that. For a long time there had been only one.

He placed her in the new one, bought in honor of her coming, seating her deferentially as if she had been a Queen, and went hurriedly about, building a fire of little dry twigs he had torn from shrubs along the river that the gay crackle of them might cheer her.

As she sat looking on, she saw in this humble service not his devotion, but his humiliation, not his great love for her which glorified all service humble or exalted, but the fact that he had so descended in the scale of life as to put his hand to work that she had been used to see done only by negroes.

Her pride, her only inheritance from haughty slave-holding ancestors, was wounded. Not all Seth's devotion, not all his labor in her behalf could salve that wound.

As he knelt before the blazing twigs, apparently doing their best to aid him in his effort to cheer her, something of this feeling penetrated to his inner consciousness.

Nevertheless, he piled on twig after twig until the refreshing flames brilliantly illumined the dugout.

From dirt floor to dirt roof they filled it with light.

The poor little twigs, eagerly flashing into flame to help him!

Better far if, wet and soggy, they had burned dimly or not at all; for their blaze only served to exhibit every deficiency Seth should have endeavored to hide. The thatch of the roof, the sod, the carpetless floor, the lack of furniture, the plain wooden bedstead in the corner with its mattress of straw, the crazy window fashioned by his own rude carpentry, the shapeless door which was like a slap in the face with its raw and unpainted color of new wood.

After the first wild glance about her, Celia buried her face in her hands, resolutely shutting out the view for fear of bursting into uncontrollable tears.

Seth, seeing this, rose from his knees slowly, lamely, as if suddenly very tired, and went about his preparations for their evening meal.

Men with less courage than it required to perform this simple duty have stood up to be shot at.

Knowing full well that with each act of humble servitude he sank lower and lower in the estimation of the one living creature in whose estimation he wished to stand high, he once more knelt on the hearth, placed potatoes in the ashes, raked a little pile of coals together and set the coffee pot on them.

He drew the small deal table out and put upon it two cups and saucers, plates and forks for two. There was but one knife. That was for Celia. A pocket knife was to serve for himself.

It had been his pleasure throughout his lonely days of waiting to picture this first meal which Celia and he should eat together.

Never once had he dreamed that the realization could come so near breaking a strong man's heart,—that things seemingly of small import could stab with a thrust so knife-like.

He felt the color leave his cheek at the thought that he had failed to provide a cloth for the table, not even a napkin. He fumbled at his bandana, then hopelessly replaced it in his pocket. He grew cold at the realization that every luxury to which she had been accustomed, almost every necessity, was absent from that plain board.

He had counted on her love to overlook much.

It had overlooked nothing.

When all was in readiness he drew up a chair and begged her to be seated.

He took the opposite chair and the meal proceeded in silence, broken only by the wail of the wind and the crackle of the little dry twigs that burned on the hearth.

"I am afraid of it," sighed Celia.

"Of what, sweet?" he asked, and she answered:

"I am afraid of the wind."

"There is nothing to be afraid of," he explained quickly. "It is only the ordinary wind of the prairies. It ain't a cyclone. Cyclones nevah come this way, neah to the forks of two rivers wheah we ah," and waxing eloquent on this, his hobby, he began telling her of the great and beautiful and prosperous city which was sometime to be built on this spot; perhaps the very dugout in which they sat would form its center. He talked enthusiastically of the tall steepled temples that would be erected, of the schools and colleges, of the gay people beautifully dressed who would drive about in their carriages under the shade of tall trees that would line the avenues, of the smiling men and women and children whose home the Magic City would be, and how he was confident they would build it here because, in the land of terrible winds, when people commenced to erect their metropolis, they must put it where no deadly breath of cyclone or tornado could tear at it or overturn it.

With that he went on to describe the destructive power of the cyclones, telling how one in a neighboring country had licked up a stream that lay in its course, showering the water and mud down fifty miles away.

"But no cyclone will ever come here," he added and explained why.

Because it was the place of the forks of two rivers, the Big Arkansas and the Little Arkansas. A cyclone will go out of its way, he told her, rather than tackle the forks of two rivers. The Indians knew that. They had pitched their tents here before they had been driven into the Territory and that was what they had said. And they were very wise about some things, those red men, though not about many.

But Celia could not help putting silent questions to herself. Why should a cyclone that could snatch up a river and toss it to the clouds, fight shy of the forks of two?

Looking fearfully around at the shadows, she interrupted him:

"I am afraid," she whispered. "I am afraid!"

Seth left his place at the table and took her in his arms.

"Po' little gurl," he said. "Afraid, and tiahd, too. Travelin' so fah. Of cose, she's tiahd!"

And with loving hands, tender as a mother's, he helped her undress and laid her on the rough bed of straw, covered with sheets of the coarsest, wishing it might be a bed of down covered with silks, wishing they were back in the days of enchantment that he might change it into a couch fit for a Princess by the wave of a wand.

Then he left her a moment, and walking out under the wind-blown stars he looked up at them reverently and said aloud:

(For in the dreary deserts of loneliness one often learns to talk aloud very openly and confidentially to God, since people are so scarce and far away:)

"Tempah the wind to this po' shiverin' lam, deah Fathah!"

Then with a fanatic devotion, he added:

"And build the Magic City!"

CHAPTER IV.[ToC]

Upon each trip to the station for provision or grain Seth met with tail ends of cyclones, or heard of rumors of those that had just passed through, or were in process of passing, strange enough stories of capers cut by the fantastic winds.

He told these tales to Celia with a vein of humor meant to cheer her, but which had an opposite effect. Love blinded, he failed to see that the nervous laughs with which she greeted them were a sign of terror rather than amusement.

One night, he related, after a day whose sultriness had been almost unendurable, a girl had stood at the door to her dugout, bidding her sweetheart good night. She opened the door, he stepped outside, and a cyclone happening to pass that way, facetiously caught him into the atmosphere and carried him away somewhere, she never knew where.

Strewn in the path of that cyclone were window-sashes, doors, shingles, hair mattresses, remnants of chimneys, old iron, bones, rags, rice, old shoes and dead bodies; but not the body of her blue-eyed sweetheart.

For many months she grieved for him, dismally garbed in crape, which was extremely foolish of her, some said, for all she knew he might still be in the land of the living. Possibly the cyclone had only dropped him into another county where, likely as not, he was by this time making love to another girl.

But though she mourned and mourned and waited and waited for the wild winds to bring him back, or another in his place, none came.

"They've got to tie strings to their sweethearts in this part of the country," the old gray-haired man at the corner grocery had said, "if they want to keep them."

Another playful cyclone had snatched up a farmer who wore red and white striped socks. The cyclone had blown all the red out of the socks, the story teller had said, so that when they found the farmer flattened against a barn door as if he had been pasted there, his socks were white as if they had never contained a suspicion of red. They had turned white, no doubt, through fright.

Evidently knives had flown promiscuously about in another cyclone, he said. Hogs had been cut in two and chickens carved, ready for the table.

There were demons at work as well as knives.

A girl was engaged to be married. All her wedding finery had been made. Dainty, it was, too; so dainty that she laid it carefully away in a big closet in a distant wing of the house, far from the profane stare of strange eyes. She made discreet pilgrimages to look at those dainty things so dear to her, lingerie white and soft and fine, satin slippers, fans, gloves and a wedding gown of dazzling snowiness.

The day was set for the wedding. Unfortunately—how could she know that?—the same day was set for a cyclone.

The girl could almost hear the peal of the wedding bells; when along came the tornado, rushing, roaring, shrieking like mad, and grasping that wing of the house, that special and precious wing containing her trousseau, bore it triumphantly off.

A silk waist was found in one county, but the skirt to match it lay in another, many miles away. Her beplumed hat floated in a pool of disfiguring water, her long suede gloves lay in a ditch and her white satin wedding slippers, alas, hung by their tiny heels at the top of a tree in a neighboring township, the only tree in the entire surrounding county, put there, in all probability, to catch and hold them for her.

Naturally, the wedding was postponed until new wedding finery could be prepared, but alas! A man's will is the wind's will!

By the time the second trousseau was well on the way, the affections of the girl's sweetheart had wafted away and wound themselves about another girl.

Here and there the prairie farmers had planted out trees in rows and clumps, taking tree claims from the Government for that purpose.

In many instances cyclones had bent these prospective forests double in their extreme youth, leaving them to grow that way, leaning heavily forward in the attitude of old men running.

Of course, there were demons. God could have nothing to do with their devilments, Seth said. Seth had great belief in God.

One had maliciously torn up all the churches in a town by the roots, turned them upside down and stuck their steeples in the ground as if in mockery of religion.

"Why do you call them cyclones?" the old man at the corner grocery had asked. "They are not cyclones. They are tornadoes."

And this old man who had once been a doctor of medicine in an Eastern village and who was therefore learned, though he had been persuaded by some Wise men to go West and grow up with the Fools, went on to explain the difference.

"A cyclone," he said, "is miles and miles in width. It sweeps across the prairie screeching and screaming, but doing not so very much damage as it might do, just getting on the nerves of the people and helping to drive them insane. That is all.

"Then along comes a hailstone. It drops into the southeast corner of this cyclone and there you are! It generates a tornado and That is the Thing that rends the Universe."

Seth had listened to these stories undismayed; for what had they to do with his ranch and the Magic City upon which it was to be built?

A cyclone would never come to the forks of two rivers. The Indians had said so.

Tradition had it that an old squaw whose name was Wichita had bewitched the spot with her incantations, defying the wind to touch the ground on which she had lived and died.

It must have been that this old squaw still occupied the spot, that her phantom still stooped over seething kettles, or stalked abroad in the darkness, or chanted dirges to the slap and pat of the grim war dance of the Indians; for the winds, growing frightened, had let the forks of the river alone.

Seth was very careful to relate this to Celia, to reiterate it to this fearful Celia who started up so wildly out of her sleep at the maniacal shriek of the wind. Very tenderly he whispered the reassurance and promise of protection against every blast that blew, thus soothing her softly back to slumber, after which he lay awake, watching her lest she wake again and wishing he might still the Universe while she slept.

He redoubled his care of her by night and by day, doing the work of the dugout before he began the work of the fields, not only bending over the tubs early in the morning for fear such bending might hurt her, but hanging out the clothes on the line for fear the fierce and vengeful wind might tan her beautiful complexion and tangle the fine soft yellow of her hair.

For the same reason, he brought in the clothes after the day's labor was over, and ironed them. He also did the simple cooking in order to protect her beauty from blaze of log and twinkle of twig.

If he could he would have hushed the noise of the world for love of her.

And yet, day after day, coming home from his work in the fields, he found her at the door of their dugout, peering after the east-bound train, trailing so far away as to seem a toy train, with a look of longing that struck cold to his heart.

His affection counted as nothing. His care was wasted. In spite of which he was full of apologies for her.

Other women, making these crude caves into homes for themselves and their children, had found contentment, but they were women of a different fibre.

He would not have her of a different and coarser fibre, this exquisite Southern creature, charming, delicate, set like a rare exotic in the humble window of his hut.

It was not her fault. It was his. It was his place to turn the hut into a palace for his Queen; and so he would, when the Wise Men came out of the East and built the Magic City.

When the Fools had made the plains a fit place for human beings to inhabit, planting trees to draw down the reluctant rain from the clouds, sowing seed and raising crops sometimes, to their surprise and the amazement of those who heard of it, the Wise Men would appear and buy the land, and the building of great cities would begin.

Already they had reared a town that dared approach in size to a city on the edge of the desert, but what had happened?

An angry cyclone, hearing of it, had come along and snatched it into the clouds.

Furious at sight of its spick and span newness, its yellow frame shanties and shining shingles, it had carried it off as if it had been a hen coop and set it down somewhere in Texas, a state that had been longer settled and was therefore a better place for houses and fences, and left it there.

Then the Wise Men, growing discouraged, had gone away.

But they would come again, he promised himself. They would come again. They must. Not to pass through in long vestibule trains whose sparks out of pure fiendishness lighted the furious prairie fires that were so hard to put out, smothering the innocent occupants of the dugouts in their sleep and burning their grain. Not to gaze wild-eyed through the shining windows of these splendid cars as they passed on and on to some more promising unwind-blown country, to build there their beautiful cities of marble and of stone.

They would come to stay.

When?

Why, when they should find a spot unvisited by cyclones, and that spot would be in the place of their dugout at the forks of these two rivers, the Big Arkansas and the Little Arkansas, the little river that had real water trickling along its shallow bed year in and year out, and the Big river whose bed was dry as a bone all the year round until June, when the melting snows of the Rockies sent the water down in floods.

In fierce, uncontrollable and pitiless floods to drown the crops that had been spared by the chinch bugs, the grasshoppers and the Hot Winds.

All this Seth told Celia, finishing with his old rapturous picture of the glory of the Magic City, which he called after the old witch who had driven the winds from the forks of the rivers, Wichita.

He talked on, trying hard not to let her listless air of incredulity freeze the marrow of his bones and the blood in his veins, or cut him so deeply as to destroy his enrooted hope in their splendid future.

Taking her in his arms, partly to hide her cold face from his view and partly to comfort her, he offered every possible apology for her unbelief, wrapping her about with his love and tenderness as with a mantle.

He thought by day of the coming of the child, and dreamed of it by night, trusting that, whether or not she shared his belief in the Magic City, when she held it warmly in her arms, that little baby, his and hers, the homesick look would give place to a look of content, and the hole in the ground would become to her a home.

CHAPTER V.[ToC]

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."

CHAPTER VI.[ToC]

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.