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.



CHAPTER XV.



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.



CHAPTER XVI.



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."



CHAPTER XVII.



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.



CHAPTER XVIII.



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.



CHAPTER XIX.



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.



CHAPTER XX.



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!"



CHAPTER XXI.



Thereafter at station after station, a tall, gaunt man may have been seen handling baggage, running errands, caring for the cattle, doing any sort of work, no matter how humble, that lay to his hand, making his way slowly, wearily but steadily on toward the South.

Seth, working his way home to Celia.

He slept in baggage cars, on cattle trains. He swung to steps of trains moved off and clung there between brief stations. He stopped over at small towns and earned his bread at odd jobs, bread and sufficient money sometimes to move on steadily for a day or two.

Strange weathers burned and bit him. He walked heavily in the path of the wind overhung by pale clouds. He slept under the stars out in the open.

It was days before he passed the plains, the place of the sleepless winds where wan white skies bent above the grass of the hot dry pulse, the lifeless grass that wailed into the ceaseless wind its dirge of death and decay.

It was weeks before he reached Kansas City, the city of hills, with lights hung high and lights hung low. Here he found a place as brakeman and worked his way into Missouri.

Here it was as if an ocean steamer had suddenly stopped the whir of its wheels at the approach of the pilot come out from shore to tug it in.

The wind had stopped blowing.

The position was only temporary. Another brakeman taking his place, Seth walked.

He was not sorry to walk in this quiet land. How tenderly green the shrubbery was, how beautiful! Mingled with the darker green of the cedar and pine, the brown green of the cone.

How sweet the slow green trees! Not windswept! Not torn by the wild, wet fingers of the wind, not lashed with hot and scathing fingers gone dry with drought, but still and peaceful.

A sleepy world of streams it was, a sleepy world of streams and sweet green trees among whose leaflets gentle zephyrs breathed scarcely perceptible sighs of pure contentment.

Patiently, contentedly, he walked mile after mile through this beautiful Missouri which was so like home, among these tall, sighing trees, under the protection of their great still umbrella-like heads, thinking of his dream Celia, whom he was so soon to see.

The absence of the wind had left his brain clear. Since it was so short a time until his dream was to become a reality, no longing or heartache served to set his brain afire with the agony of despair. Calmly he walked in the white straight rain among the tender trees, his tired brain clear, thinking of her.

How would she receive him?

Surely, in spite of his empty-handedness, she would greet him lovingly because of their long separation and the death of the child. Surely she would receive him lovingly because of the endless days that had divided them. Those days! Those days! But he refused to let his mind dwell on the deadly length of them. It might sadden again.

In the world, he reasoned, there were those two only, Celia and himself. Should they not cling together?

True, he would arrive empty-handed, but he could make a living for her and himself in the old town. He was not without friends there. There were those who had loved him in the olden time. They would give him work. They would help him build up his lost fortunes. He would spend his life in retrieving, in compensating to Celia for the foolish years that he had spent dreaming dreams.

In St. Louis he remained for weeks, working about the station in the effort to earn enough for his ride to Cincinnati. At length he succeeded, but on an emigrant train.

He rode for a day, looking out the window at the landscape swimming by rather than at his wild-eyed companions, crowded together like sheep. At the end of the day he arrived at Cincinnati.

And then Seth came into—into God's country.



CHAPTER XXII.



For some months after Celia's return to her native town, her friends gathered gladly about her. A little visit! That was natural enough. They welcomed her with open arms.

As the visit lengthened, questions ensued.

The child. What of him. Was he not very young to leave for such a length of time? Was not that a strange mother who could thus separate herself from a babe in arms; who could deprive him of the warmth and comfort of her embrace?

And Seth? What of him? For Seth had many friends among them who knew his great heart and his worth.

How was it possible for her to remain apart from her husband and child so long?

Contented in the soft and balmy clime, in the land of her birth, she told them of the terror of the winds, of the sunbaked prairie, of the plague of the grasshoppers, of the hot winds that blistered, of the scorch of the simoons, of the withering blasts of summer and the freezing storms of winter, and thought that sufficient explanation until she beheld herself reflected in the coldness of their glances as in a mirror, set aloof outside their lives as a thing abnormal, as a worthless instrument whose leading string is somehow out of tune, which has snapped with a discordant twang.

However, this did not greatly distress her. She turned to her mother for companionship. The mother filled what small need she had of love until she died. She was soon followed, this mother of hers, into the land of shadows by the loving shadow of herself, Celia's black Mammy. Then Celia was left alone in the old house, which, for lack of funds, was fast falling into ruin, the wrinkled shingles of the roof letting in the rain in dismal drops to flood the cellar and the kitchen, the grass growing desolately up between the bricks of the pavement that led from door to gate for lack of the tread of neighborly feet.

Life, which is never the same, which is ever changing, changes by degrees. Not all at once did Celia's soul shrivel but gradually. Now and again in the early days following upon her return to her home, at the cry of a child in the street, she would start to her feet, then remember and shrug her shoulders and forget. And there were some nights that were filled for her with the remembered moan of the prairie winds. She heard them shriek and howl and whistle with all their old time force and terror. She sprang wildly out of bed and ran to the window to look out on the slumbrous quiet of the Southern night, to clasp her hand and thank her good fortune that she looked not out on the wide weird waste of the trackless prairie.

Gradually, too, she descended to poverty and that without complaint.

To poverty dire as that from which she had fled, except that it was unaccompanied by the horror of simoon and blizzard, of hot winds and cold.

For her this sufficed.

Too proud to ask for help of those who passed her by in coldness as a soulless creature of a nature impossible to understand and therefore to be shunned, she toiled and delved alone, a recluse and outcast in the home of her birth. She delved in the patch of a garden for the wherewithal to keep the poor roof over her head. She hoed and dug and drove hard bargains with the grocers to whom she sold her meagre products. She washed and ironed and mended and darned and cooked, coming at length perforce to the drudgery which throughout her brief life in the hole in the ground she had scornfully disdained.

Not once did the thought of asking help of Seth or of returning to him present itself.

And yet there were tardy times when the memory of the winds remained with her day in and day out, when at twilight she sat on the steps of her vine-covered, crumbling portico and communed with herself.

When, placing herself apart, she reviewed her life and observed herself with the critical eye of an uninterested outsider.

Invariably then she would say to herself, remembering the wail and shriek and moan of the hideous winds:

"I would leave them again, the winds and the child and him. If it happened a second time, and I again had the choice, I would leave them exactly the same."

Then aloud, in apology for what had the look to her own biased eyes of utter heartlessness:

"It was the fault of the winds," she would mutter, "it was the fault of the winds!"



CHAPTER XXIII.



Kentucky! God's country!

It was as if Seth had dropped out of a wind-blown cloud into a quiet garden, sweetly fenced about and away from the jar and fret of the world.

Placid, content, tranquil, standing stock-still in the delicacy of its old-fashioned beauty, as if the world outside and beyond had never progressed.

He wandered by old and rich plantations, carved by necessity into smaller farms, past big white stone gates opening to wide avenues which led up to them, looking wistfully in, still content to wander a space before he should experience the rapture of seeing Celia's face, loitering, the white happiness of that within his reach, half fearing to hold out his hand for it, fearing it might vanish, escape phantasmagorically, turn out to be a will-o'-the-wisp.

Whip-poor-wills accompanied him in his wanderings, Bob Whites, Nightingales; and lazy ebon negroes, musical as birds, sang lilting Southern songs on the way to the tinkle of banjo and guitar.

The negroes were not so kind as the birds. From them he suffered humiliation.

More than once he was dubbed "Po' white!" by some haughty ebon creature from whose mouth he was supposedly taking the bread.

But here, as in Missouri, he looked for consolation to the wet woods, to the still, soft, straight rain, to the sighing trees that softly soughed him welcome.

After weary days and nights, working by day on rock-pile or in field, sleeping by night in the corner of a friendly fence of worm-eaten rails, fanned by the delicate hair of the pale blue grasses, he came to Burgin.

The driver of the bus that conveyed passengers to Harrodsburg looked down upon him from the height of his perch. He was strange to Seth, but he recognized a something of the kinship of country in his face and manner.

"Have a lif'?" he asked.

Seth refused. It was bright daylight. He wished to steal into his old home under the covering of the twilight, he was so footsore and bedraggled.

"I'll walk," he smiled, "but thank you just the same."

Four miles, then, over hill, down dale, past dusty undergrowth, the brilliant blue of the skies above him, passing negroes who looked strangely at him out of rolling eyes, who jerked black thumbs in his direction over shoulders, saying:

"See de po' white trash man, walkin' home!"

But there were some Bob Whites singing in the bushes over the rail fences, singing, singing!

A bird at the side of the road rested momentarily on a long, keen switch of a blackberry bush, the switch bent earthward, the bird flew off and the twig bent back again.

At sight of him ground squirrels sped into the underbrush.

Somewhere on the other side of the rail fences little negroes sang. They were too young yet to jerk their thumbs at him and say:

"Po' white!"

Now that he was so near to Celia his heart misgave him. How would she receive him, coming home to her a tramp, a dusty, tired, footsore tramp, wet, chilled to the bone, footsore and tired! So tired!

He forged ahead, trying hard to throw off these thoughts. It was the scornful negroes who had engendered them.

A mile from Harrodsburg he came to the toll gate. A woman whose yellow hair showed streaks of gray, raised the pole for him, smiling at him.

"That man had eyes like Seth Lawsons," she said to her husband, who smoked his pipe on the porch while she raised and lowered the poles and so supported the family.

She was the girl who had called good-by after Celia years before, when she left for her journey to the West and the Magic City.

* * * * *

It was twilight when Seth came to Celia's gate.

A woman sat alone on the step of the portico, looking out down the pike.

Seth paused, his hand on the latch, seeing which the woman shook her head negatively.

Seth raised the latch, whereupon she suddenly stood, frowning.

"I have nothing for you," she called out raspingly. "There is not a thing in the house to eat. Go away! Go away!"

"Celia!" Seth cried out, stabbed to the heart. "I am not a beggar for bread, but give me a crust of kindness for the love of God! I am Seth."



CHAPTER XXIV.



Seen from afar off by the loving eyes of memory, the cows' horns are longer than they are close by.

The kitchen was old and smoky. Once on a time it had been regularly calcimined, twice a year, or three times, but it had been many years now since it had undergone this cleanly process.

Celia's welcome of Seth had been according to her nature, all the more hardened now by seclusion and poverty. She heard without emotion of the death of the child. It mattered little to her. She had never known him. Seth, come back to her a failure, a tramp, was deserving of scant courtesy. She meted it out to him as it seemed to her he deserved.

The miles he had travelled counted little. Since he had proven himself too great a failure to travel as men do, it was only just that he should work his way, sleep in fence corners, live on crusts and walk.

It was one of her theories that, given sufficient time, all men and animals sink to their level.

Who was Seth that he should be exempt from this law?

The thought occurred to her that he had come to her as a last recourse. That, unable to make his own living, he had come to share hers.

That thought scarcely served to add warmth to her welcome.

Seth sat on a chair against the blackened wall in the position of the tramp who has covered weary distances, whose every bone aches with the extreme intensity of fatigue.

He was like a rag that had been thrown there.

As Celia had watched him get their first supper in the dugout, so he now watched her. As she had sat bitterly disillusioned in the darkness of the hole in the ground, so he sat within the four close walls of the smoke-begrimed kitchen of her old Kentucky home, disillusioned beyond compare.

In the once sunny hair there were streaks of gray, but it was not that. There were wrinkles beneath the blue eyes that had not lost their sternness, the cold blue of their intensity, the chill and penetrating frost of their gaze. Somehow, too, those large and beautiful eyes had appeared to grow smaller with the passing of the years, not with tears, for there are tears that wash out all else but beauty in some women's eyes, but with the barren drought of feeling which goes to sap the very fount of loveliness.

And it was this barren drought of feeling which at last served to disillusion him, whose existence he at last realized in this creature who had been his cherished idol. He realized it in her apathy upon hearing of the death of the child. He realized it in the look she turned upon him in which he saw her stern suspicion that he had come homeless to her in the hope of a home.

Formerly, in the days of her mother and her old black Mammy, they had taken tea in the dining-room, which had looked out on a green sward brightened by flowers.

Gay and cheerful teas these were, enlivened by guests.

In the absence of guests, Celia had fallen into the slack habit of eating in the kitchen of the smoke-begrimed ceiling and the dark bare walls. There was a small deal table against the window. It was covered with an abbreviated cloth.

Celia walked about setting this table for Seth and herself, laying with palpable reluctance the extra plate, cup, saucer, knife and fork. Her movements were no longer girlish. They were heavy and slow.

When tea was ready she bade Seth draw up his chair. They then ate their supper, Seth too tired to talk and Celia busy with the problem of this added mouth destined to consume the contents of her scant larder.

When supper was over Seth left her to clear the table, went out in the dark on the front porch away from the cold steel blue of her eye and sat down on the step.

Men seldom shed tears, or he would have found it in his heart to weep.



CHAPTER XXV.



Not many moons after the wreck wrought by the withering winds, which, while they had not touched the place of the forks of the two rivers, lacked little of it, the Wise Men came out of the East and found Cyclona alone in the Kansas dugout there by the Big Arkansas and the Little Arkansas.

"Is this the place where the Indians pitched their tents?" they asked, "because no cyclones come here?"

"Yes," she answered.

"Then this," said they, "is where we will build our city."

"The Magic City," repeated Cyclona, without surprise.

"When we have finished it," they smiled, "it will be a Magic City."

Cyclona looked wistfully out along the weary track of the wind.

"But Seth," said she, "will never see it maybe. He has given up and gone back home."



CHAPTER XXVI.



Few there are who have not heard of the Magic City, the Windy Wonder of the West, the Peerless Princess of the Plains, and how it sprung up mushroom-like in a night there at the forks of the Big Arkansas and the Little Arkansas, where the Indians had pitched their tents and Seth had lived and hoped and despaired, and how men went wild erecting Colleges and Palaces and Temples and Watch Factories and buying up town lots so far from the town that if the city had been built on all of them it would have surpassed the marvellous tales of it written in the newspapers, reached half way to Denver and become, instead of the Magic City of the West, the Magic City of the World.

Seth had been a dreamer of dreams, but his vision of the Magic City was not half so marvellous as the city itself.

Fortunes were made in a day and lost before midnight.

Men came from far and near, many from the other side of the water, and bought town lots and sold them, bought still others and built tall houses and planted great avenues of trees, cottonwood trees, the trees of Seth's imaginings, trees that seemed also to spring up in a night, they grew so magically, thrusting deep roots into the moist black soil and greedily sucking up its moisture in a very madness of growing, and laid off parks and sent flashing electric cars out into the large farms and dangled big soft balls of electricity in the middle of the streets that twinkled at eventide like big pale blinking fireflies.

Those who had formerly eked out a precarious enough existence in dugouts, now lived in palaces, had their raiment fashioned by hands Parisian, and gave receptions on a scale of such grandeur that the flowers offered as souvenirs thereat would have kept many a wolf from a dugout door for years, and a few Wise Men it was said lost their heads in the mad whirl of speculation, but as that often happens in the building up of any great city, not necessarily in the West, it was not so surprising as it might have been.

Indeed, the World stood still a moment, agape at the wonder of the Magic City, and there were those who, now that Seth had passed out of the way of the wind into a country strange to them, spoke of him reverently as Prophet and Seer, going so far as to express regret that while within the sound of their voices they had carelessly dubbed him a foolish dreamer of mad, fantastic and impossible dreams, yet comforting themselves withal with the thought that they were not alone in denying a Prophet honor in his own country, since so wagged the world.



CHAPTER XXVII.



The Magic City, stretching itself far and near, had not failed to include the little station.

Common walls of plank no longer enshrined the person of the Post Mistress. She no longer looked out from the limited space of a narrow window onto ragged flower beds in whose soft, loose earth floundered wind-blown chickens.

She dwelt in the wide, white marble halls of a lofty new Post Office. Bell boys, porters and stenographers surrounded her.

It was five o'clock. The Professor stood near while she sorted out some letters and placed them in pigeon-holes. He was clad in the latest fashion as laid down by the London Tailors who, at the first sound of the Boom, had hastened on the wings of the wind to the Magic City. His frock coat radiated newness, his patent leathers shone, and a portion of the brim of a tall silk hat rested daintily between thumb and fingers of a well-gloved hand.

As a matter of fact, since he had proved himself her friend through thick and thin, through storms and adversity, through high winds and blizzards, the Post Mistress had at last, after much persuasion, awarded him the privilege of standing by her throughout the rest of her natural existence.

A dapper youth in livery approached the window, asked for letters and withdrew.

There was about him a certain air of elegance which yet had somehow the subtle effect of having been reflected.

"Will Low's valet," explained the Post Mistress. "Sometimes it seems to be a dream, all this. These men who sat around my big blazing stove spinning cyclone yarns while they waited for the brakeman to fling in the mailbag, sending their valets for their mail! It seems like magic, doesn't it?"

"It does," assented the Professor.

"There's Zed Jones," continued the Post Mistress, "with his new drag, his Queen Anne cottage built of gray stone, his Irish setters. And Mrs. Zed sending to Paris for all her clothes, and the little Zeds fine as fiddles with their ponies and their pony carts."

"And Hezekiah Smith," reminded the Professor.

"Who used to sleep on a pile of newspapers in his old newsstand on the corner, driving his tandem now. And Howard Evans and Roger Cranes and a dozen others, all poor as church mice then, and rich as cream now. It is like fairy land. You, too," with an admiring glance at the frock coat, "worth fifty thousand. And my bit of land bringing me a small fortune. I think after," with another smile in his direction, "we'll let some other lone single woman have this job who needs the money. We won't keep the Post Office any longer."

The Professor smiled a silent assent.

"But the most wonderful thing of all," went on the Post Mistress, "is that girl Cyclona. All of twenty-seven or eight, but she looks like a girl. It was pretty cute of her, wasn't it, to jump Seth's claim?"

"She didn't exactly jump it," said the Professor. "She was taking care of it after Seth went away, when her own topsy turvy house blew off somewhere. She had no other home. I wouldn't exactly call it jumping Seth's claim."

"Call it what you please," said the Post Mistress, "but it amounts to the same thing. She got all the money the Wise Men paid for the claim, and it went into the millions. Why, Seth's claim takes up the very heart of the city. That girl's worth her weight in gold, that Cyclona, and she deserves it, taking care of the baby first, then watching after Seth. I believe she's in love with Seth. I believe she lives in hopes that he'll come back again. I know. She is seen everywhere with Hugh Walsingham, drivin' with him in her stylish little trap, a good driver she is, too, after ridin' fiery bronchos, herdin' Seth's cattle and livin' wild-like on the prairies. She's a splendid whip, afraid of nothin'."

"But you can see in her big, stretchy faraway eyes that she ain't thinkin' about Hugh Walsingham, that she's always thinkin' about Seth and wishin' it was him a drivin' with her in that stylish little trap of hers."

She stopped to read a postal card.

"Cyclona's a fine young woman," she resumed, "and a beautiful young woman, if she is brown as a gypsy, but the wind has left a wheel in her head. She has never been right since that storm that blew away the topsy turvy house. Another shock and her mind will go entirely. I've heard a doctor say so, a man who knows. She deserves all she's got and a happy life with that handsome Englishman, but here she is with some fool idea that the money, all these riches she's fallen heiress to, that make her the belle of the Magic City, ain't hers. That they are held in trust for Seth and Celia, that heartless Celia, who deserted her husband and baby to go back to her home in the South.

"What right has that Celia got to any money that comes out of the West she hated so, out of this wind-blown place she wouldn't live in? None at all. No more right than I have. Leaving Seth out here on the plains all by himself, grievin' for her, breakin' his heart for her, nearly losin' his mind with grief about her.

"The money's Cyclona's. She worked for it, never thinkin' of the reward. She took care of the child and looked after Seth. She deserves all the good that can come to her, that girl does."

"She does," assented the Professor.

"Hugh Walsingham's in a good fix, too," continued the Post Mistress, "sold his claim for a whole lot of money. Able now, he is, to help his poor relations back there in England, who sent him to the plains to get rid of him. Funny how things turn out sometimes."

"Cyclona coming out of Nowhere, and he packed off out of England, both outcasts, both rich now and ready to live happy ever after, if Cyclona would only get rid of this fool notion of hers that she's only holdin' the riches in trust for Celia and Seth.

"Have you heard the news? It's this: You know Nancy Lewis, the dish-washer in the restaurant before the Boom, the girl who happened to save her earnings and buy a bit of land that turned into a gold nugget? Well, a millionaire who made his money here, fell in love with her. She accepted him, but he made a slight mistake. He failed to keep an engagement with her one night and sent a waiter with a note. She got huffy and went off and married the waiter.

"We can't rise all at once from our station in life, can we? Like as not, when we get into our new house and put on style ourselves with our drags and our dogs, I'll be sortin' out letters in my dreams and handin' them through a dream window to the people. This girl is a born dish-washer. She clung to her station. Her children may rise from the position of dish-washers, if they have enough money and education, but not she."

"Wait a minute. Here's a postcard I haven't read yet. It looks like it's been through a cyclone. Land sakes alive! Guess who it's from!"

"Can't," said the Professor, beginning to be hungry.

The Post Mistress turned the card over and over.

"It's from Jonathan, Cyclona's father," she chuckled. "Of all the people in the world! It is post-marked Texas."

"So that's where they blew to! It's to Cyclona, but everybody will be dying to know what it says. Listen:

"'Dear Cyclona:—

"'I think you will be glad to hear that this cyclone was good to us, blowin' us 'way down here in Texas, where the weather is so fine. It saved me the trouble, too, of bothering with the roof. It blew it right side up and the clothes are all down in the room now.'"

"'Your affectionate father,'" "'Jonathan.'"

"'P.S.—I like this part of the country better than I did Kansas. I think we will stay here, Cyclona.'"

"Until another cyclone comes along," the Professor commented, "and blows him into the Gulf."

"I wonder," mused the Post Mistress, "if the cyclone put the clothes away in the presses when it took them down from the walls."



CHAPTER XXVIII.



It was as the Post Mistress had said. Cyclona was the heiress of the Magic City. As Seth had predicted, she sold his land in its heart for more money than she knew what to do with. Cyclona was not only the most beautiful young woman in the Magic City, but she was the most beautifully gowned and exquisite, what with her well-filled purse with its attendant luxuries of maids, mantua-makers and milliners. She was new to look at, but old thoughts clung to her, old dreams, old fancies.

Cyclona dreamed a dream one night. She thought that she was in the old dugout at the little deal table before the dim half-window, outside which the wind sang fitfully, blowing the tumbleweeds hither and thither, near and far, with moans and sighs, and Seth sat by her side. And as of old he talked to her of the beautiful house.

"All these were of costly stones, according to the measures of hewed stones," she heard him say in the dream, "sawed with saws within and without. Even from the foundation unto the coping, and so on the outside toward the great court."

Cyclona sat up in her bed with a start and slept no more.

So it was the beautiful house that she was to build, of course. Wondering how it was she had not thought before of carrying out Seth's dearest wish without waiting to be reminded of it in a dream, reproaching herself, condemning her selfishness, marvelling how she could for a moment have considered this money her own which she simply held in trust for Celia and Seth.

Thereafter, Hugh, in spite of his deep affection for her, became occasionally somewhat exasperated with Cyclona, who all at once developed such peculiar ideas in regard to the building of the house, ideas gathered from an old and yellow plan resurrected from the leaves of a well-thumbed Bible brought from the dugout.

"Cedar!" he cried, "Must we bring cedar all the way from the South? It will cost a fortune. Why not use some other wood? There are others as beautiful."

"We will use cedar," determined Cyclona without further explanation, and cedar they used, carved curiously in pomegranate and lily work, very beautiful, Hugh had to acknowledge, though the expense was more than it should have been, no matter how much money a young woman had to throw to the birds.

"Shall we have so many windows?" he asked as Cyclona ordered window after window, according to the old yellow plan.

"There must be no dark spot in all this house," decided Cyclona, and when it was finished there was not. Built of stone brought from great distances, stone of delicate pink from Tennessee, carved, wide of door, alight with windows, it was a marvel to those who came and stood by, watching the building of it.

"A beautiful house," they called it. "A beautiful house!"

There was no word of Seth in regard to the beautiful house that Cyclona failed to remember.

"This is the stairway," she heard him say, "up which Celia shall trail in her silks and her velvets. This is the threshold her little feet shall press, and here is the low divan before a wide and sunny window where she shall sit and thrum on her guitar."

Cyclona fashioned the threshold of marble, she built the stairway spacious, she had the low divan carved in cedar and placed it before a wide and sunny window in the music room. She placed there mandolins and guitars. She ordered a piano made of cedar for the music room. She had antique and gorgeous pillows embroidered by deft fingers for the low divan, then went on to the bed-room of white and gold, of which Seth had delighted to dream. She ordered pier-glasses, so many that Hugh began to fear indeed for her sanity. She bought spindle-legged furniture of gold and scattered it about. She covered the gold bedstead with lace of the rarest. She hung curtains at the sunny window, but curtains of so lacey a web that no possible ray of light could they exclude.

"Exquisite!" exclaimed Hugh, "but must you have gold door knobs?"

"We must," answered Cyclona; and people came in wonder to look at the beautiful house whose gold door knobs passed into one of the many traditions of the excess of insanity displayed by the very rich of that marvellous boom in their expenditure of money.

Cyclona caused the cellar to be lighted, according to Seth's directions, until there was no dark spot in it. Light gleamed throughout, if not the light of day, the light of electrics.

"I never in my life," declared Hugh, "saw so light a cellar. It is like a conservatory."

By the time the house was finished, it was the wonder of the Magic City, which itself was the wonder of the West for its beautiful houses.

Then, when carpenter, painter, wood-carver and decorator had departed, and the house stood in the sunshine, a gem of a house, surpassing, if possible, in beauty, the house of Seth's imaginings, he came to Cyclona for the last time in a dream. He stood in the dimness of a low-roofed room, looking out of a window. His face was inexpressibly sad. He stood there stilly for a long time, looking out of the window.

Then there rushed through Cyclona's dream the heavy whirring roar of the wind, the moan of the wind, the wail of the wind.

Cyclona started out of the dream with a cry.

What had happened? What was it? What was it?

It was as if her life had gone out all at once like the flame of a candle. It was as if her heart-strings had snapped asunder.

What was it? What was it?

She lay back among her pillows, trembling in the dark, afraid of she knew not what, her wide eyes agaze at the ceiling's shadows.

And then after a long while she fell asleep again and once more dreamed.

The wind soughed through her dream again, pitifully, wailingly, as it had often soughed outside the dugout. Presently it dropped to a whisper and the passing gleam of clouds let in a slab of sunlight through the window.

Was Seth in the dugout then, or in that other room?

Whichever it was, the sunlight rested goldenly on the calmness of his face. It glorified it.

In her dream, Cyclona looked long and lovingly at the strong, fine lines of it brought out by this unexpected high light of the skies, accentuated Rembrandt-like against the darkness of the hole in the ground.

Yes. It was in the hole in the ground and not that other room of the Beautiful House.

As she looked the calm dream face of Seth turned to her with a smile of ineffable content.

On the following day Hugh said to her:

"Now that the beautiful house is finished, be mine. Be mine!"

She shook her head and looked at him with eyes that turned the heart of him cold. The pupils that had once been large and full and black had shrunk to the size of pin heads.

"No," she said. "I will wait and keep the house beautiful for Seth. Last night I saw him in a dream. He'll be coming home soon now to the beautiful house."

She walked to the window and looked out. She sank into a chair there, folded her hands and smiled contentedly, looking out through the leaves of the trees down the sunlit road.

"I will wait here for Seth," she repeated. "He won't be long now. He'll be coming home soon. I saw his face last night in a dream, and he smiled at me."



CHAPTER XXIX.



The whittlers of the little sticks sitting on dry goods boxes which surrounded the corner grocery looked up as a wagon came lumberingly down the Lexington Pike, rounded the corner and made its way up Main Street to Tom Coleman's livery stable.

They watched a man get out, lift an enormous trunk and carry it into the stable on his shoulders. They saw the man bend earthward beneath the weight of the trunk.

"Seth Lawson," they explained to some newcomers. "He's got a place at last. Drivin' the baggage wagon from Burgin to Harrodsburg and back again."

Tom Grums, the grocer, puffed a few whiffs of his pipe.

"That's the man," he explained succinctly, "whut was goin' to conquer the West. That's the man whut said he was goin' to build the Magic City at the forks of two rivahs wheah the wind didn't blow."

By and by, when he had unhitched and fed his horse Seth came down the street, passed the whittlers of the little sticks and went on up the Lexington Pike to his home and Celia's.

He walked laggingly. There was something that he must tell Celia and he was afraid. It was impossible for him to keep the place.

He was not young enough. He was not sufficiently nimble. They wanted a younger man, they told him, to lift the trunks. He had been months getting the place and now he had lost it. He had lost it within a week.

He walked slowly through the hall to the kitchen where Celia stood at the old stove, cooking their supper. He sat by the window presently, watching her.

No. He wouldn't tell her. He could not. He hadn't the courage to face the scorn of her eye, to face the cold steely blue of it.

He ate the supper she set silently before him slowly. It had the taste to sawdust.

After supper he went out on the porch awhile and sat looking into the dusk, looking over the fine soft green of the dim grass on the opposite lawns, his mind going back to the scorched and parched grasses of the prairie.

How quiet it was! How windless. There came to him the memory of the wind as it soothed him that day of Celia's home coming. He had not hated the wind. He had loved it. There came also the memory of the wind as it soughed around the dugout on those lonely nights, when he and Cyclona had planned the beautiful house for Celia. In a flash of light he seemed to see Cyclona.

With this rose by his side, he had gone sighing after the roses of memory.

He arose and began to walk up and down, up and down to the gate and back, to the gate and back, thinking of Cyclona and the wind. A restlessness began to possess him, a longing for the sound of the wind, for the sound of the voice of Cyclona which had mingled from the first, from first to last, with the sound of the wind. The windless stillness oppressed him. He stopped at the gate and looked again across at the quiet grass of the still, dim lawns, then he walked back into the house, along the hall and up into the low-roofed garret, which had been set apart for him by Celia.

He closed the door of the garret very carefully behind him. He walked to the window and looked out. The stillness weighed upon him. If only he could run into the wind! If only he could hear again its wail, its sob, its grief, its moaning.

Oh, no. It was impossible to tell Celia that he no longer had work. He had no courage to face the steel blue of her eye.

Impossible, too, to face the sarcastic whittlers of the little sticks who sat around the corner grocery in the morning, he who was to have conquered the West and build the Magic City. They were total strangers to him. All his old friends in the town seemed to be dead.

He took a pistol down from the shelf and looked at it. He turned it around and around, the dim light coming in at the window playing on it. Since the first night of his arrival he had had it ready.

"A man who cannot earn his salt," he said softly, "encumbers the earth."

He held the thing, playing with it. He smiled as he played with it. He went to the window and stood for a long while, looking out, thinking of Cyclona, thinking very lovingly of Cyclona, that beautiful girl who had cared for him and the child. He would like to see Cyclona once more before,—but that was impossible. In the other world, perhaps.

God was not to blame. How could He look after so many? If he put them here with all their faculties, was it His fault if they failed?

He was very tired. His fingers rested lovingly upon the weapon that was to send him to the other world. He was very tired. He was very tired.

By and by he placed the weapon to his temple, taking careful aim.

In a blinding flash of light he saw Cyclona.

There was the heavy roar of the wind, the wild and woeful wind of the prairies,—and stillness.



CHAPTER XXX.



Some visitors from the East to the Magic City, whose fame was now widespread, were driving gaily by the beautiful house, which was one of the choice show places of the town.

Cyclona, sitting by the window, turned her wide, soft eyes their way.

"How beautiful she is," sighed one of the girls, "but how strange her eyes are! How vacant they are! There is no expression in her eyes," she said and sighed again.

"She has built the house," explained the guide, "for someone she says who ought to own it. She sits there waiting for him, taking care of the house, keeping it beautiful for him."

"She is very gentle and mild," he added, as they passed out of sight of the beautiful house, "and so they let her live there instead of locking her up in an asylum with all those other pioneer prairie people whose minds went the way of the wind."



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