The Way of the Wind Part 4

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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.shoppers 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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.

"h.e.l.lo," she said.

"h.e.l.lo," 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."