[Illustration]
In all her life Celia had not travelled further from her native town
than Lexington, which was thirty miles away. It was not necessary. She
lived in the garden spot of the world, an Eden with all things
sufficient for a simple life.
As she stood at the station, waiting for her train, an old negro
shuffled by. He hummed the refrain of "Old Kentucky Home," "Fare you
well, my lady!" It seemed meant for her. The longing was strong within
her to fly back to the old town she loved so well; but the train,
roaring in just then, intimidated her by its unaccustomed turmoil and
she allowed herself to be hauled on board by the brakeman and placed
in the car.
Passing into the open country, the speed of the train increased. The
smoke and cinders poured into the open window. Timid because of her
strange surroundings, she silently accepted the infliction, cowering
into her seat without attempting to put the window down. When a man in
the opposite seat leaned forward and pulled it down for her, she was
too abashed to thank him, but retained her crouching position and
began silently to weep.
A terrible night of travel began. It was a day car. Celia crouched
into her seat, trying to sleep, afraid of everything, of the staring
eyes of the porter, of the strange faces about her, of the jet black
of the night that gloomed portentously through the window.
Then came the dawn and with it the long gray bridge spanning the drab
and sullen Mississippi, then St. Louis, with its bustle and rush and
more and more strange faces, a sea of strange faces through which she
must pass.
After another weary day of travel through which she dozed, too tired
to think, too tired to move, at twilight she reached Kansas City, a
little town on the edge of the desert. Here, worn out mentally and
physically, she was forced to stop and rest a night and sleep in a
bed.
And the next day the wind!
A little way out from the town she could see it beginning, bending
the pliant prairie grasses to earth, flinging them fiercely upward,
crushing them flat again and pressing them there, whistling,
whistling, whistling!
The car moved fairly fast for a car of that day, but the wind moved
faster. It shook the windows with terrific force. It blew small grains
of sand under the sill to sting Celia, moaning, moaning, moaning in
its mad and unimpeded march across the country straight to the skies.
She looked out in dismay.
Back of her, on either side of her and beyond, stretched this vast
prairie country, desolate of shrub, undergrowth, or tree, a barren
waste, different from the beautiful, still, green garden spot that she
called home, a spot redolent of flowers, sweet with the odor of
new-mown grass, and pungent with whiff of pine and cedar, different as
night is from day.
Her heart sank within her as she looked.
It was late in the afternoon when she came to her station, a
collection of frame shanties dignified by that name, and Seth, tall,
tanned and radiant, clasped her in his arms, and man though he was,
shed tears of pure rapture.
His joy served to thrill her momentarily to the extent of forgetting
the wind, but with his departure for the vehicle which was to convey
her to their home, the discomfort of it returned to her.
The madness of it! The fury of it! Its fiendish joy! It tore at her
skirts. It wrapped them about her. It snatched them away again,
flapping them flaglike.
It was with difficulty that she kept her hat on her head. She held it
with both hands.
The wind seemed to make sport of her, to laugh at her. It treated her
as it would a tenderfoot. It tried to frighten her. It blew the
shutters of the shanties open and slammed them to with a noise like
guns. It shrieked maniacally as if rejoicing in her discomfort. At
times it seemed to hoot at her.
Added to this, when Seth returned for her with the vehicle, it proved
to be a common two-wheeled cart drawn by a mule, a tall, ungainly cart
of dull and faded blue.
She kept back the tears as Seth helped her in.
Then she sat silently by him throughout their jolting journey over the
prairie country into what seemed to her to be the Nowhere, listening
to the wind chant, now requiems, now dirges, listening to its shriek
and whistle, listening to it cry aloud and moan, die down to a
whisper, then rise once more and wail like a living thing in
unendurable pain.
Seth, too, by and by fell into silence, but from a different cause.
The wind failed to distress him. He had become accustomed to it in the
months spent in preparing her home. It was like an old friend that
sometimes whispered in his tired ears words of infinite sweetness. He
forgave the wanton shrieks of it because of this sweetness, the
sweetness of a capricious woman, all the more sweet because of her
capriciousness.
He was silent from pure happiness at having Celia there beside him,
going over the same road with him in the old blue cart.
From time to time he glanced at her timidly as if half afraid if he
looked too hard the wind might blow her away.
And, indeed, there did appear to be some danger; for the wind that had
loved Seth from the first was apparently jealous of Celia. It tore at
her as though to toss her to unreachable distances in the way it
ripped the tumbleweeds from their small brittle stems and tossed them
away.
Seth looked at her profile, white from the fatigue of the journey, but
beautiful as alabaster; at the blue of her eyes; at the delicate taper
of her small white hands that from her birth had done only the
daintiest of service; at the small feet that had never once walked the
rough and sordid pathway of toil.
Beautiful! Beautiful!
His eyes caressed her. Except that he must hold the reins both arms
would have encircled her. As it was, she rested in the strong and
tender half-circle of one.
All at once the wind became frantic. It blew and blew!
Finding it impossible to tear Celia from the tender circling of that
arm, it wreaked its vengeance upon the tumbleweeds, broke them
fiercely from their stems, and sent them pell-mell over the prairie
before the tall blue cart, about it, at the sides of it, a fantastic
cortege, airily tumbling, tumbling, tumbling!
Yes. The wind was jealous of Celia.
Strong as it was, it failed of accomplishing its will, which would
have been to snatch her from the cart and toss her to the horizon in
company with the tumbleweeds. It shrieked its despair, the despair of
a jealous woman balked of her vengeance, tumultuously wild.
At last at about twilight, at the time of day when the prairie skies
are mellow with tints fit for a Turner and the prairie winds sough
with the tenderness of lullabies, resting for a period, in order to
prepare for the fury of the night, they came upon the forks of the two
rivers, sparsely sheltered by a few straggling and wind-blown trees.
Seth reined in the animal, sprang down over the high wheel of the cart
and helped Celia out.
"Darling," he said, "let me welcome you home!"
"Home," she repeated. "Where is it?"
For she saw before her only a slight elevation in the earth's surface,
a mound enlarged.
Going down a few steps, Seth opened wide the door of their dugout,
looking gladly up at her, standing stilly there, a picture daintily
silhouetted by the pearl pink of the twilit sky.
"Heah!" he smiled.
Celia stared down into the darkness of it as into a grave.
"A hole in the ground," she cried.
Then, as the beflowered home she had left rose mirage-like in the
window of her memory, she sobbingly re-stammered the words:
"A ... hole ... in ... the ... ground!"