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It was in this way that Cyclona blew into their lives and came to be
something of a companion to Celia, though, realizing that the girl was
a distinct outgrowth of the country she so detested, she never came to
care for her with that affection which she had felt for her Southern
girl friends. The kindly interest which most women, settled in life,
feel for the uncertain destiny of every girl child bashfully budding
into womanhood was absent.
It is to be doubted if Celia possessed a kindly heart to begin with,
added to which there was nothing of the self-conscious bud about
Cyclona. She was ignorant of her beauty as a prairie rose. Strange as
her life had been, encompassed about by cyclones, the episode of her
moving as told by the gray-haired doctor at the corner grocery was
stranger.
"The house was little," the doctor commenced, "or it might not have
happened. There was only one room. It was built of boards and weighed
next to nothing, which may have helped to account for it.
"On that particular day the house was situated in the northern part of
the State."
He swapped legs.
"But the next day," he resumed. "Well, you can't tell exactly where
any house will be the next day in Kansas.
"It was about noon and Cyclona's foster father was out in the
cornfield, plowing. The wind, as usual, was blowing a gale. It was a
mild gale, sixty miles an hour, so Jonathan did not permit it to
interfere with his plowing. The rows were a little uneven because the
wind blew the horse sidewise and that naturally dragged the plow out
of the furrows, but as one rarely sees a straight row of corn in
Kansas, Jonathan was not worried. If he took pains to sow the corn
straight, in trim and systematic rows, like as not the wind would blow
the seed out of the ground into his neighbor's cornfield, so what was
the use?
"Like the horse and plough, Jonathan was walking crooked, bent in the
direction of the wind. He seldom walks straight or talks straight for
that matter, the wind has had such an effect on him.
"At any rate, leaving out the question of his reasoning which pursues
a devious and zigzag course, varying according to the way the wind
blows--and he is not alone in this peculiarity in Kansas, as I
say--Jonathan steadily toiled against the wind, he stopped altogether,
and taking out his lunch basket, he removed a pie and sat down on a
log to eat it, while his horse, moving a little further along, propped
himself against a cottonwood tree to keep from being entirely blown
away, and also rested."
He swapped tobacco wads from one cheek to the other and continued:
"The pie was made of custard, Jonathan said, with meringue on the top.
The meringue blew away, but Jonathan contentedly ate the custard,
thankful that the hungry wind had not taken that.
"Mrs. Jonathan had been going about all morning with a dust rag in her
hand, wiping the dust from the sills and the furniture.
"So, tired out at last, she had flung herself on the bed and was
quietly napping when the cyclone came along.
"Of course, the house and the bed she was lying on were shaken, but
Mrs. Jonathan had lived so long in Kansas she couldn't sleep unless
the wind rocked the bed.
"She slept all the sounder, therefore, lulled by its whistling and
moaning and sobbing, not waking even when Cyclona, this girl they had
adopted, opened the door and shut it suddenly with herself on the
inside, and a fortunate thing, too, that was for Cyclona, or the
cyclone might have left her behind.
"Cyclona, standing by the window, saw it all, the swiftly passing
landscape, the trees, the cows, as one would look from an observation
car on a train.
"The house was at last deposited rather roughly on terra firma and the
jar awoke Mrs. Jonathan. She sat up and rubbed her eyes open. Then she
looked about her in some alarm.
"The furniture was tumbled together in one corner all in a heap,
Jonathan says, and the pictures were topsy turvy. Pictures are never
on a level on Kansas walls on account of the winds, so Mrs. Jonathan
thought little of this, but the ceiling puzzled her. Instead of
arching in the old way, it pointed at her. It was full of shingles,
moreover, like a roof, and the point reached nearly to her head when
she sat up in the bed, staring about her.
"'What on earth is the matter?' she asked of Cyclona.
"Cyclona turned away from the window.
"'We have moved,' said she.
"Mrs. Jonathan arose then, and going to the door, opened it and found
that what Cyclona had said was true. The scenery was quite different.
It is much further south here, you know, than in the northern part of
the State. The grass was green and the trees, hardly budded at all
where she came from, here had full grown leaves.
"There was little or no debris in the path of the cyclone, nearly
everything, with the exception of the house, having been dropped
before it arrived at that point.
"A few stray cows hung from the branches of the large cottonwood
trees, Jonathan says...."
Here the Doctor was interrupted by a man who took his pipe out of his
mouth and coughed.
"But they presently dropped on all fours," he continued, "and began to
munch on the nice green grass growing all about them.
"The landscape thus losing all indications of the tornado's effect,
assumed a sylvan aspect which was tranquil in the extreme.
"Not far off stood the horse still hitched to the plough, Jonathan
said. The horse had a dazed look, but the plough seemed to be in fit
enough condition. One handle, slightly bent, had evidently struck
against something on the journey, which gave it a rakish aspect, but
that was all."
"Did the horse have its hide on?" asked the man who had coughed.
"So far's I know," the Doctor replied. "Why?"
"Because there's a story goin' the rounds," answered the cougher, "to
the effec' that a horse was blown a hundred miles in a cyclone and
when they found him he was hitched to a tree and skinned."
There was a period of thoughtful silence before the Doctor went on
with his story.
"As Mrs. Jonathan looked out the door," he said, "she saw Jonathan
walking down the road in her direction. His slice of pie, which he had
not had time to finish, was still in his hand.
"'Where are we at?' he asked her, curiously.
"'I am sure I don't know,' answered Mrs. Jonathan, beginning,
woman-like, to cry, now that the danger was over.
"Jonathan began to finish his pie, which the cyclone had interrupted.
Between mouthfuls he gave quick glances of surprise at the house.
"'What on earth!' he exclaimed, 'is the matter with the roof?'
"Mrs. Jonathan ran out to look.
"The tornado had been busy with the roof. It had blown it skyward and
then, upon second thoughts, had brought it back again and deposited it
not right side up, but upside down.
"The extreme suction caused by this sudden reversal of things had
caught every rag of clothing in the house into the atmosphere where,
adhering to the roof, they had been brought down with it, so that they
hung in festoons all around the outside, the roof, fastening onto the
walls with a tremendous jerk, securing all the different articles with
the clinch of a massive and giant clothespin.
"'It was a strange sight,' Jonathan said.
"Mrs. Jonathan's and Cyclona's skirts, stockings, shirt waists, night
dresses and handkerchiefs were strung along indiscriminately with
Jonathan's trousers, coats, waistcoats and socks. Here and there, in
between, prismatic quilts, red bordered tablecloths and fringed
napkins varied the monotony.
"'How are we ever going to get them down?' asked Mrs. Jonathan, the
floodgate of her tears loosed once more at sight of her household and
wearing apparel hung, as it were, from the housetop.
"Jonathan said his wife didn't seem to think of the kindness of the
cyclone in bringing her husband along with the house when it might so
easily have divorced them by dropping him into the house of some plump
widow. All she seemed to think of was those clothes.
"'Don't you worry,' he told her. 'We will just wait till another
cyclone comes along and turns the roof right side up again.'
"For one becomes philosophical, you know, living in Kansas. One must,
or live somewhere else....
"Jonathan looked delightedly about him.
"The green prairies sloped away to the skies; there was a clump of
cottonwood trees near by and a little creek, the same that gurgles by
Seth's claim, gurgled by his between twin rows of low green bushes.
"He admired this scenery, Jonathan did. He smiled a smile which
stretched from one ear to the other when he discovered that his
faithful and trusted horse had followed him down and was standing
conveniently near by, ready for work.
"'I like this part of the country,' he declared, 'better than the part
we came from. We'll just stake off this claim and take possession.'
"After a moment of thought, however, he added provisionally:
"'That is, until another cyclone takes a notion to move us.'"