[Illustration]
Across the purple prairie, the wondering stars blinking down upon him,
the wind tearing at him to know what the matter was, the tumbleweeds
tumbling at the heels of his broncho, his heart in his mouth, Seth
madly rode in the wild midnight to fetch the weazened old woman who
tended the women of the desert, rode as madly back again, leaving the
midwife to follow.
After an age, it seemed to him, she came, and the child was born.
Seth knelt and listened to the breathing of the little creature in the
rapture felt by most mothers of newborn babes and by more fathers than
is supposed.
Now and again this feeling, which more than any other goes to make us
akin to the angels, is lacking in a mother.
Seth saw with a sadness he could not uproot that Celia was one of
these. His belief, therefore, in the efficacy of the child to comfort
her went the way of other beliefs he had been forced one by one to
relinquish. When, after some weeks of tending her, the old woman was
gone, and Celia was able to be about, it was he who took charge of the
child, while she, in her weakness, gave herself up to an increased
disgust for her surroundings and an even deeper longing to go back
home.
It was in vain that he showed her the broad green of the wheat fields,
smiling in the sunlight, waving in the wind.
Some blight would come to them.
Fruitlessly he pictured to her the little house he would build for her
when the crop was sold.
She listened incredulously.
* * * * *
And then came the grasshoppers.
For miles over the vastness of the desert they rushed in swarms,
blackening the earth, eclipsing the sun.
Having accomplished their mission of destruction, they disappeared as
quickly as they had come, leaving desolation in their wake. The
prairie farms had been reduced to wastes, no leaves, no trees, no
prairie flowers, no grasses, no weeds.
One old woman had planted a garden near her dugout, trim, neat,
flourishing, with its rows of onions, potatoes and peas in the pod.
It was utterly demolished. She covered her head with her apron and
wept old disconsolate tears at the sight of it.
Another was hanging her clothes on the line. When the grasshoppers
were gone there were no clothes and no line.
As for the beautiful wheat fields that had shone in the sun, that had
waved in the wind, they lay before Seth's tearless eyes, a blackened
ruin.
Was it against God's wish that they make their feeble effort to
cultivate the plains, those poor pioneer people, that He must send a
scourge of such horror upon them?
Or had He forsaken the people and the country, as Celia had said?
Seth walked late along the ruin of the fields, not talking aloud to
God as was his wont when troubled, silent rather as a child upon whom
some sore punishment has been inflicted for he knows not what, silent,
brooding, heartsick with wondering, and above all, afraid to go back
and face the chill of Celia's look and the scorn of her eye.
But what one must do one must do, and back he went finally, opened
the badly hung door and stood within, his back to it, with the air of
a culprit, responsible alike for the terror of the winds, the scourge
of the grasshoppers and the harshness of God.
"As a man," she said slowly, her blue eyes shining with their clear
cold look of cut steel through slits of half-shut white lids, the
words dropping distinctly, clearly, relentlessly, that he might not
forget them, that he might remember them well throughout the endless
years of desert life that were to follow, "you ah a failuah."
He hung his head.
"You ah right," he said.
For though he had not actually gone after the grasshoppers and brought
them in a deadly swarm to destroy his harvest, he had enticed her to
the plains it seemed for the purpose of witnessing the destruction.
"You ah right," he reiterated.
In the night Celia dreamed of home and the blue-grass hills and the
whip-poor-wills and the mocking birds that sang through the moonlight
from twilight till dawn.
Sobbing in her sleep, she waked to hear the demoniacal shriek of the
tireless wind and the howl of a coyote, and wept, refusing to be
comforted.
The next day she said to Seth firmly and conclusively:
"I am goin' home."