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To do her justice, Celia would have taken the child with her; but
young as he was, Seth refused to give him up. He would buy a little
goat, he said, feed the baby on its milk and look after him.
At heart he said to himself that he would hold the child as ransom.
Surely, if love for him failed, love for the little one would draw the
mother back to the hole in the ground.
He found Cyclona and implored her to keep the child while he hitched
up the cart and drove the mother away over the same road she had come
to the station.
It was a silent drive; each occupied with individual thoughts running
in separate channels; she glad that her eyes were looking their last
on the wind-lashed prairies blackened by the scourge; he casting about
in his mind for some bait with which to entice her to return.
"You will come back to the child?" he faltered.
But she made no answer.
"If the crops succeed," he ventured, "and I build you a beautiful
house, then will you come back?"
For answer, she gave a scornful glance at the blackened plains,
flowerless, grainless, grassless.
"If the Wise Men come out of the East," it was his last plea, "and
build the Magic City, then you will come back?"
At that she laughed aloud and the wind, to spare him the sound of it,
tossed the laugh quickly out and away with the jeer of its cruel
mockery.
"The Magic City!" she repeated.
She laughed in derision of such violence that she fell to coughing.
"The Magic City!" she reiterated. "The Magic City!"