[Illustration]
For one mad moment, such as comes to the bravest, Seth's impulse was
to throw himself beneath the wheels of the car that was taking Celia
away from him.
In another he would have lain a crushed and shapeless mass in their
wake; but as he shut his eyes for the leap there came to him
distinctly, pitifully, wailingly, the cry of the child.
Perhaps it came to him in reality across the intervening miles of
wind-blown prairie. Perhaps the wind blew it to him. Who knows? Our
Mother Earth often sends us help in our sorest need in her own way, a
way which oftentimes partakes of mystery.
Perhaps it came only in memory.
However, it served.
He opened his eyes, and the madness had passed.
He pulled himself together dazedly, unfastened the hitch rein of the
mule, mounted awkwardly into the high and ungainly blue cart and
started off in the direction of the cry.
The wind which on the coming trip had appeared to take fiendish
delight in trying to tear Celia's garments to ribbons, now suddenly
died down, for the wind loved Seth.
It had done with Celia. She was gone. But not by one breath would it
add to the grief of Seth. On the contrary, it spent its most dulcet
music in the effort to soothe him. Tenderly as the cooing of a dove it
whispered in his ear, reminding him of the child.
He answered aloud.
"I know," he said. "I had forgotten him. The po' little mothahless
chile!"
And the wind kissed his cheek, its breath sweet as a girl's, caressing
him, urging him over the vastness of the prairie to the child.
On the road to the station, Seth's mind had been filled with Celia to
the exclusion of all else. He had not observed the devastation of the
prairie.
Unlike her, his heart held no hatred for the wayward winds. They were
of heaven. He loved them. Fierce they were at times, it was true,
claws that clutched at his heart; but at other times they were gentle
fingers running through his hair.
Their natures were opposite as the poles, his and hers.
The prairies were her detestation. He loved them.
He inherited the traits of his ancestors, the sturdy Kentucky pioneers
who had lived in log huts and felled the forests in settling the
country. Something not yet tamed within him loved the little wild
things that had their homes in the prairie grasses:
The riotous birds, the bright-colored insects, the prairie dogs in
their curious towns, sitting on their haunches at the doors of their
little dugouts, so similar to his own, and barking, then running at
whistle or crack of whip into the holes to their odd companions, the
owls and the rattlesnakes; the herds of antelope emerging from the
skyline and brought down to equally diminutive size by the infinite
distance, disappearing into the skyline mysteriously as they had come.
But now he looked out on the prairie with a sigh.
It was like a familiar face disfigured by a burn, scarred and almost
unrecognizable.
The prairie in loneliness is similar to the sea.
In one wide circle it stretches from horizon to horizon.
It stretched about him far as the eye could reach, scorched and
hideous as the ruin of his life.
He shut his eyes. He dared not look out on the ruin of his life. What
if the ghastly spectacle should turn his brain?
That had been known to happen among the prairie folk time out of
number. Many a brain stupefied by the lonely life of the dugout, the
solemn, often portentous grandeur of the great blue dome, under which
the pioneers crawled so helplessly, had been blown zigzag by the wild
buffetings of the wayward, wanton winds, punctuating the dread
loneliness so insistently, so incessantly, so diabolically by its
staccato preludes, by its innuendoes of interludes prestissimo, by its
finales frantically furious and fiendishly calculated to frighten the
soul and tear the bewildered and weakened brain from its pedestal.
The reproach of the thought held something of injustice, the wind
blew with such gentleness, kissing his cheek.
His mind ran dangerously on in the current of insanity. He endeavored
to quiet it.
The thought of his mother came to him.
Once he had heard her crying in the night, waiting for his father to
come home, not knowing where he was, wondering as women will, and
fearfully crying.
Then he heard her begin to count aloud in the dark:
"One, two. One, two, three," she had counted, to quiet her brain.
He fell mechanically to counting as she had done:
"One, two. One, two, three."
He must preserve his sanity, he said to himself, for the sake of the
child. Otherwise it would be good to lose all remembrance, to forget,
to dream, to lapse into the nothingness of the vacant eye, the
down-drooping lid and the drivel.
"One, two. One, two, three," he counted, the wind listening.
In spite of the counting, with his eyes fixed on the desolation of the
prairie, his thoughts on Celia, suddenly he felt himself seized by
gusts of violent rage. The desire to dash out his brains against the
unyielding wall of his relentless destiny tore him like the fingers of
a giant hand.
"One, two. One, two, three," he counted, and between the words came
the cry of the child.
If he could only render his mind a blank until it recovered its
equilibrium, a ray of sunshine must leak in somewhere.
It must for the sake of the child.
But how was it possible for him to go back to the ghastliness of the
dugout, the bereft house, where it was as if the most precious inmate
had suddenly died--to the place that had held Celia but would hold her
no more!
It was necessary to count very steadily here, to strangle an outcry of
despair.
"One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three, four, five."
He could count no further.
The wind, seeing his distress, soughed with a weird sweet sound like
aeolian harps in the effort to comfort him, but he dropped the reins
and laid his face in the hollow of his arm.
It was the attitude of a woman, grief-stricken.
He had evidently fallen into a lethargy of grief from which he must be
aroused.
So thought the wind. It blew a great blast. It whistled loudly as if
calling, calling, calling!
Was it the wind or his heart? Was it his Mother Nature, his Guardian
Angel, or God?
Again pitifully, distinctly, wailingly, came the cry of the child.
He raised his head, grasped the reins and hurried.
On he went, on and on, faster and faster, until at last he came to the
door of the tomb.
He descended into it. He took the child from the arms of Cyclona, who
sat by the fire cuddling it, and held it close to his heart.
"He has been crying," she told him, "every single minute since you
have been gone. Crying! Crying! No matter what I did, no matter how
hard I tried, I couldn't quiet him."