[Illustration]
The wind lulled the child to sleep, the wind wakened him, the wind
sang to him all day long, dashed playful raindrops in his upturned
face and whispered to him.
Perhaps it was the wind, then, that was his mother. This variable,
coquettish wind of tones so infinitely tender, of shrieks so
blusteringly loud.
He listened to it in the dawn. He listened to it in the sombre
darkness of the night. Early and late it seemed to call to him to come
out and away to his mother.
The restlessness that sometimes encompasses the soul of a boy took
possession of him. He was filled with the passion of wander-lust. The
darkened walls of the dugout restricted him, those grim, gray earth
walls that duskily, grave-like, enclosed the body of him.
He must be up and away.
He would go to the heart of the wind and find his mother.
Seth had gone to the town for feed for his cattle. Cyclona was at
home. He took advantage of their absence to start on his journey.
Outside the dugout the wind enveloped him softly, enticingly, kissing
his curls, kissing the rosy sunburn, the tender down of his cheek
which still retained the kissable outline of babyhood.
It was day when he started, broad day, bright with the light of the
red sun high in the heavens, surrounded by the brilliant hue of
cloudless skies.
The boy ran.
The wind tossed him like a plaything as it tossed the big round
tumbleweeds, making the pace for him a little beyond.
Now and again, broad day though it was, the wind blew blasts that
frightened him, dying down immediately again into piping Pan-like
whispers that lured him on and on until he became a mere speck on the
trackless prairie, blown by alternate blasts and zephyrs, hurrying,
hurrying, hurrying to the heart of the wind to find his mother.
But by and by the sun sank, dropping suddenly into the Nowhere behind
the darkling line of the mysterious horizon.
Then the twilight seeped softly over the prairie, like a drop of ink
spilt over a blotter.
A little while later and the prairie became obscurely shadowy, peopled
all at once by frightful things, familiar everyday things changed to
hideous hobgoblins by the chrism of the dark.
Grasses with long human fingers beckoned him to the Unknown, which is
always terrible, while great ever-moving tumbleweeds sprang up at him
as if from underground, like enormous heads of resurrected giants.
And the voice of the wind!
As he neared the heart of it, it, too, took on an unknown quantity
more terrible than the bugaboo of the shadows and the dark.
It howled with the howl of wolves.
The child began to be afraid. Pantingly, wildly afraid!
He stood still, looking breathlessly ahead of him to where the prairie
stretched indefinitely to the rim of the starlit dome, billowy with
long gray grasses blown into the semblance of fingers by the bellowing
blasts of the fearsome wind.
He sobbed, he was now so far from home, and the voice of the wind had
taken on a menacing note of such deep subtleness.
Which way was home? He had forgotten. The way the wind blew?
But the wind had turned to a whirlwind, blowing gales in every
direction to mislead him, now that he wanted to go home.
True, there were the stars, blinking high above the stress and turmoil
of the tireless wind, but he was too young yet to understand the way
they pointed.
As he stood irresolutely sobbing, one ache of loneliness and
homesickness and fear, he heard the call of a human voice and his
name, the voice coming to him high above the wind, with its own note
of terrorized anguish.
His father's voice!
The voice sounded nearer and nearer, calling, calling!
The child ran toward the sound of it, the loneliness of the prairie
swallowed up in a sob of gladness, and he was in Seth's arms.
As for Seth, he could only articulate one word:
"Why? Why?"
Celia had deserted him, but the Boy!
"I was looking for my mother," sobbed the child in answer, safe in the
tender hollow of his arm.
After a moment's hesitation:
"Mother will come to you some day," Seth breathed over him. "Won't
Cyclona and father do till then?"
And in the close clasp of the longing man the child felt the
unmistakable throb of paternity penetrate his heart and was
satisfied.