[Illustration]
The winter had been too long and cold, or the child, however tender
Seth's care of him, had been insufficiently clothed and fed.
He lay ill, alternately shaking with chills and burning with fever.
It was March now and the winds blew with the fierceness of tornadoes.
But the laughter of Charlie's delirium outvoiced the winds.
Now he moaned with them and sighed.
Cyclona took up her abode at the dugout now, nursing him tirelessly,
while Seth walked the floor, back and forth, back and forth like some
caged and helpless animal writhing in pain; for from the first he had
read death in the face of the child.
The wind lulled and Seth knelt by his bedside, his ear against
Charlie's heart, listening for his breathing, Cyclona standing
fearfully by, her face white as the coverings.
After a long time Seth raised beseeching eyes to her in an unspoken
question:
"Does he breathe?"
As if he had heard, Charlie suddenly opened his eyes and looked
smilingly first at one and then at the other of these two who had
encompassed his short life about with such loving care.
"Listen," he whispered, "to the wind."
The wind had risen. It howled like some mad thing. It blew great
blasts, ferocious blasts and deafening.
It was as if it, too, were hurt. It was as if it, too, suffered the
agony of mortal pain in sympathy with the child.
Soon the child began to lisp and they bent their heads to listen.
"I am ... going ... out ... in ... the wind ... again," he said, "to
find ... my ... mother."
"Charlie!" cried Seth, in a voice whose anguish sounded high above the
winds. "Stay! It is we who love you, Cyclona and I. Stay with us!"
Cyclona knelt and laid her brown hand across the beautiful eyelids of
the child for a little while.
Then she took Seth's head and pillowing it upon her bosom, rocked
gently back and forth as they knelt alone on the hard cold earth of
the dugout floor.
"It doesn't matter now," she whispered to him; "he knows."