[Illustration]
But the moons waxed and waned and the months lapsed into years and
Seth grew hopeless, more and more hopeless, so hopeless that at last
he began to lose faith in the Magic City, and to fear for the
realization of his fantastic will-o'-the-wisp of a beautiful house.
Would the Wise Men never come out of the East to buy up his land and
build that magnificent city of his dreams at the forks of the river
where the cyclones never came, so that he could build his beautiful
house for Celia? Or would they always stop just short of it?
Already that little town on the edge of the State called Kansas City
because it was in Missouri, had boomed itself into a city and, being
just outside the cyclone belt, had not been blown away. In spite of
the fact that it had been set high on a hill it had not been blown
away.
The Wise Men had built that town.
Also, there was another town they had built within the belt which
promised to thrive, a town where the people had so arranged it that
the coming of a cyclone could be telegraphed to them, where signs like
this were posted, "A cyclone due at three o'clock," and they had ample
time to shut up shop and school and prepare for it, going down into
their cyclone cellars, shutting fast the doors and staying there until
it was over.
True, a cyclone or two had grazed this town.
One had even taken off a wing. But, though a trifle disabled by each,
it had continued to thrive, showing such evident and robust signs of
life and strength that the cyclones, presently giving up in despair of
making a wreck of it, had gone on by as Seth has said they would do
once they found their master.
Then this town had been by way of premium for stanchness and courage
made the capital of this State of tornadoes and whirlwinds.
But this was as far as it went or seemed to intend to go. Further
south and west an attempt or two had been made to plant towns, but
their cellars had not been dug deep enough or their foundations had
not been sufficiently firm, or the cyclones had not yet become
reconciled to the sight of them. At any rate, the cyclones had come
along and swept them away without a word of warning, and they had not
been heard of since, neither cyclone nor town.
And so, altogether, Seth lost heart and came to the conclusion that
his Magic City, if it was ever to be built would be built after his
time and he would never have the happiness of gazing upon it. The hope
of seeing it was all that had kept him in the West. Now that he had
lost it, an uncontrollable longing came over him to go back home, to
see the wife who had deserted him, throw himself at her feet and beg
her forgiveness for his madness which had resulted in their
separation.
From dreaming dreams of the Magic City he took to dreaming dreams of
her.
It was years since he had seen her, but the absent, like the dead,
remain unchanged to us. To him she was the same as when last he saw
her.
How beautiful she had been with her great blue eyes and her hair the
color of Charlie's, tawny, like sunshine! And right, too, in her
scorn of his visions. And how foolish he had been to dream of training
the wind-blown West into a fit place for human beings to inhabit, or
for great cities to be built! It would take a stronger hand than his
to do that, he had come to believe. It would take the hand of God.
He had tried to find a tree that would grow so swiftly that the wind
could have no effect upon it. He had planted slim switches of one kind
after another and the wind had blown each to leaflessness, until now
there stood a slim row of cottonwoods that he had tried as a last
resort, but the same thing would happen to them, perhaps. He had lost
faith in trees. But he would not say yet that he had lost faith in
God.
He watched the same train trailing so far away as to seem a toy train
and longed as she had done to take it and go back home.
At last he understood the look in her eyes as she watched it and the
thoughts that enthralled her.
Sometimes when we strive for a thing and set our hearts on it, it
holds itself aloof from us. When we cease to strive, it comes.
But that is among the many strange ways of Providence which seems to
rule us blindly, but which is not so blind, perhaps, after all, as it
seems.
Another of its ways most incomprehensible is to bring us what we have
longed for a little too late sometimes.
But this is the story of Seth, and this is the way of its happening:
It was early in a mild and beautiful spring when the corn was young.
It stood shoulder high, lusty and strong and green. What with the
unwonted mildness of the weather and the absence of the usual storms
and the proneness of the clouds to deposit themselves about in gentle
showers, the crop promised fair to rival any crop that Seth had ever
raised on the Kansas prairies.
He hoed and toiled and smiled and listened to the rustling of the
corn, for he had made up his mind.
When the harvest was at an end he would sell the crop and the place
for what it would bring, and go back home. He would go back to his
wife and home!
The rustling of the corn was music in his ears. It was more. It was
like the glad hand of young Love; for with the crops so fine and the
harvest so rich, when he went back home to her, he would not go
empty-handed and unwelcome.
He was going back once more to his Kentucky home.
No hills seemed so green as those Kentucky hills and no skies so blue
as those skies that vaulted above the green, green hills of his native
land.
It had been longer than he cared to count since he had seen the blue
grass waving about in the wind there, not such wind as swept the
Kansas prairies, but gentle zephyrs almost breathless that rustled
softly and musically through the little blades of grass just as the
wind was rustling through the stalks now as he walked slowly with the
heavy stride of the clumsy farmer, hoeing the corn.
And he had not heard the whip-poor-will, nor sat under the shade of
the wide spreading oaks, nor listened to the soft Southern talk of his
and her people, not since he had come to Kansas with those other
foolish folk to brave the dangers of the strange new country in the
search of homes.
Homes!
He could point out the graves of some of them here and there about the
vastness of the level prairies, though more often he wandered across
the vast level wastes, looking for the places where they should be and
found them not, because of the buffaloes that had long ago trampled
out the shape of them, or because of the corn that had been planted in
furrows above their mounds, the serried ranks through which the wind
sang requiems, chanting, whispering, moaning and sighing in the balmy
springtime and through the heat of the long summer days until in the
chill of the autumn the farmers cut the stalks and stacked them
evenly, leaving no dangling leaves to sigh through nor tassels to
flout.
Now that he had made up his mind, the roughness of his life bore in
upon him.
He thought with Celia that it would be good to live again in a land
where people led soft, easy lives. She was not to be blamed. She was
right with that strange animal instinct which leads some women blindly
to the truth, and he had wasted the best years of his life and all of
the boy's in this terrible land of whirlwinds and coyotes and wide,
thirsty plains stretching to meet the blazing skies of noonday or the
star-gemmed dome of the purple night.
For the plains in some strange and mysterious way took vengeance upon
many of those who dared upturn with hoe and plough the fresh new
malarial soil, inserting germs of disease and death which soon
stretched them beneath.
Some lives must invariably be sacrificed to the upbuilding of any new
country, but why so many? And, sadder still, minds had been
sacrificed. The asylums, such as they were, were filled with those
whose minds in the ghastly loneliness of the desert had been torn and
turned and twisted by the incessant whirl and shirr and swish and
force of the pitiless winds.
He himself loved the wind, but there were times when he was afraid of
it, when it got in his brain and whirled and caused him to see things
in strange lights and weird, things fantastically colored,
kaleidoscopic and upside down.
When the day's work was done he sat outside the dugout talking
sometimes to himself, sometimes to Cyclona, telling of how when the
harvest was over and gathered he would go back home.
His plan must succeed, he sighed, to himself sometimes, sometimes to
Cyclona, who would sit listening, her great eyes on the limit of the
horizon, deep, dark, troubled as she brooded upon what her life would
be when he was gone; and as he talked he panted in the deep
earnestness of his insistence that the crops must succeed.
Other plans had failed, but not this. Not this! It must not!
Resolutely he put away from him all thought of failure. It must
succeed. He must go home!
He must ease this longing for the sight of Celia and her people which
had come to him of late to stay with him through seed-time and
harvest, through the early spring when the corn was young, and later
when it rose to heights unheard of, and later still through those
bitter days of grasshoppers and chinch bugs and hot winds and other
blightful things that haunt the Kansas cornfield to their ruin.
He must go home.