Chapter 12

As the boy, whom Seth called Charlie, grew older, Seth cast about in his mind for some story to tell him which should serve to protect both Celia and himself.

Celia was not to blame for leaving him. He had long ago come to that conclusion. He was a failure, as she had said. Women as a rule do not care for failures, though there are some few who do.

They love men who succeed.

In personal appearance, aside from some angularities, considerable gauntness, and much sunburn, Seth told himself that he was not different from other men. It was not palpable to the casual observer that as men went he was a failure, but Seth realized the truth of Celia's judgment.

He had failed doubly. In the effort to provide her a home, and to imbue her with his belief in the Magic City. Since she had gone home he had sent her next to no money. He had none to send. Perhaps that was why she did not write. He never knew. Putting himself in her place, he concluded she was right. A delicate little woman, far away from a great failure of a husband who could not provide for her, ought to let him go without letters.

And so thinking, he seldom hung about the post-office waiting for the mail. He trained himself to expect nothing.

Yes. It had been impossible for him to send her money.

Disaster had followed disaster and he had been barely able to keep himself and the boy alive.

He was a failure of the most deplorable sort, but the boy did not know it. He did not even guess it. The standing monument of his failure in life to Celia was the dugout. In the eyes of the boy it was no failure at all. Born in it he had no idea of the luxury of a house and the luxuries we wot not of we miss not.

He was used to lizards on the roof, to say nothing of other creeping things within the house which are generally regarded as obnoxious, roaches, ants, mice. He rather liked them than otherwise, regarding them as his private possessions.

Besides, hadn't he Cyclona?

And as for the winds of which Celia complained so bitterly, he loved them. His ears had never been out of the sound of them and they were very gentle winds sometimes, tender and loving with their own child born on the desert. They lulled him. They cradled him. They were sweet as Cyclona's voice singing him to sleep.

In another State, where they failed to blow, it would in all probability have been necessary to entice a cyclone into his neighborhood to induce him to slumber.

Accustomed to the infinite tenderness of his father's care from the first, the boy loved him. Seth determined that if it were possible, this state of affairs should continue. If it were necessary to invent a story to fit the case, he would be as other men, or even better in the eyes of the child, until there came a time when he must learn the truth.

Perhaps the time would never come. If he could by any manner of means keep up the delusion until the Wise Men came out of the East and built the Magic City, he would be a failure no longer. He would be an instantaneous success.

Also, though he fully pardoned Celia for her desertion of himself, he had never quite come to understand or fully forgive her desertion of the boy, her staying away as she had done month after month, year after year, missing all the beauty of his babyhood.

He therefore found it impossible to tell the boy that his mother had heartlessly deserted him, as impossible as to tell him that his father was a failure.

Yet the child, like every other, insisted upon knowing something of his origin. To satisfy him, Seth evolved a story, adding to it from time to time. He told it sitting in the firelight, the boy in his arms.

It was the story of the Flying Peccary.

"Tell me how I came in the cyclone," Charlie would insist, nestling into the comfortable curve of his arm.

"The cyclone brought you paht of the way," corrected Seth, jealous of his theory that cyclones never touched the place of his dugout, the forks of the two rivers, "and the flyin' peccary brought you the rest. You've heard me tell about these little Mexican hawgs, the wildest, woolliest, measliest little hawgs that evah breathed the breath of life and how they ate up the cyclone?"

"Yes," nodded Charlie.

"Well, this was the first time, I reckon, that a cyclone evah met its match, becawse a cyclone was nevah known befo' to stop at anything until it had cleaned up the earth and just stopped then on account of its bein' out of breath and tiahd. But it met its match that time.

"You see, Texas is full of those measly little peccaries. You can hahdly live, they say, down theah for them. They eat up the rail fences, the wagon beds, the bahns and the sheep and the cows. They don't stop at women and children, I heah, if they get a good chance at them. And grit! They've got plenty of that, I tell you, and to spah, those little bad measly Mexican hawgs.

"Well, one day a herd of peccaries wah a gruntin' and squealin' around the prairie, huntin' for something to eat as usual, when a cyclone come lumberin' along.

"It come bringin' everything with it it could bring; houses, bahns, chicken coops and a plentiful sprinklin' of human bein's, to liven up things a little. A cyclone ain't very particular, any more than a peccary. It snatches up anything that comes handy. Sometimes it picks up a few knives and whacks things with them as it goes along. You know that, don't you, Cyclona?"

Cyclona nodded. She always lingered at the fireside to hear this story of the flying peccary which was her favorite as well as the child's.

"It brought me," she said.

The boy raised himself in Seth's arms.

"Maybe you are my sister!" he cried.

"Maybe I am," smiled Cyclona.

"At that theah Towanda cyclone," recommenced Seth, "that little Kansas town the cyclone got mad at and made way with, theah must have been a hundred knives or mo' flyin' around loose. They cut hogs half in two. You would have thought a butchah had done it. And the chickens were carved ready to be put on the table. It was wonderful the things that cyclone did."

"And the peccaries," Charlie reminded him.

"That cyclone," began Seth all over again, "came flyin' along black as night and thunderin' laik mad and caught up the whole herd of peccaries.

"Those peccaries ain't even-tempahd animals.

"They've got tempahs laik greased lightnin'. It made them firin' mad fo' a cyclone to take such liberties with them, and they got up and slammed back at it right and left. Well, they didn't do a thing to that cyclone. In the first place the whole herd of peccaries began to snap and grunt laik fury till the noise of the cyclone simmahd down into a sort of pitiful whine, laik the whine of a whipped dog. Imagine a cyclone comin' to that! Then, they tell me, you couldn't heah anything but the squealin' and gruntin' of those pesky little peccaries.

"Between squeals they bit into that theah cyclone fo' all it was wuth, takin' great chunks out of it, swallowin' lightnin' and eatin' big mouthfuls of thundah just as if they laiked it. All the stuff the cyclone was bringin' along with it wa'n't anything to them. They swallowed it whole and pretty soon, you'd hahdly believe it, but theah wa'n't anything lef' of that cyclone at all.

"They had eaten up ever' single bit of it except a tiny breeze they had fohgotten that died away mournful laik across the prairies, sighin' becawse it had stahted out so brash and come to such a sudden untimely and unexpected end.

"Then, theah was the herd of peccaries about five miles from wheah they had stahted, sittin' down, resting, a-smilin' at each othah and congratulatin' each othah, I reckon, on the way they had knocked the stuffin' out of that theah ole cyclone fo' good and all.

"They must have scahd the res' of the cyclones off, too, becawse with them and the forks of the rivahs, they haven't been seen or heahd of aroun' these pahts since."

"Exceptin' the tail end of that one that moved me," Cyclona reminded him.

"And what about me?" questioned Charlie.

"Oh, yes. One of these heah peccaries, a good-natured peccary, too, with a laikin' fo' little children, found you in the cyclone. You were a pretty little baby with big blue eyes the same's you've got now. I don't know exactly wheah the cyclone found you. Anyway, the peccary picked you up in his mouth. When he had rested as long as he wanted to with the other peccaries, he flew along and flew along--they had all got to be flying peccaries, you know, on account of swallowin' so much wind, until he came to the door of my dugout, this same dugout we are in now, and he laid you very carefully down by the door. Then I went out in the mawnin' and brought you in."

Charlie invariably at this point reached up his arms and put them around Seth's neck.

It was very kind of him, he thought, to go out and bring him in. What if the wolves had come along and eaten him! Or the little hungry coyotes they heard barking in the nights. Ugh!

"And then the peccary flew away again?" he asked. "Didn't he?"

"Yes," answered Seth. "He flew away with the rest of the flyin' peccaries."

"And haven't you ever seen them since?" asked Charlie, "or him?"

"Sometimes you can see them 'way up in the air," replied Seth, running his fingers through his hair, "but they ah so fah away and little, you can't tell them from birds."

Cyclona nodded again.

"Yes," she corroborated, "they are so far away and little you can't tell them from birds."