Chapter 5

Seth was toiling slowly along a furrow back of his plow, bending sidewise with the force of the wind, not resentfully that it persisted in making it so difficult for him to earn his bread, for resentment was not in his nature, besides which, Seth loved the wind,--but humming a little tune, something soft and reminiscent about his old Kentucky home, with its chorus of "Fare you well, my lady," when a broncho, first a mere speck on the horizon ahead of him, then larger and larger, rushed out of the wind from across the prairie with flashing eyes and distended nostrils, and lunged toward him.

At first he thought it was a wild broncho, untamed and riderless; but as his eyes became accustomed to dust and sunlight, he discovered that the saddle held a girl.

For the moment she had bent herself to the broncho's mane, which had the effect, together with the haze produced by the wind-blown dust, of rendering the animal apparently riderless.

Seth drew up his mule and halted.

At the same time the broncho was jerked with a sudden rein that sent him back on his haunches, his front feet pawing the air.

His rider, apparently accustomed to this pose, clung to him with the persistency of a fly to fly paper, righted him, swung herself from the saddle and stood before Seth, a tall, slim girl of twelve, a girl of complexion brown as berries, of dark eyes heavily fringed with thick lashes and dusky hair tinged redly with sunburn. Her hair, one of her beauties, blew about her ears in tangled curls that were unconfined by hat or bonnet.

She smiled at him, showing rows of rice-like teeth, of an exaggerated white in contrast with the sunburn of her face.

"Hello," she said.

"Hello," said Seth in return.

Then, in the outspoken manner of the prairie folk he asked:

"Who ah you?"

"I am Cyclona," she answered.

"Cyclona what?"

"Just Cyclona. I ain't got no other name."

Seth smiled back at her, she seemed so timidly wild, like those little prairie dogs that stand on their haunches and bark, and yet are ever mindful of the safety of their near-by lairs, waiting for them in case of molestation.

"Wheah did you come frum?" he queried.

"Two or three hundred miles from here," she answered, "where we had a claim."

"Who is we?" asked Seth.

"My father and me. He ain't my real father. He's the man what adopted me."

Always courteous, Seth stood, hand on plough, waiting for her to state her errand or move on.

She did neither.

"There be'n't many neighbors hereabout, be there?" she ventured presently, toying with her broncho's mane.

"No," said Seth. "They ah mighty scarce. One about every eighteen miles or so."

Cyclona looked straight at him out of her big dark eyes framed by their heavy lashes.

"I am a neighbor of yourn," she said.

"I'm glad of that," responded Seth with ready Southern cordiality. "Wheah do you live?"

Cyclona turned and pointed to the horizon.

"About ten or twelve miles away," she explained. "There!"

"Been theah long?" asked Seth.

"Come down last week," said Cyclona, adding lightly by way of explanation, "we blew down. Father and his wife and me. Never had no mother. A cyclone blew her away. That's why they call me Cyclona."

She drew her sleeve across her eyes.

"It's mighty lonesome in these parts," she sighed, "without no neighbors. Neighbors was nearer where we came from."

"What made you move, then?" Seth queried.

"We didn't move," said Cyclona. "We was moved. Father likes it here, but I get awful lonesome without no neighbors."

The plaint struck an answering chord.

"Look heah," said Seth. "You see that little dugout 'way ovah theah? That's wheah I live. My wife's theah all by herself. She's lonesome, too. Maybe she'd laik to have you come and visit her and keep her company. Will you?"

Cyclona nodded a delighted assent, caught the mane of her broncho, and swung herself into her saddle with the ease and grace of a cowboy.

Seth was suddenly engrossed with the fear that Celia, seeing the girl come out of the Nowhere, as she had come upon him, might be frightened into the ungraciousness of unsociability.

"Wait," he cried. "I will go with you."

So he took Cyclona's rein and led her broncho over the prairie to Celia's door, the girl, laughing at the idea of being led, chattering from her saddle like any magpie.

He knocked at Celia's door and soon her face, white, Southern, aristocratic, in sharp contrast with the sunburned cheek and wild eye of Cyclona, appeared.

He waved a rough hand toward Cyclona, sitting astride her broncho, a child of the desert, untamed as a coyote, an animated bronze of the untrammelled West emphasized by the highlights of sunshine glimmering on curl and dimple, on broncho mane and hoof, and backed by the brilliancy of sky, the far away line of the horizon and the howl of the wind.

"Look!" he called to her exultantly, in the voice of the prairies, necessarily elevated in defiance of the wind, "I have brought a little girl to keep you company."