Chapter 9

For one mad moment, such as comes to the bravest, Seth's impulse was to throw himself beneath the wheels of the car that was taking Celia away from him.

In another he would have lain a crushed and shapeless mass in their wake; but as he shut his eyes for the leap there came to him distinctly, pitifully, wailingly, the cry of the child.

Perhaps it came to him in reality across the intervening miles of wind-blown prairie. Perhaps the wind blew it to him. Who knows? Our Mother Earth often sends us help in our sorest need in her own way, a way which oftentimes partakes of mystery.

Perhaps it came only in memory.

However, it served.

He opened his eyes, and the madness had passed.

He pulled himself together dazedly, unfastened the hitch rein of the mule, mounted awkwardly into the high and ungainly blue cart and started off in the direction of the cry.

The wind which on the coming trip had appeared to take fiendish delight in trying to tear Celia's garments to ribbons, now suddenly died down, for the wind loved Seth.

It had done with Celia. She was gone. But not by one breath would it add to the grief of Seth. On the contrary, it spent its most dulcet music in the effort to soothe him. Tenderly as the cooing of a dove it whispered in his ear, reminding him of the child.

He answered aloud.

"I know," he said. "I had forgotten him. The po' little mothahless chile!"

And the wind kissed his cheek, its breath sweet as a girl's, caressing him, urging him over the vastness of the prairie to the child.

On the road to the station, Seth's mind had been filled with Celia to the exclusion of all else. He had not observed the devastation of the prairie.

Unlike her, his heart held no hatred for the wayward winds. They were of heaven. He loved them. Fierce they were at times, it was true, claws that clutched at his heart; but at other times they were gentle fingers running through his hair.

Their natures were opposite as the poles, his and hers.

The prairies were her detestation. He loved them.

He inherited the traits of his ancestors, the sturdy Kentucky pioneers who had lived in log huts and felled the forests in settling the country. Something not yet tamed within him loved the little wild things that had their homes in the prairie grasses:

The riotous birds, the bright-colored insects, the prairie dogs in their curious towns, sitting on their haunches at the doors of their little dugouts, so similar to his own, and barking, then running at whistle or crack of whip into the holes to their odd companions, the owls and the rattlesnakes; the herds of antelope emerging from the skyline and brought down to equally diminutive size by the infinite distance, disappearing into the skyline mysteriously as they had come.

But now he looked out on the prairie with a sigh.

It was like a familiar face disfigured by a burn, scarred and almost unrecognizable.

The prairie in loneliness is similar to the sea.

In one wide circle it stretches from horizon to horizon.

It stretched about him far as the eye could reach, scorched and hideous as the ruin of his life.

He shut his eyes. He dared not look out on the ruin of his life. What if the ghastly spectacle should turn his brain?

That had been known to happen among the prairie folk time out of number. Many a brain stupefied by the lonely life of the dugout, the solemn, often portentous grandeur of the great blue dome, under which the pioneers crawled so helplessly, had been blown zigzag by the wild buffetings of the wayward, wanton winds, punctuating the dread loneliness so insistently, so incessantly, so diabolically by its staccato preludes, by its innuendoes of interludes prestissimo, by its finales frantically furious and fiendishly calculated to frighten the soul and tear the bewildered and weakened brain from its pedestal.

The reproach of the thought held something of injustice, the wind blew with such gentleness, kissing his cheek.

His mind ran dangerously on in the current of insanity. He endeavored to quiet it.

The thought of his mother came to him.

Once he had heard her crying in the night, waiting for his father to come home, not knowing where he was, wondering as women will, and fearfully crying.

Then he heard her begin to count aloud in the dark:

"One, two. One, two, three," she had counted, to quiet her brain.

He fell mechanically to counting as she had done:

"One, two. One, two, three."

He must preserve his sanity, he said to himself, for the sake of the child. Otherwise it would be good to lose all remembrance, to forget, to dream, to lapse into the nothingness of the vacant eye, the down-drooping lid and the drivel.

"One, two. One, two, three," he counted, the wind listening.

In spite of the counting, with his eyes fixed on the desolation of the prairie, his thoughts on Celia, suddenly he felt himself seized by gusts of violent rage. The desire to dash out his brains against the unyielding wall of his relentless destiny tore him like the fingers of a giant hand.

"One, two. One, two, three," he counted, and between the words came the cry of the child.

If he could only render his mind a blank until it recovered its equilibrium, a ray of sunshine must leak in somewhere.

It must for the sake of the child.

But how was it possible for him to go back to the ghastliness of the dugout, the bereft house, where it was as if the most precious inmate had suddenly died--to the place that had held Celia but would hold her no more!

It was necessary to count very steadily here, to strangle an outcry of despair.

"One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three, four, five."

He could count no further.

The wind, seeing his distress, soughed with a weird sweet sound like aeolian harps in the effort to comfort him, but he dropped the reins and laid his face in the hollow of his arm.

It was the attitude of a woman, grief-stricken.

He had evidently fallen into a lethargy of grief from which he must be aroused.

So thought the wind. It blew a great blast. It whistled loudly as if calling, calling, calling!

Was it the wind or his heart? Was it his Mother Nature, his Guardian Angel, or God?

Again pitifully, distinctly, wailingly, came the cry of the child.

He raised his head, grasped the reins and hurried.

On he went, on and on, faster and faster, until at last he came to the door of the tomb.

He descended into it. He took the child from the arms of Cyclona, who sat by the fire cuddling it, and held it close to his heart.

"He has been crying," she told him, "every single minute since you have been gone. Crying! Crying! No matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't quiet him."