The Way of the Wind | Page 8

his. It was his place to turn the hut into a
palace for his Queen; and so he would, when the Wise Men came out of
the East and built the Magic City.

When the Fools had made the plains a fit place for human beings to
inhabit, planting trees to draw down the reluctant rain from the clouds,
sowing seed and raising crops sometimes, to their surprise and the
amazement of those who heard of it, the Wise Men would appear and
buy the land, and the building of great cities would begin.
Already they had reared a town that dared approach in size to a city on
the edge of the desert, but what had happened?
An angry cyclone, hearing of it, had come along and snatched it into
the clouds.
Furious at sight of its spick and span newness, its yellow frame shanties
and shining shingles, it had carried it off as if it had been a hen coop
and set it down somewhere in Texas, a state that had been longer
settled and was therefore a better place for houses and fences, and left it
there.
Then the Wise Men, growing discouraged, had gone away.
But they would come again, he promised himself. They would come
again. They must. Not to pass through in long vestibule trains whose
sparks out of pure fiendishness lighted the furious prairie fires that were
so hard to put out, smothering the innocent occupants of the dugouts in
their sleep and burning their grain. Not to gaze wild-eyed through the
shining windows of these splendid cars as they passed on and on to
some more promising unwind-blown country, to build there their
beautiful cities of marble and of stone.
They would come to stay.
When?
Why, when they should find a spot unvisited by cyclones, and that spot
would be in the place of their dugout at the forks of these two rivers,
the Big Arkansas and the Little Arkansas, the little river that had real
water trickling along its shallow bed year in and year out, and the Big
river whose bed was dry as a bone all the year round until June, when

the melting snows of the Rockies sent the water down in floods.
In fierce, uncontrollable and pitiless floods to drown the crops that had
been spared by the chinch bugs, the grasshoppers and the Hot Winds.
All this Seth told Celia, finishing with his old rapturous picture of the
glory of the Magic City, which he called after the old witch who had
driven the winds from the forks of the rivers, Wichita.
He talked on, trying hard not to let her listless air of incredulity freeze
the marrow of his bones and the blood in his veins, or cut him so
deeply as to destroy his enrooted hope in their splendid future.
Taking her in his arms, partly to hide her cold face from his view and
partly to comfort her, he offered every possible apology for her
unbelief, wrapping her about with his love and tenderness as with a
mantle.
He thought by day of the coming of the child, and dreamed of it by
night, trusting that, whether or not she shared his belief in the Magic
City, when she held it warmly in her arms, that little baby, his and hers,
the homesick look would give place to a look of content, and the hole
in the ground would become to her a home.
CHAPTER V.
[Illustration]
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