The Way of the Wind | Page 9

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."
CHAPTER VI.
[Illustration]
It was in this way that Cyclona blew into their lives and came to be
something of a companion to Celia, though, realizing that the girl was a
distinct outgrowth of the country she so detested, she never came to
care for her with that affection which she had felt for her Southern girl
friends. The kindly interest which most women, settled in life, feel for
the uncertain destiny of every girl child bashfully budding into
womanhood was absent.
It is to be doubted if Celia possessed a kindly heart to begin with,
added to which there was nothing of the self-conscious bud about
Cyclona. She was ignorant of her beauty as a prairie rose. Strange as
her life had been, encompassed about by cyclones, the episode of her
moving as told by the gray-haired doctor at the corner grocery was
stranger.
"The house was little," the