The Way of the Wind Part 9

With a wild yell it burst the door of the dugout open.

Cyclona put the baby back on the bed, faced the fury of the wind a moment, then cried out to it:

"Why can't you behave?"

Then she shut the door and placed a chair against it, taking the baby up and again walking it back and forth, up and down and back and forth.

"It's just tryin' itself," she repeated.

Again she endeavored with the coo of the lullaby to entice the child into forgetting the wind.

But the wind was not to be forgotten. It turned into a tornado.

Failing of its effort to tear off the roof of the dugout, it stormed tempestuously, fretfully; it raved, it grumbled, it groaned.

It screamed aloud with a fury not to be appeased or a.s.suaged.

Cyclona had taken her seat in the rocking chair near the hearth. She had laid the crying child in every possible position, across her knee face down, sitting on one of her knees, her hand to his back with gentle pats, and over her shoulder.

All to no avail. It seemed as if the child would never quit sobbing.

The sense of her helplessness joined with pity for his distress saddened her to tears.

She was very tired. She had had charge of the child since early morning, when Seth, compelled to attend to his work in the fields, had left him to her.

She bent forward and looked out the window where the long fingers of the ragged rosebush, torn by the wind, tapped ceaselessly at the pane.

"Wind," she implored. "Stop blowing. Don't you know the little baby's mother has gone away? Don't you know the little baby hasn't any mother now; that she's left him and gone away?"

It seemed that the wind had not thought of it in this way. Occupied only with Celia's departure, it had not considered the desolation it had caused.

The long lithe fingers of the twigs ceased their tapping.

The wind sobbed fitfully a moment, little sad remorseful penitential sobs, and died away softly across the prairie as a breath of May.

The stillness which ensued was so deep and restful that the eyes of the child involuntarily closed. Cyclona pressed his little body close to her, his head in the hollow of her arm. She rocked him back and forth gently, singing:

"Sleep, baby, sleep," the words coming slowly, she was so tired.

"The big stars are the sheep, The little ... stars ... are ... the lambs, I guess.

The moon ... is ... the ... shepher ... dess, Sleep, Baby ...

Sleep ..."

Her eyes closed. She nodded, still rocking gently back and forth.

After a long time Seth pushed open the door and looked in.

He set back the chair and came tip-toeing forward.

Cyclona raised her head and looked at him dreamily.

"Hus.h.!.+" she whispered. "Be very quiet ... He has gone to sleep."

CHAPTER XI.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"Brumniagen" is a name given to those wares which, having no use for them at home, England s.h.i.+ps to other countries. The term, however, is not applied to one leading export of this sort: the scores of younger sons of impoverished n.o.blemen who are packed off to the wilds of Australia or to the Great Desert of America, to finish sowing their wild oats in remote places, where such agriculture is not so overdone as it is in England.

This economic movement resulted in a neighbor for Jonathan and Seth, a young, blue-eyed, well-built Englishman, whose name was Hugh Walsingham.

Jonathan walked out of his topsy turvy house one day to find the claim just north of his pre-empted by the young man who was evidently a tenderfoot, since his fair complexion had not yet become tanned by the ceaseless winds.

Walsingham had staked out the claim, and was busily engaged in excavating a cave in which he purposed to dwell.

Jonathan, never busy himself, lent a helping-hand, and he and Walsingham at once became friends.

The outdoor life of the prairie pleased Walsingham, the abundance of game rejoiced him. An excellent shot, his dugout was soon filled with heads of antelope, while the hide of a buffalo const.i.tuted the covering for his floor.

Surrounded by an atmosphere of sobriety, for even at that early date the fad of temperance had fastened itself upon Kansas, he became by and by of necessity a hard working farmer, tilling the soil from morning till night in the struggle to earn his salt.

There are not many women on the prairies now. Then they were even more scarce. It was not long before his admiring eyes centered themselves upon Cyclona. He fell to wondering why it was that she appeared to consider her own home so excellent a place to stay away from.

Personally he would consider the topsy turvy house a good and sufficient reason for continued absence, but according to his English ideas a girl should love her own roof whether it was right side up or inverted.

The thought of this brown-skinned girl of the rapt and steadfast gaze remained with him. It was, he explained to himself, the look one finds in the eyes of sailors accustomed to the limitless reach of the monotonous seas; it came from the constant contemplation of desert wastes ending only in skylines, of sunlit domes dust-besprinkled, of night skies scattered thick with dusty stars.

His interest grew to the extent that he issued from his dugout early of mornings in order to see her depart for her mysterious destination.

He waited at unseemly hours in the vicinity of Jonathan's curious dwelling to behold her as she came back home.

On one of these occasions, when he was turning to go, after watching her throw the saddle on her broncho, fasten the straps, leap into the saddle and speed away, to be swallowed up by the distances, Jonathan came out of the topsy turvy house and found him.

"Walk with me awhile," implored Walsingham, a sudden sense of the loneliness of the prairie having come upon him with the vanis.h.i.+ng of the girl.

Jonathan, always ready to idle, filled his pipe and walked with him.

"Who is the girl?" asked Hugh.

"She is a little girl we adopted," explained Jonathan. "I don't know who she is or where she came from. Her mother blew away in a cyclone.

That is all I know about her."

"A pretty girl," commented Hugh.

"And a mighty good girl," added Jonathan. "I don't know what we'd do without her."