"Good fair-weather wives," nodded the Post Mistress, "but look out for storms. That"s when they desert."
"It"s a sweeping a.s.sertion," mused the Professor, "and not quite fair.
It is impossible to judge them all by this weak creature, Celia Lawson. Many a woman in Kentucky braved dangers, cold, hunger and wild animals, living in log huts as these women live in their dugouts, before that State was settled and civilized."
"Some won"t give in that it is civilized," objected the Post Mistress, "they"re so given down there to killin" people."
"The only difference," went on the Professor, "was in the animals.
They had bears. We have buffaloes. But sometimes you come across a woman who isn"t cut out for a pioneer woman, and all the training in the world won"t make her one. It"s the way with Seth"s wife."
"She"s not only weak and incapable," vowed the Post Mistress, "but soulless and heartless."
"How these women love each other," the Professor commented.
""Tain"t that," flared the Post Mistress. "I"m as good a friend to a woman as another woman can be...."
"Just so," the Professor smiled.
"It"s my theory," frowned the Post Mistress, "that women should stand by women and men by men...."
"Your Theory," mused the Professor.
"And I practice it," declared the Post Mistress. "Only in this case I can"t. n.o.body could. What sort of woman is she, anyway? I can"t understand her. She"s rid of him and the child and the wind and the weather. She"s back there where they say it"s cool in the summer-time and warm in the winter, where the cold blasts don"t blow, and the hot winds don"t blister, and still she can"t take time to sit down and write a little note to the father of her child."
She looked away from the window and Seth to the Professor, who wondered why it was he had never before observed the beauty of her humid eyes.
"I can"t bear to see him walking up and down," she complained, "waitin" and waitin". It disgusts you with woman-kind."
The wind blew the shutter to with a bang. It flung it open again. Some twigs of a tree outside tapped at the pane. A whistle sounded.
Seth turned glad eyes in the direction of the sound. The train!
There was the usual bustle. A man brought in a bag of letters, flung it down, sped out and made a flying leap for the train, which was beginning to move on. The Post Mistress busied herself with distributing the mail and Seth walked back and forth, waiting.
Presently he came in at the door, stood at the grated window back of which she sorted out the letters and then went out again.
After a time he drove slowly by the house in the high blue cart.
"Was there anything for him?" asked the Professor.
The Post Mistress looked after the cart receding into a cloud of dust blown up by the wind and brushed her fingers across her eyes.
"There was nothing for him," she said.
CHAPTER XIV.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
On the winter following Celia"s departure, Seth fared ill.
It was all he could do to keep warmth in the boy"s body and his own, to get food for their nourishment.
And as for homesickness!
There were nights when he looked at the silver moon, half effaced by wind-blown clouds, and fought back the tears, thinking how that same moon was shining down on home and her.
Nights when he fell into very pleasant dreams of that tranquil beauteous and pleasant country where the wind did not blow. Dreams in which he beheld flowers, not ragged wind-torn flowers of a parched and ragged prairie, odorless, colorless flowers and tumbleweeds tossing weirdly over dusty plains, but flowers of his youth, Four o"Clocks, Marguerites and Daffy-Down-Dillies, nodding bloomily on either side of an old brick walk leading from door to gate, Jasmine hanging redolently from lattice, Virginia Creeper and Pumpkin-vine.
And oh!
A radiant dream! Celia, walking out through vine and flower in all her fresh young beauty to meet him as in the old days, to open wide the door and welcome him.
Then as she had done, he waked sobbing, man though he was, but he hushed his sobs for fear of waking the child.
Homesickness!
He dared not dwell on the word lest his few ideas, scattered already by the sough of the wind, the incessant moan and sob and wail of the wind, might blow away altogether; lest he throw to those winds his pride of independence, his resolute determination to make a home for her and himself and their child in the West, and go back to her.
This, whatever dreams a.s.sailed him, he resolved not to do.
And yet there was one dream which he thrust from him fiercely, afraid of it, turning pale at the remembrance of it. A dream of a night on that winter when he had gone to bed hungry.
It was a strange dream and terrible.
He thought it was night, he was out on the prairie, and the wolves were following him.
They had caught him.
Ravenously they were tearing the flesh from his body in shreds.
He waked in terror to hear the bark of a pack at his door, for in that winter of bitter cold the wolves also suffered.
"Was that to be his fate?" he asked himself.
Was he to strive and strive, to spend his life in striving, and then in the working out of destiny, in the survival of the fittest, of the stronger over the weaker, of those who are able to devour over those destined to be devoured, fall prey to the fangs of animals hungrier than he and stronger?
There were times when he was very tired. When almost he was ready to fold his arms, to give up the fight and say--
"So be it."
But what of the boy then?
Raising himself out of the slough of despond, he resolutely re-fed his soul with hope.
Those Wise Men! If only they could come! If only they could be made to see and understand that this was the place for their Magic City and be persuaded to build it here!