"Po" little gurl," he said. "Afraid, and tiahd, too. Travelin" so fah.
Of cose, she"s tiahd!"
And with loving hands, tender as a mother"s, he helped her undress and laid her on the rough bed of straw, covered with sheets of the coa.r.s.est, wishing it might be a bed of down covered with silks, wishing they were back in the days of enchantment that he might change it into a couch fit for a Princess by the wave of a wand.
Then he left her a moment, and walking out under the wind-blown stars he looked up at them reverently and said aloud:
(For in the dreary deserts of loneliness one often learns to talk aloud very openly and confidentially to G.o.d, since people are so scarce and far away:)
"Tempah the wind to this po" shiverin" lam, deah Fathah!"
Then with a fanatic devotion, he added:
"And build the Magic City!"
CHAPTER IV.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
Upon each trip to the station for provision or grain Seth met with tail ends of cyclones, or heard of rumors of those that had just pa.s.sed through, or were in process of pa.s.sing, strange enough stories of capers cut by the fantastic winds.
He told these tales to Celia with a vein of humor meant to cheer her, but which had an opposite effect. Love blinded, he failed to see that the nervous laughs with which she greeted them were a sign of terror rather than amus.e.m.e.nt.
One night, he related, after a day whose sultriness had been almost unendurable, a girl had stood at the door to her dugout, bidding her sweetheart good night. She opened the door, he stepped outside, and a cyclone happening to pa.s.s that way, facetiously caught him into the atmosphere and carried him away somewhere, she never knew where.
Strewn in the path of that cyclone were window-sashes, doors, shingles, hair mattresses, remnants of chimneys, old iron, bones, rags, rice, old shoes and dead bodies; but not the body of her blue-eyed sweetheart.
For many months she grieved for him, dismally garbed in c.r.a.pe, which was extremely foolish of her, some said, for all she knew he might still be in the land of the living. Possibly the cyclone had only dropped him into another county where, likely as not, he was by this time making love to another girl.
But though she mourned and mourned and waited and waited for the wild winds to bring him back, or another in his place, none came.
"They"ve got to tie strings to their sweethearts in this part of the country," the old gray-haired man at the corner grocery had said, "if they want to keep them."
Another playful cyclone had s.n.a.t.c.hed up a farmer who wore red and white striped socks. The cyclone had blown all the red out of the socks, the story teller had said, so that when they found the farmer flattened against a barn door as if he had been pasted there, his socks were white as if they had never contained a suspicion of red.
They had turned white, no doubt, through fright.
Evidently knives had flown promiscuously about in another cyclone, he said. Hogs had been cut in two and chickens carved, ready for the table.
There were demons at work as well as knives.
A girl was engaged to be married. All her wedding finery had been made. Dainty, it was, too; so dainty that she laid it carefully away in a big closet in a distant wing of the house, far from the profane stare of strange eyes. She made discreet pilgrimages to look at those dainty things so dear to her, lingerie white and soft and fine, satin slippers, fans, gloves and a wedding gown of dazzling snowiness.
The day was set for the wedding. Unfortunately--how could she know that?--the same day was set for a cyclone.
The girl could almost hear the peal of the wedding bells; when along came the tornado, rushing, roaring, shrieking like mad, and grasping that wing of the house, that special and precious wing containing her trousseau, bore it triumphantly off.
A silk waist was found in one county, but the skirt to match it lay in another, many miles away. Her beplumed hat floated in a pool of disfiguring water, her long suede gloves lay in a ditch and her white satin wedding slippers, alas, hung by their tiny heels at the top of a tree in a neighboring township, the only tree in the entire surrounding county, put there, in all probability, to catch and hold them for her.
Naturally, the wedding was postponed until new wedding finery could be prepared, but alas! A man"s will is the wind"s will!
By the time the second trousseau was well on the way, the affections of the girl"s sweetheart had wafted away and wound themselves about another girl.
Here and there the prairie farmers had planted out trees in rows and clumps, taking tree claims from the Government for that purpose.
In many instances cyclones had bent these prospective forests double in their extreme youth, leaving them to grow that way, leaning heavily forward in the att.i.tude of old men running.
Of course, there were demons. G.o.d could have nothing to do with their devilments, Seth said. Seth had great belief in G.o.d.
One had maliciously torn up all the churches in a town by the roots, turned them upside down and stuck their steeples in the ground as if in mockery of religion.
"Why do you call them cyclones?" the old man at the corner grocery had asked. "They are not cyclones. They are tornadoes."
And this old man who had once been a doctor of medicine in an Eastern village and who was therefore learned, though he had been persuaded by some Wise men to go West and grow up with the Fools, went on to explain the difference.
"A cyclone," he said, "is miles and miles in width. It sweeps across the prairie screeching and screaming, but doing not so very much damage as it might do, just getting on the nerves of the people and helping to drive them insane. That is all.
"Then along comes a hailstone. It drops into the southeast corner of this cyclone and there you are! It generates a tornado and That is the Thing that rends the Universe."
Seth had listened to these stories undismayed; for what had they to do with his ranch and the Magic City upon which it was to be built?
A cyclone would never come to the forks of two rivers. The Indians had said so.
Tradition had it that an old squaw whose name was Wichita had bewitched the spot with her incantations, defying the wind to touch the ground on which she had lived and died.
It must have been that this old squaw still occupied the spot, that her phantom still stooped over seething kettles, or stalked abroad in the darkness, or chanted dirges to the slap and pat of the grim war dance of the Indians; for the winds, growing frightened, had let the forks of the river alone.
Seth was very careful to relate this to Celia, to reiterate it to this fearful Celia who started up so wildly out of her sleep at the maniacal shriek of the wind. Very tenderly he whispered the rea.s.surance and promise of protection against every blast that blew, thus soothing her softly back to slumber, after which he lay awake, watching her lest she wake again and wishing he might still the Universe while she slept.
He redoubled his care of her by night and by day, doing the work of the dugout before he began the work of the fields, not only bending over the tubs early in the morning for fear such bending might hurt her, but hanging out the clothes on the line for fear the fierce and vengeful wind might tan her beautiful complexion and tangle the fine soft yellow of her hair.
For the same reason, he brought in the clothes after the day"s labor was over, and ironed them. He also did the simple cooking in order to protect her beauty from blaze of log and twinkle of twig.
If he could he would have hushed the noise of the world for love of her.
And yet, day after day, coming home from his work in the fields, he found her at the door of their dugout, peering after the east-bound train, trailing so far away as to seem a toy train, with a look of longing that struck cold to his heart.
His affection counted as nothing. His care was wasted. In spite of which he was full of apologies for her.
Other women, making these crude caves into homes for themselves and their children, had found contentment, but they were women of a different fibre.
He would not have her of a different and coa.r.s.er fibre, this exquisite Southern creature, charming, delicate, set like a rare exotic in the humble window of his hut.
It was not her fault. It was 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.