The Way of the Wind Part 5

"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 a.s.sent, 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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, encompa.s.sed 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 doctor commenced, "or it might not have happened. There was only one room. It was built of boards and weighed next to nothing, which may have helped to account for it.

"On that particular day the house was situated in the northern part of the State."

He swapped legs.

"But the next day," he resumed. "Well, you can't tell exactly where any house will be the next day in Kansas.

"It was about noon and Cyclona's foster father was out in the cornfield, plowing. The wind, as usual, was blowing a gale. It was a mild gale, sixty miles an hour, so Jonathan did not permit it to interfere with his plowing. The rows were a little uneven because the wind blew the horse sidewise and that naturally dragged the plow out of the furrows, but as one rarely sees a straight row of corn in Kansas, Jonathan was not worried. If he took pains to sow the corn straight, in trim and systematic rows, like as not the wind would blow the seed out of the ground into his neighbor's cornfield, so what was the use?

"Like the horse and plough, Jonathan was walking crooked, bent in the direction of the wind. He seldom walks straight or talks straight for that matter, the wind has had such an effect on him.

"At any rate, leaving out the question of his reasoning which pursues a devious and zigzag course, varying according to the way the wind blows--and he is not alone in this peculiarity in Kansas, as I say--Jonathan steadily toiled against the wind, he stopped altogether, and taking out his lunch basket, he removed a pie and sat down on a log to eat it, while his horse, moving a little further along, propped himself against a cottonwood tree to keep from being entirely blown away, and also rested."

He swapped tobacco wads from one cheek to the other and continued:

"The pie was made of custard, Jonathan said, with meringue on the top.

The meringue blew away, but Jonathan contentedly ate the custard, thankful that the hungry wind had not taken that.

"Mrs. Jonathan had been going about all morning with a dust rag in her hand, wiping the dust from the sills and the furniture.

"So, tired out at last, she had flung herself on the bed and was quietly napping when the cyclone came along.

"Of course, the house and the bed she was lying on were shaken, but Mrs. Jonathan had lived so long in Kansas she couldn't sleep unless the wind rocked the bed.

"She slept all the sounder, therefore, lulled by its whistling and moaning and sobbing, not waking even when Cyclona, this girl they had adopted, opened the door and shut it suddenly with herself on the inside, and a fortunate thing, too, that was for Cyclona, or the cyclone might have left her behind.

"Cyclona, standing by the window, saw it all, the swiftly pa.s.sing landscape, the trees, the cows, as one would look from an observation car on a train.

"The house was at last deposited rather roughly on terra firma and the jar awoke Mrs. Jonathan. She sat up and rubbed her eyes open. Then she looked about her in some alarm.

"The furniture was tumbled together in one corner all in a heap, Jonathan says, and the pictures were topsy turvy. Pictures are never on a level on Kansas walls on account of the winds, so Mrs. Jonathan thought little of this, but the ceiling puzzled her. Instead of arching in the old way, it pointed at her. It was full of s.h.i.+ngles, moreover, like a roof, and the point reached nearly to her head when she sat up in the bed, staring about her.

"'What on earth is the matter?' she asked of Cyclona.

"Cyclona turned away from the window.

"'We have moved,' said she.

"Mrs. Jonathan arose then, and going to the door, opened it and found that what Cyclona had said was true. The scenery was quite different.

It is much further south here, you know, than in the northern part of the State. The gra.s.s was green and the trees, hardly budded at all where she came from, here had full grown leaves.

"There was little or no debris in the path of the cyclone, nearly everything, with the exception of the house, having been dropped before it arrived at that point.

"A few stray cows hung from the branches of the large cottonwood trees, Jonathan says...."

Here the Doctor was interrupted by a man who took his pipe out of his mouth and coughed.

"But they presently dropped on all fours," he continued, "and began to munch on the nice green gra.s.s growing all about them.

"The landscape thus losing all indications of the tornado's effect, a.s.sumed a sylvan aspect which was tranquil in the extreme.

"Not far off stood the horse still hitched to the plough, Jonathan said. The horse had a dazed look, but the plough seemed to be in fit enough condition. One handle, slightly bent, had evidently struck against something on the journey, which gave it a rakish aspect, but that was all."

"Did the horse have its hide on?" asked the man who had coughed.

"So far's I know," the Doctor replied. "Why?"

"Because there's a story goin' the rounds," answered the cougher, "to the effec' that a horse was blown a hundred miles in a cyclone and when they found him he was. .h.i.tched to a tree and skinned."

There was a period of thoughtful silence before the Doctor went on with his story.

"As Mrs. Jonathan looked out the door," he said, "she saw Jonathan walking down the road in her direction. His slice of pie, which he had not had time to finish, was still in his hand.