now as he walked slowly with the
heavy stride of the clumsy farmer, hoeing the corn.

And he had not heard the whip-poor-will, nor sat under the shade of
the wide spreading oaks, nor listened to the soft Southern talk of his
and her people, not since he had come to Kansas with those other
foolish folk to brave the dangers of the strange new country in the
search of homes.

Homes!

He could point out the graves of some of them here and there about the
vastness of the level prairies, though more often he wandered across
the vast level wastes, looking for the places where they should be and
found them not, because of the buffaloes that had long ago trampled
out the shape of them, or because of the corn that had been planted in
furrows above their mounds, the serried ranks through which the wind
sang requiems, chanting, whispering, moaning and sighing in the balmy
springtime and through the heat of the long summer days until in the
chill of the autumn the farmers cut the stalks and stacked them
evenly, leaving no dangling leaves to sigh through nor tassels to
flout.

Now that he had made up his mind, the roughness of his life bore in
upon him.

He thought with Celia that it would be good to live again in a land
where people led soft, easy lives. She was not to be blamed. She was
right with that strange animal instinct which leads some women blindly
to the truth, and he had wasted the best years of his life and all of
the boy's in this terrible land of whirlwinds and coyotes and wide,
thirsty plains stretching to meet the blazing skies of noonday or the
star-gemmed dome of the purple night.

For the plains in some strange and mysterious way took vengeance upon
many of those who dared upturn with hoe and plough the fresh new
malarial soil, inserting germs of disease and death which soon
stretched them beneath.

Some lives must invariably be sacrificed to the upbuilding of any new
country, but why so many? And, sadder still, minds had been
sacrificed. The asylums, such as they were, were filled with those
whose minds in the ghastly loneliness of the desert had been torn and
turned and twisted by the incessant whirl and shirr and swish and
force of the pitiless winds.

He himself loved the wind, but there were times when he was afraid of
it, when it got in his brain and whirled and caused him to see things
in strange lights and weird, things fantastically colored,
kaleidoscopic and upside down.

When the day's wo