rk was done he sat outside the dugout talking
sometimes to himself, sometimes to Cyclona, telling of how when the
harvest was over and gathered he would go back home.

His plan must succeed, he sighed, to himself sometimes, sometimes to
Cyclona, who would sit listening, her great eyes on the limit of the
horizon, deep, dark, troubled as she brooded upon what her life would
be when he was gone; and as he talked he panted in the deep
earnestness of his insistence that the crops must succeed.

Other plans had failed, but not this. Not this! It must not!
Resolutely he put away from him all thought of failure. It must
succeed. He must go home!

He must ease this longing for the sight of Celia and her people which
had come to him of late to stay with him through seed-time and
harvest, through the early spring when the corn was young, and later
when it rose to heights unheard of, and later still through those
bitter days of grasshoppers and chinch bugs and hot winds and other
blightful things that haunt the Kansas cornfield to their ruin.

He must go home.

CHAPTER XIX.

[Illustration]

Since Seth had braved everything and dared everything, going so far
even as to hire harvest hands to help him, taking every possible
chance upon the yield of this harvest, as a gambler stakes his all
upon the last throw of the dice, fortune seemed at last to come his
way, and it promised a yield which eclipsed his wildest dreaming.

His heart grew light as he listened to the rustling of the corn and
into his tired eyes, beginning to be old, there crept so warm a glow
that the farm hands stood and stared at him as they came trooping in
hot and dusty from the fields.

They wondered what could have come over him to give to his worn and
faded face so nearly the look of youth.

"The corn is fine, John, isn't it?" he asked of a gray-haired man who
sat at one corner of the rough table, mopping his forehead with a
large bandana handkerchief, not too clean.

John put the handkerchief back into his pocket and fell upon the meal
Seth set before him.

"It's fine enough," said he, "it'll be the finest crop ever raised in
these here parts if the hot winds don't come."

After a little while he said again:

"If the hot winds don't come."

Seth set a plate of bread down by him with a crash.

"The hot winds!" he cried. "The hot winds!"

Man as he was he clasped his hands together and caught them apart,
wringing them.

"I had forg