e wind.

She wanted to ask Him why he whirled body-clad souls out of the
Nowhere, dragged them by the hair of their heads through ways thronged
with thorns, then thrust them back again into the Nowhere, to lie
stone still in their chill damp graves, in their straight grave
clothes, awaiting His pleasure?

Why had He seen fit to fashion some all body and no soul?

Why had He made others all soul?

Why had He created the Seths to weary for love of the Celias and the
Cyclonas to eat out their hearts for love of the Seths?

Some of these questions she had been wont to put to Seth, who had
answered them as best he could in his patient way.

There was a hidden meaning in it all, he had said, meaningless as it
often seemed. Some meaning that would show itself in God's good time.

We are uncut diamonds, was one of his explanations. We had much need
of polishing before we could attain sufficient brilliancy to adorn a
crown. We must have faith and hope, he had said. Much faith and hope
and patience. And above all we must have the belief that it would all
come out in the Great White Wash of Eternity, in God's good time.

But there were those who succumbed before God's good time, who would
never know the explanation until they had passed into the Beyond,
where they would cease to care.

She rode on and on, asking herself these questions and finding no
answer in the whirl and eddy of dust blown at her by the wind, in the
limitless stretch of prairie, in the suffocating thickness of heat
which enveloped the way of the wind.

Intense heat. Sultry, parching, enervating, sure precursor, if she had
thought to remember, if she had been less engrossed in the bitterness
of her questionings, of a storm.

Soon, aroused by the intensity of this heat, which burned like the
blast from an oven, she whirled about and turned her broncho's head
the other way.

It was time, for that way lay her home and danger threatened it.

At the moment of her turning a blast blew with trumpet-like warning
into the day, blazing redly like a fire of logs quickened by panting
breaths.

A lurid light, like the light of Judgment Day or the wrath of God
spread while she looked.

It enveloped her.

It was as if she gazed upon earth and sky through a bit of bright red
stained glass.

In the southern skies, in the direction of her home, clouds piled
high, black, threatening.

Then she heard a rushing sound of wind, wailing, moaning, threshing,
roa