.

He talked on, trying hard not to let her listless air of incredulity
freeze the marrow of his bones and the blood in his veins, or cut him
so deeply as to destroy his enrooted hope in their splendid future.

Taking her in his arms, partly to hide her cold face from his view and
partly to comfort her, he offered every possible apology for her
unbelief, wrapping her about with his love and tenderness as with a
mantle.

He thought by day of the coming of the child, and dreamed of it by
night, trusting that, whether or not she shared his belief in the
Magic City, when she held it warmly in her arms, that little baby,
his and hers, the homesick look would give place to a look of content,
and the hole in the ground would become to her a home.

CHAPTER V.

[Illustration]

Seth was toiling slowly along a furrow back of his plow, bending
sidewise with the force of the wind, not resentfully that it persisted
in making it so difficult for him to earn his bread, for resentment
was not in his nature, besides which, Seth loved the wind,--but
humming a little tune, something soft and reminiscent about his old
Kentucky home, with its chorus of "Fare you well, my lady," when a
broncho, first a mere speck on the horizon ahead of him, then larger
and larger, rushed out of the wind from across the prairie with
flashing eyes and distended nostrils, and lunged toward him.

At first he thought it was a wild broncho, untamed and riderless; but
as his eyes became accustomed to dust and sunlight, he discovered that
the saddle held a girl.

For the moment she had bent herself to the broncho's mane, which had
the effect, together with the haze produced by the wind-blown dust, of
rendering the animal apparently riderless.

Seth drew up his mule and halted.

At the same time the broncho was jerked with a sudden rein that sent
him back on his haunches, his front feet pawing the air.

His rider, apparently accustomed to this pose, clung to him with the
persistency of a fly to fly paper, righted him, swung herself from the
saddle and stood before Seth, a tall, slim girl of twelve, a girl of
complexion brown as berries, of dark eyes heavily fringed with thick
lashes and dusky hair tinged redly with sunburn. Her hair, one of her
beauties, blew about her ears in tangled curls that were unconfined by
hat or bonnet.

She smiled at him, showing rows of rice-like teeth, of an exaggerated
white in contrast with the sunburn of her fac