ey lay before Seth's tearless eyes, a blackened
ruin.

Was it against God's wish that they make their feeble effort to
cultivate the plains, those poor pioneer people, that He must send a
scourge of such horror upon them?

Or had He forsaken the people and the country, as Celia had said?

Seth walked late along the ruin of the fields, not talking aloud to
God as was his wont when troubled, silent rather as a child upon whom
some sore punishment has been inflicted for he knows not what, silent,
brooding, heartsick with wondering, and above all, afraid to go back
and face the chill of Celia's look and the scorn of her eye.

But what one must do one must do, and back he went finally, opened
the badly hung door and stood within, his back to it, with the air of
a culprit, responsible alike for the terror of the winds, the scourge
of the grasshoppers and the harshness of God.

"As a man," she said slowly, her blue eyes shining with their clear
cold look of cut steel through slits of half-shut white lids, the
words dropping distinctly, clearly, relentlessly, that he might not
forget them, that he might remember them well throughout the endless
years of desert life that were to follow, "you ah a failuah."

He hung his head.

"You ah right," he said.

For though he had not actually gone after the grasshoppers and brought
them in a deadly swarm to destroy his harvest, he had enticed her to
the plains it seemed for the purpose of witnessing the destruction.

"You ah right," he reiterated.

In the night Celia dreamed of home and the blue-grass hills and the
whip-poor-wills and the mocking birds that sang through the moonlight
from twilight till dawn.

Sobbing in her sleep, she waked to hear the demoniacal shriek of the
tireless wind and the howl of a coyote, and wept, refusing to be
comforted.

The next day she said to Seth firmly and conclusively:

"I am goin' home."

CHAPTER VIII.

[Illustration]

To do her justice, Celia would have taken the child with her; but
young as he was, Seth refused to give him up. He would buy a little
goat, he said, feed the baby on its milk and look after him.

At heart he said to himself that he would hold the child as ransom.
Surely, if love for him failed, love for the little one would draw the
mother back to the hole in the ground.

He found Cyclona and implored her to keep the child while he hitched
up the cart and drove the mother away over the same road she had c