ome
to the station.

It was a silent drive; each occupied with individual thoughts running
in separate channels; she glad that her eyes were looking their last
on the wind-lashed prairies blackened by the scourge; he casting about
in his mind for some bait with which to entice her to return.

"You will come back to the child?" he faltered.

But she made no answer.

"If the crops succeed," he ventured, "and I build you a beautiful
house, then will you come back?"

For answer, she gave a scornful glance at the blackened plains,
flowerless, grainless, grassless.

"If the Wise Men come out of the East," it was his last plea, "and
build the Magic City, then you will come back?"

At that she laughed aloud and the wind, to spare him the sound of it,
tossed the laugh quickly out and away with the jeer of its cruel
mockery.

"The Magic City!" she repeated.

She laughed in derision of such violence that she fell to coughing.

"The Magic City!" she reiterated. "The Magic City!"

CHAPTER IX.

[Illustration]

For one mad moment, such as comes to the bravest, Seth's impulse was
to throw himself beneath the wheels of the car that was taking Celia
away from him.

In another he would have lain a crushed and shapeless mass in their
wake; but as he shut his eyes for the leap there came to him
distinctly, pitifully, wailingly, the cry of the child.

Perhaps it came to him in reality across the intervening miles of
wind-blown prairie. Perhaps the wind blew it to him. Who knows? Our
Mother Earth often sends us help in our sorest need in her own way, a
way which oftentimes partakes of mystery.

Perhaps it came only in memory.

However, it served.

He opened his eyes, and the madness had passed.

He pulled himself together dazedly, unfastened the hitch rein of the
mule, mounted awkwardly into the high and ungainly blue cart and
started off in the direction of the cry.

The wind which on the coming trip had appeared to take fiendish
delight in trying to tear Celia's garments to ribbons, now suddenly
died down, for the wind loved Seth.

It had done with Celia. She was gone. But not by one breath would it
add to the grief of Seth. On the contrary, it spent its most dulcet
music in the effort to soothe him. Tenderly as the cooing of a dove it
whispered in his ear, reminding him of the child.

He answered aloud.

"I know," he said. "I had forgotten him. The po' little mothahless
chile!"

And the wind kisse