d his cheek, its breath sweet as a girl's, caressing
him, urging him over the vastness of the prairie to the child.

On the road to the station, Seth's mind had been filled with Celia to
the exclusion of all else. He had not observed the devastation of the
prairie.

Unlike her, his heart held no hatred for the wayward winds. They were
of heaven. He loved them. Fierce they were at times, it was true,
claws that clutched at his heart; but at other times they were gentle
fingers running through his hair.

Their natures were opposite as the poles, his and hers.

The prairies were her detestation. He loved them.

He inherited the traits of his ancestors, the sturdy Kentucky pioneers
who had lived in log huts and felled the forests in settling the
country. Something not yet tamed within him loved the little wild
things that had their homes in the prairie grasses:

The riotous birds, the bright-colored insects, the prairie dogs in
their curious towns, sitting on their haunches at the doors of their
little dugouts, so similar to his own, and barking, then running at
whistle or crack of whip into the holes to their odd companions, the
owls and the rattlesnakes; the herds of antelope emerging from the
skyline and brought down to equally diminutive size by the infinite
distance, disappearing into the skyline mysteriously as they had come.

But now he looked out on the prairie with a sigh.

It was like a familiar face disfigured by a burn, scarred and almost
unrecognizable.

The prairie in loneliness is similar to the sea.

In one wide circle it stretches from horizon to horizon.

It stretched about him far as the eye could reach, scorched and
hideous as the ruin of his life.

He shut his eyes. He dared not look out on the ruin of his life. What
if the ghastly spectacle should turn his brain?

That had been known to happen among the prairie folk time out of
number. Many a brain stupefied by the lonely life of the dugout, the
solemn, often portentous grandeur of the great blue dome, under which
the pioneers crawled so helplessly, had been blown zigzag by the wild
buffetings of the wayward, wanton winds, punctuating the dread
loneliness so insistently, so incessantly, so diabolically by its
staccato preludes, by its innuendoes of interludes prestissimo, by its
finales frantically furious and fiendishly calculated to frighten the
soul and tear the bewildered and weakened brain from its pedestal.

The reproach of the t