d forth,
sobbing.

God had spared her, true, but He had offered her this delicate irony
of leaving her homeless.

Hugh looked moodily out over the place of the topsy turvy house, his
own mind awhirl with the maddening force of the furious winds through
which he had passed.

"In Kansas," said he, grimly, "it is the wind that giveth and the wind
that taketh away."

Then, looking tenderly at the girl in his arms, he added softly:
"Blessed be the name of the wind!"

CHAPTER XXI.

[Illustration]

Thereafter at station after station, a tall, gaunt man may have been
seen handling baggage, running errands, caring for the cattle, doing
any sort of work, no matter how humble, that lay to his hand, making
his way slowly, wearily but steadily on toward the South.

Seth, working his way home to Celia.

He slept in baggage cars, on cattle trains. He swung to steps of
trains moved off and clung there between brief stations. He stopped
over at small towns and earned his bread at odd jobs, bread and
sufficient money sometimes to move on steadily for a day or two.

Strange weathers burned and bit him. He walked heavily in the path of
the wind overhung by pale clouds. He slept under the stars out in the
open.

It was days before he passed the plains, the place of the sleepless
winds where wan white skies bent above the grass of the hot dry
pulse, the lifeless grass that wailed into the ceaseless wind its
dirge of death and decay.

It was weeks before he reached Kansas City, the city of hills, with
lights hung high and lights hung low. Here he found a place as
brakeman and worked his way into Missouri.

Here it was as if an ocean steamer had suddenly stopped the whir of
its wheels at the approach of the pilot come out from shore to tug it
in.

The wind had stopped blowing.

The position was only temporary. Another brakeman taking his place,
Seth walked.

He was not sorry to walk in this quiet land. How tenderly green the
shrubbery was, how beautiful! Mingled with the darker green of the
cedar and pine, the brown green of the cone.

How sweet the slow green trees! Not windswept! Not torn by the wild,
wet fingers of the wind, not lashed with hot and scathing fingers gone
dry with drought, but still and peaceful.

A sleepy world of streams it was, a sleepy world of streams and sweet
green trees among whose leaflets gentle zephyrs breathed scarcely
perceptible sighs of pure contentment.

Patiently, contente