awns, his mind going back to the scorched and parched
grasses of the prairie.

How quiet it was! How windless. There came to him the memory of the
wind as it soothed him that day of Celia's home coming. He had not
hated the wind. He had loved it. There came also the memory of the
wind as it soughed around the dugout on those lonely nights, when he
and Cyclona had planned the beautiful house for Celia. In a flash of
light he seemed to see Cyclona.

With this rose by his side, he had gone sighing after the roses of
memory.

He arose and began to walk up and down, up and down to the gate and
back, to the gate and back, thinking of Cyclona and the wind. A
restlessness began to possess him, a longing for the sound of the
wind, for the sound of the voice of Cyclona which had mingled from the
first, from first to last, with the sound of the wind. The windless
stillness oppressed him. He stopped at the gate and looked again
across at the quiet grass of the still, dim lawns, then he walked
back into the house, along the hall and up into the low-roofed garret,
which had been set apart for him by Celia.

He closed the door of the garret very carefully behind him. He walked
to the window and looked out. The stillness weighed upon him. If only
he could run into the wind! If only he could hear again its wail, its
sob, its grief, its moaning.

Oh, no. It was impossible to tell Celia that he no longer had work. He
had no courage to face the steel blue of her eye.

Impossible, too, to face the sarcastic whittlers of the little sticks
who sat around the corner grocery in the morning, he who was to have
conquered the West and build the Magic City. They were total strangers
to him. All his old friends in the town seemed to be dead.

He took a pistol down from the shelf and looked at it. He turned it
around and around, the dim light coming in at the window playing on
it. Since the first night of his arrival he had had it ready.

"A man who cannot earn his salt," he said softly, "encumbers the
earth."

He held the thing, playing with it. He smiled as he played with it. He
went to the window and stood for a long while, looking out, thinking
of Cyclona, thinking very lovingly of Cyclona, that beautiful girl who
had cared for him and the child. He would like to see Cyclona once
more before,--but that was impossible. In the other world, perhaps.

God was not to blame. How could He look after so many? If he put them
here with all the