s of cyclones, or heard of rumors of those that had just
passed through, or were in process of passing, strange enough stories
of capers cut by the fantastic winds.

He told these tales to Celia with a vein of humor meant to cheer her,
but which had an opposite effect. Love blinded, he failed to see that
the nervous laughs with which she greeted them were a sign of terror
rather than amusement.

One night, he related, after a day whose sultriness had been almost
unendurable, a girl had stood at the door to her dugout, bidding her
sweetheart good night. She opened the door, he stepped outside, and a
cyclone happening to pass that way, facetiously caught him into the
atmosphere and carried him away somewhere, she never knew where.

Strewn in the path of that cyclone were window-sashes, doors,
shingles, hair mattresses, remnants of chimneys, old iron, bones,
rags, rice, old shoes and dead bodies; but not the body of her
blue-eyed sweetheart.

For many months she grieved for him, dismally garbed in crape, which
was extremely foolish of her, some said, for all she knew he might
still be in the land of the living. Possibly the cyclone had only
dropped him into another county where, likely as not, he was by this
time making love to another girl.

But though she mourned and mourned and waited and waited for the wild
winds to bring him back, or another in his place, none came.

"They've got to tie strings to their sweethearts in this part of the
country," the old gray-haired man at the corner grocery had said, "if
they want to keep them."

Another playful cyclone had snatched up a farmer who wore red and
white striped socks. The cyclone had blown all the red out of the
socks, the story teller had said, so that when they found the farmer
flattened against a barn door as if he had been pasted there, his
socks were white as if they had never contained a suspicion of red.
They had turned white, no doubt, through fright.

Evidently knives had flown promiscuously about in another cyclone, he
said. Hogs had been cut in two and chickens carved, ready for the
table.

There were demons at work as well as knives.

A girl was engaged to be married. All her wedding finery had been
made. Dainty, it was, too; so dainty that she laid it carefully away
in a big closet in a distant wing of the house, far from the profane
stare of strange eyes. She made discreet pilgrimages to look at those
dainty things so dear to her, lingerie white