ility.

"Wait," he cried. "I will go with you."

So he took Cyclona's rein and led her broncho over the prairie to
Celia's door, the girl, laughing at the idea of being led, chattering
from her saddle like any magpie.

He knocked at Celia's door and soon her face, white, Southern,
aristocratic, in sharp contrast with the sunburned cheek and wild eye
of Cyclona, appeared.

He waved a rough hand toward Cyclona, sitting astride her broncho, a
child of the desert, untamed as a coyote, an animated bronze of the
untrammelled West emphasized by the highlights of sunshine glimmering
on curl and dimple, on broncho mane and hoof, and backed by the
brilliancy of sky, the far away line of the horizon and the howl of
the wind.

"Look!" he called to her exultantly, in the voice of the prairies,
necessarily elevated in defiance of the wind, "I have brought a little
girl to keep you company."

CHAPTER VI.

[Illustration]

It was in this way that Cyclona blew into their lives and came to be
something of a companion to Celia, though, realizing that the girl was
a distinct outgrowth of the country she so detested, she never came to
care for her with that affection which she had felt for her Southern
girl friends. The kindly interest which most women, settled in life,
feel for the uncertain destiny of every girl child bashfully budding
into womanhood was absent.

It is to be doubted if Celia possessed a kindly heart to begin with,
added to which there was nothing of the self-conscious bud about
Cyclona. She was ignorant of her beauty as a prairie rose. Strange as
her life had been, encompassed about by cyclones, the episode of her
moving as told by the gray-haired doctor at the corner grocery was
stranger.

"The house was little," the doctor commenced, "or it might not have
happened. There was only one room. It was built of boards and weighed
next to nothing, which may have helped to account for it.

"On that particular day the house was situated in the northern part of
the State."

He swapped legs.

"But the next day," he resumed. "Well, you can't tell exactly where
any house will be the next day in Kansas.

"It was about noon and Cyclona's foster father was out in the
cornfield, plowing. The wind, as usual, was blowing a gale. It was a
mild gale, sixty miles an hour, so Jonathan did not permit it to
interfere with his plowing. The rows were a little uneven because the
wind blew the horse sidewise and that nat