rt on his journey.

Outside the dugout the wind enveloped him softly, enticingly, kissing
his curls, kissing the rosy sunburn, the tender down of his cheek
which still retained the kissable outline of babyhood.

It was day when he started, broad day, bright with the light of the
red sun high in the heavens, surrounded by the brilliant hue of
cloudless skies.

The boy ran.

The wind tossed him like a plaything as it tossed the big round
tumbleweeds, making the pace for him a little beyond.

Now and again, broad day though it was, the wind blew blasts that
frightened him, dying down immediately again into piping Pan-like
whispers that lured him on and on until he became a mere speck on the
trackless prairie, blown by alternate blasts and zephyrs, hurrying,
hurrying, hurrying to the heart of the wind to find his mother.

But by and by the sun sank, dropping suddenly into the Nowhere behind
the darkling line of the mysterious horizon.

Then the twilight seeped softly over the prairie, like a drop of ink
spilt over a blotter.

A little while later and the prairie became obscurely shadowy, peopled
all at once by frightful things, familiar everyday things changed to
hideous hobgoblins by the chrism of the dark.

Grasses with long human fingers beckoned him to the Unknown, which is
always terrible, while great ever-moving tumbleweeds sprang up at him
as if from underground, like enormous heads of resurrected giants.

And the voice of the wind!

As he neared the heart of it, it, too, took on an unknown quantity
more terrible than the bugaboo of the shadows and the dark.

It howled with the howl of wolves.

The child began to be afraid. Pantingly, wildly afraid!

He stood still, looking breathlessly ahead of him to where the prairie
stretched indefinitely to the rim of the starlit dome, billowy with
long gray grasses blown into the semblance of fingers by the bellowing
blasts of the fearsome wind.

He sobbed, he was now so far from home, and the voice of the wind had
taken on a menacing note of such deep subtleness.

Which way was home? He had forgotten. The way the wind blew?

But the wind had turned to a whirlwind, blowing gales in every
direction to mislead him, now that he wanted to go home.

True, there were the stars, blinking high above the stress and turmoil
of the tireless wind, but he was too young yet to understand the way
they pointed.

As he stood irresolutely sobbing, one ache of loneliness a