"You ah right," he said. For though he had not actually gone after the grasshoppers and brought them in a deadly swarm to destroy his harvest, he had enticed her to the plains it seemed for the purpose of witnessing the destruction. "You ah right," he reiterated. In the night Celia dreamed of home and the blue-grass hills and the whip-poor-wills and the mocking birds that sang through the moonlight from twilight till dawn. Sobbing in her sleep, she waked to hear the demoniacal shriek of the tireless wind and the howl of a coyote, and wept, refusing to be comforted. The next day she said to Seth firmly and conclusively: "I am goin' home." CHAPTER VIII. [Illustration] To do her justice, Celia would have taken the child with her; but young as he was, Seth refused to give him up. He would buy a little goat, he said, feed the baby on its milk and look after him. At heart he said to himself that he would hold the child as ransom. Surely, if love for him failed, love for the little one would draw the mother back to the hole in the ground. He found Cyclona and implored her to keep the child while he hitched up the cart and drove the mother away over the same road she had come to the station. It was a silent drive; each occupied with individual thoughts running in separate channels; she glad that her eyes were looking their last on the wind-lashed prairies blackened by the scourge; he casting about in his mind for some bait with which to entice her to return. "You will come back to the child?" he faltered. But she made no answer. "If the crops succeed," he ventured, "and I build you a beautiful house, then will you come back?" For answer, she gave a scornful glance at the blackened plains, flowerless, grainless, grassless. "If the Wise Men come out of the East," it was his last plea, "and build the Magic City, then you will come back?" At that she laughed aloud and the wind, to spare him the sound of it, tossed the laugh quickly out and away with the jeer of its cruel mockery. "The Magic City!" she repeated. She laughed in derision of such violence that she fell to coughing. "The Magic City!" she reiterated. "The Magic City!" CHAPTER IX. [Illustration] For one mad moment, such as comes to the bravest, Seth's impulse was to throw himself beneath the wheels of the car that was taking Celia away from him. In another he would have lain a crushed and shapeless mass in their wake; but as he shut his eyes for the leap there came to him distinctly, pitifully, wailingly, the cry of the child. Perhaps it came to him in reality across the intervening miles of wind-blown prairie. Perhaps the wind blew it to him. Who knows? Our Mother Earth often sends us help in our sorest need in her own way, a way which oftentimes partakes of mystery. Perhaps it came only in memory. However, it served. He opened his eyes, and the madness had passed.