That had been known to happen among the prairie folk time out of number. Many a brain stupefied by the lonely life of the dugout, the solemn, often portentous grandeur of the great blue dome, under which the pioneers crawled so helplessly, had been blown zigzag by the wild buffetings of the wayward, wanton winds, punctuating the dread loneliness so insistently, so incessantly, so diabolically by its staccato preludes, by its innuendoes of interludes prestissimo, by its finales frantically furious and fiendishly calculated to frighten the soul and tear the bewildered and weakened brain from its pedestal. The reproach of the thought held something of injustice, the wind blew with such gentleness, kissing his cheek. His mind ran dangerously on in the current of insanity. He endeavored to quiet it. The thought of his mother came to him. Once he had heard her crying in the night, waiting for his father to come home, not knowing where he was, wondering as women will, and fearfully crying. Then he heard her begin to count aloud in the dark: "One, two. One, two, three," she had counted, to quiet her brain. He fell mechanically to counting as she had done: "One, two. One, two, three." He must preserve his sanity, he said to himself, for the sake of the child. Otherwise it would be good to lose all remembrance, to forget, to dream, to lapse into the nothingness of the vacant eye, the down-drooping lid and the drivel. "One, two. One, two, three," he counted, the wind listening. In spite of the counting, with his eyes fixed on the desolation of the prairie, his thoughts on Celia, suddenly he felt himself seized by gusts of violent rage. The desire to dash out his brains against the unyielding wall of his relentless destiny tore him like the fingers of a giant hand. "One, two. One, two, three," he counted, and between the words came the cry of the child. If he could only render his mind a blank until it recovered its equilibrium, a ray of sunshine must leak in somewhere. It must for the sake of the child. But how was it possible for him to go back to the ghastliness of the dugout, the bereft house, where it was as if the most precious inmate had suddenly died--to the place that had held Celia but would hold her no more! It was necessary to count very steadily here, to strangle an outcry of despair. "One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three, four, five." He could count no further. The wind, seeing his distress, soughed with a weird sweet sound like aeolian harps in the effort to comfort him, but he dropped the reins and laid his face in the hollow of his arm. It was the attitude of a woman, grief-stricken. He had evidently fallen into a lethargy of grief from which he must be aroused. So thought the wind. It blew a great blast. It whistled loudly as if calling, calling, calling! Was it the wind or his heart? Was it his Mother Nature, his Guardian Angel, or God?