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Way of the Wind, The

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<hr /> <h3>CHAPTER VIII.ToC</h3> <div class="imgl"> <ANTIMG border="0" src="images/image01.png" width-obs="100%" alt="CHAPTER VIII." /></div> 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!" <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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