A northerly air which cut like knives began to quicken, and little bitter waves to smack the flanks of the barge.
VI
Storm came to the tuft of moss where he had tryst with Rain, but she was not there, and though he whistled the love call, she did not come. Indeed, the sun had risen then beyond the Rocky Mountains and Rain was awake eating smoked venison for breakfast before she went to her hunting. At such an hour she could not come to Dreamland. And since she did not come, Storm felt aggrieved. He would worry the Fairy Parson for lack of better sport.
He went up the bed of the sparkling brook which splashes but never wets one, through the still pool whose ripples flash like rainbows, and on past the fountain spring which croons a lullaby. It always croons one song, but when the fairies tickle it has to chuckle. It always chuckles too when the Padre preaches, as he does when he loses his temper.
The adobe house, although absurdly small, is really most important, the only parsonage in Fairyland.
The Padre used to be a monk, not by vocation, but by a mistake of his mother who hoped he was religious, because he was really fit for nothing else. Truly he was a born Unnaturalist, devoted from childhood to Unnatural History, heraldic animals, story-book monsters, sea serpents, nightmares, and of course all sorts of elementals, especially the bad ones. He felt it must be enormous sport to be a Fiery Dragon and hunt saints. Indeed he said so. Moreover, he announced one evening in the refectory that the Abbot was going to Heaven on Saturday. "Now God forbid!" said the Abbot, but on Saturday he went to Heaven. "Perhaps!" quoth this unholy monk, "I called it Heaven, because, you see, one must be polite to an Abbot."
Afterwards the monks as a body resolved that this was a very uncomfortable Brother, so he was ordered to go and convert the heathen.
"Not that they ever did me any harm," said he, "but perhaps the heathen may tell me stories, nice ones—about boiled monks—yes, boiled with parsley sauce."
And thus among the Red Indians he became an eminent Fairyologist. Nobody else but an eminent Fairyologist would have been so utterly unpractical as to go hunting Fairies in the driest corners of the Great American Desert. Everybody knows that Fairies like a moist climate, superstitious inhabitants, and Mozart or Greig to play their own tunes.
In Death Valley he found no moisture at all, no people whatsoever, or any music except when the snakes played their rattles. There he became very thirsty, lonely, and frightened, so altogether miserable that one of the rattlesnakes gave him a bite just to cheer him up.