"Think of that!" says I. "How they do mess up the map! What's it like, this Naukeesha?"
And for the first time Ruby shows some traces of life. "It's nice," says she, "real nice. Not at all like New York."
"Ah come, not so rough!" says I. "What you got special against our burg here?"
Ruby lapses back into her vacant stare and sort of shivers. "It's so big and—and whirly!" says she. "I don't like things to be whirly. Then the people are so strange, and their faces so hard. If—if I should fall down in one of those crowds, I'm sure they would walk right over me, trample on me, without caring."
"Pooh!" says I. "You'll work up a rush-hour nerve in a month or so. Of course, havin' always lived in a place like Naukeesha——"
"But I haven't," corrects Ruby. "I was born in Kansas."
"As bad as that!" says I. "And your folks moved up there later, eh?"
"No," says she. "They—they—I lost them there. A cyclone, you know."
"You don't mean," says I, "that—that——"
"Yes," says she, "Mother, Father, and my two brothers. We were all together when it struck; that is, I was just coming in from the kitchen. I'd been shutting the windows. I saw them all go—whirled off, just like that. The chimney fell, big beams came down, then it was all smoky and dark. I must have been blown through a window. My face was cut a little. I never knew. Neighbors found me in a field by a stump. They found the others too—laid them side by side in the wagon shed. Nothing else was left standing. It's dreadful, being in a cyclone—the roar, you know, and things coming at you in the dark, and that feeling of being lifted and whirled. I was only twelve; but I—I can't forget. And when I'm in big, noisy places it all comes back. I suppose I'm silly."