It stretched about him far as the eye could reach, scorched and hideous as the ruin of his life.
He shut his eyes. He dared not look out on the ruin of his life. What if the ghastly spectacle should turn his brain?
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: