The wind tossed him like a plaything as it tossed the big round tumbleweeds, making the pace for him a little beyond.
Now and again, broad day though it was, the wind blew blasts that frightened him, dying down immediately again into piping Pan-like whispers that lured him on and on until he became a mere speck on the trackless prairie, blown by alternate blasts and zephyrs, hurrying, hurrying, hurrying to the heart of the wind to find his mother.
But by and by the sun sank, dropping suddenly into the Nowhere behind the darkling line of the mysterious horizon.
Then the twilight seeped softly over the prairie, like a drop of ink spilt over a blotter.
A little while later and the prairie became obscurely shadowy, peopled all at once by frightful things, familiar everyday things changed to hideous hobgoblins by the chrism of the dark.
Grasses with long human fingers beckoned him to the Unknown, which is always terrible, while great ever-moving tumbleweeds sprang up at him as if from underground, like enormous heads of resurrected giants.
And the voice of the wind!
As he neared the heart of it, it, too, took on an unknown quantity more terrible than the bugaboo of the shadows and the dark.
It howled with the howl of wolves.
The child began to be afraid. Pantingly, wildly afraid!