He stood still, looking breathlessly ahead of him to where the prairie stretched indefinitely to the rim of the starlit dome, billowy with long gray grasses blown into the semblance of fingers by the bellowing blasts of the fearsome wind.
He sobbed, he was now so far from home, and the voice of the wind had taken on a menacing note of such deep subtleness.
Which way was home? He had forgotten. The way the wind blew?
But the wind had turned to a whirlwind, blowing gales in every direction to mislead him, now that he wanted to go home.
True, there were the stars, blinking high above the stress and turmoil of the tireless wind, but he was too young yet to understand the way they pointed.
As he stood irresolutely sobbing, one ache of loneliness and homesickness and fear, he heard the call of a human voice and his name, the voice coming to him high above the wind, with its own note of terrorized anguish.
His father's voice!
The voice sounded nearer and nearer, calling, calling!
The child ran toward the sound of it, the loneliness of the prairie swallowed up in a sob of gladness, and he was in Seth's arms.
As for Seth, he could only articulate one word: