Cyclona saw it coming in that flash, a fiendish thing apparently alive, copper-colored, funnel-shaped, ghastly. She threw herself forward on the neck of her broncho, grasping his mane. Then a blow from a great unseen hand out of the darkness struck them both, felling them.
During the next few minutes of inky blackness, of indescribable terror, of flying missiles armed with death, Cyclona lay unconscious. When she opened her eyes a calm light of the evenness of twilight had spread over the track of the cyclone, and her head lay pillowed on Hugh Walsingham's shoulder. Close beside her was a ragged bough and her broncho lay dead near by. The bough was the hand that had struck them out of the darkness, had thrown her to the sod and killed her animal.
"I came very near," she sighed, "to standing before God."
By and by with Walsingham's help she stood.
"Where is the house?" she asked, bewildered by the barrenness of the spot on which the topsy turvy house had stood for so many years.
"It is gone," said he.
Cyclona pressed both hands to her face and rocked back and forth, sobbing.
God had spared her, true, but He had offered her this delicate irony of leaving her homeless.
Hugh looked moodily out over the place of the topsy turvy house, his own mind awhirl with the maddening force of the furious winds through which he had passed.
"In Kansas," said he, grimly, "it is the wind that giveth and the wind that taketh away."