Chapter V: Part 5

The crust over the volcano has shown itself to be even thinner than I imagined. The lava-shell gave way, under our very feet, and I've had a glimpse of the molten fury that can flow about us without our knowing it. And like so many of life's tragic moments, it began out of something that is almost ridiculous in its triviality.

Night before last, when Struthers was rather late in setting her bread, she heard Minty scratching and whimpering at the back door, and without giving much thought to what she was doing, let him into the house. Minty, of course, went scampering up to Dinkie's bed, where he slept secretly and joyously until morning. And all might have been well, even at this, had not Minty's return to his kingdom gone to his head. To find some fitting way of expressing his joy must have taxed that brindle pup's ingenuity, for, before any of us were up, he descended to the living-room, where he delightedly and diligently proceeded to remove the upholstery from the old Chesterfield. By the time I came on the scene, at any rate, there was nothing but a grisly skeleton of the Chesterfield left. Now, that particular piece of furniture had known hard use, and there were places where the mohair had been worn through, and I'd even discussed the expediency of having the thing done over. But I knew that Minty's efforts to hasten this movement would not meet with approval. So I discreetly decided to have Whinnie and Struthers remove the tell-tale skeleton to the bunk-house. Before that transfer could be effected, however, the Dour Man invaded the living-room and stood with a cold and accusatory eye inspecting that monument of destructiveness.

"Where's Elmer?" he demanded, with a grim look which started by heart pounding.

"Elmer's dressing," I said as quietly as I could. "Do you want him?"

"I do," announced my husband, whiter in the face than I had seen him for many a day.

"What for?" I asked.

"I think you know what for," he said, meeting my eye.

"I'm not sure that I do," I found the courage to retort. "But I'd prefer being certain."

Duncan, instead of answering me, went to the foot of the stairs and called his son. Then he strode out of the room and out of the house. Struthers, in the meantime, circumspectly took possession of Minty, who was still indecorously shaking a bit of mohair between his jocund young teeth. She and Minty vanished from the scene. A moment later, however, Duncan walked back into the room. He had a riding-quirt in his hand.

"Where's that boy?" he demanded.

I went out to the foot of the stairs, where I met Elmer coming down, buttoning his waist as he came. For just a moment his eye met mine. It was a questioning eye, but not a cowardly one. I had intended to speak to him, but my voice, for some reason, didn't respond to my will. So I merely took the boy's hand and led him into the living-room. There his father stood confronting him.

"Did that pup sleep on your bed last night?" demanded the man with the quirt.

"Yes," said the child, after a moment of silence.

"Did you hear me say that no dog was to sleep in this house?" demanded the child's father.

"Yes," said Elmer, with his own face as white as his father's.

"Then I think that's about enough," asserted Duncan, turning a challenging eye in my direction.

"What are you going to do?" I asked. My voice was shaking, in spite of myself.

"I'm going to whale that youngster within an inch of his life," said the master of the house, with a deadly sort of intentness.

"I don't want you to do that," I quavered, wondering why my words, even as I uttered them, should seem so inadequate.

"Of course you don't," mocked my husband. "But this is the limit. And what you want isn't going to count!"

"I don't want you to do that," I repeated. Something in my voice, I suppose, must have arrested him, for he stood there, staring at me, with a little knot coming and going on one side of his skull, just in front of his upper ear-tip.

"And why not?" he asked, still with that hateful rough ironic note in his voice.

"Because you don't know what you're punishing this child for," I told him with all the quietness I could command. "And because you're in no fit condition to do it."

"You needn't worry about my condition," he cried out--and I could see by the way he said it that he was still blind with rage. "Come here, you!" he called to Dinkie.

It was then that the fatal little bell clanged somewhere at the back of my head, the bell that rings down the curtain on all the slowly accumulated civilization the centuries may have brought to us. I not only faced my husband with a snort of scorn, but I tightened my grip on the child's hand. I tightened my grip on his hand and backed slowly and deliberately away until I came to the door of my sewing-room. Then, still facing my husband, I opened that door and said: "Go inside, Dinkie." I could not see the boy, but I knew that he had done as I told him. So I promptly slammed the door shut and stood there facing the gray-lipped man with the riding-quirt in his hand. He took two slow steps toward me. His chin was thrust out in a way that made me think of a fighting-cock's beak. He had not shaved that morning, and his squared jaw looked stubbled and blue and ugly.

"You can't pull that petticoat stuff this time," he said in a hard and throaty tone which I had never heard from him before. "Get out of my way!"

"You will not beat that child!" And I myself couldn't have made a very pretty picture as I flung that challenge up in his teeth.

"Get out of my way," he repeated. He did not shout it. He said it almost quietly. But I knew, even before he reached out a shaking hand to thrust me aside, that he was in deadly earnest, that nothing I could say would hold him back or turn him aside. And it was then that my eye fell on the big Colt in its stained leather holster, hanging up high over one corner of the book-cabinet, where it had been put beyond the reach of the children.

I have no memory of giving any thought to the matter. My reaction must have been both immediate and automatic. I don't think I even intended to bunt my husband in the short-ribs the way I did, for the impact of my body half twisted him about and sent him staggering back several steps. All I know is that holster and belt came tumbling down as I sprang and caught at the Colt handle. And I was back at the door before I had even shaken the revolver free. I was back just in time to hear my husband say, rather foolishly, for the third time: "Get out of my way!"

"You stay back there!" I called, quite as foolishly, for by this time I had the Colt balanced in my hand and was pointing it directly at his body.

He stopped short, with a vacuous look in his eyes.

"_You fool!_" he said, in a sort of strangled whisper. But it was my face, and not the weapon, that he was staring at all the while.

"Stay back!" I said again, with my eyes fixed on his.

He hesitated, for a moment, and made a sound that was like the short bark of a laugh. It was too hard and horrible, though, ever to be taken for laughter. And I knew that he was not going to do what I had said.

"Stay back!" I warned him still again. But he stepped forward, with a grim sort of deliberation, with his challenging gaze locked on mine. I could hear a thousand warning voices, somewhere at the back of my brain, and at the same time I could hear a thousand singing devils in my blood trying to drown out those voices. I could see my husband's narrowed eyes slowly widen, slowly open like the gills of a dying fish, for the hate that he must have seen on my face obviously arrested him. It arrested him, but it arrested him only for a moment. He dropped his eyes to the Colt in my hand. Then he moved deliberately forward until his body was almost against the barrel-end. I must have known what it meant, just as he must have known what it meant. It was his final challenge. And I must have met that challenge. For, without quite knowing it, I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger.

There had been something awful, I know, in that momentary silence. And there was something awful in the sound that came after it, though it was not the sound my subconscious mind was waiting for. It was distinct enough and significant enough, heaven knows. But instead of the explosion of a shell it was the sharp snap of steel against steel.

The revolver was empty. It was empty-had been empty for weeks. But the significant fact remained that I had deliberately pulled the trigger. I had stood ready, in my moment of madness, to kill the man that I lived with....

Had a ball of lead gone through that man's body, I don't think he could have staggered back with a more startled expression on his face. He looked more than bewildered; he looked vaguely humiliated, oddly and wordlessly affronted, as he stood leaning against the table-edge, breathing hard, his skin a mottled blue-white to the very lips. He made an effort to speak, but no sound came from him. For a moment the dreadful thought raced through me that I had indeed shot him, that in some mysterious way he was mortally hurt, without this particular bullet announcing itself as bullets usually do. I looked at the revolver, stupidly. It seemed to have grown heavy, as heavy as a cook-stove in my hand.

"You'd do that?" whispered my husband, very slowly, with a stricken light in his eyes which I couldn't quite understand. I intended to put the Colt on the table. But something must have been wrong with my vision, for the loathsome thing fell loathsomely to the floor. I felt sick and shaken and a horrible misty feeling of homelessness settled down about me, of a sudden, for I remembered how closely I had skirted the black gulf of murder.

"Oh, Dinky-Dunk!" I blubbered, weakly, as I groped toward him. He must have thought that I was going to fall, for he put out his arm and held me up. He held me up, but there wasn't an atom of warmth in his embrace. He held me up about the same as he'd hold up an open wheat-sack that threatened to tumble over on his granary floor. I don't know what reaction it was that took my strength away from me, but I clung to his shoulders and sobbed there. I felt as alone in the gray wastes of time as one of Gershom's lost stars. And I knew that my Dinky-Dunk would never bend down now and whisper into my ear any word of comfort, any word of forgiveness. For, however things may have been at the first, I was the one who was now so hopelessly in the wrong, _I_ was the big offender. And that knowledge only added to my misery as I stood there clinging to my husband's shoulders and blubbering "Oh, Dinky-Dunk!"

It must have grown distasteful to him, my foolish hanging on to him as though he were a hitching-post, for he finally said in a remote voice: "I guess we've had about enough of this." He led me rather ceremoniously to a chair, and slowly let me down in it. Then he crossed over to the old leather holster and picked it up, and stooped for the revolver, and pushed it down in the holster and buckled the cover-flap and tossed the whole thing up to the top of the book-cabinet again. Then, without speaking to me, he walked slowly out of the room.

I was tempted to call him back, but I knew, on second thought, that it would be no use. I merely sat there, staring ahead of me. Then I shut my eyes and tried to think. I don't know why, but I was thinking about the bigness of Betelgeuse, which was twenty-seven million times as big as our sun and which was going on through its millions of miles of space without knowing anything about Chaddie McKail and what had happened to her that morning. I was wondering if there were worlds between me and Betelgeuse with women on them, with women as alone as I was, when I felt a pair of small arms tighten about my knees and an adoring small voice whispered "Mummsy!" And I forgot about Betelgeuse. For it was my Dinkie there, with his little rough hand reaching hungrily for mine....

Minty has been removed from Casa Grande. I took him over to the Teetzel ranch in the car, and young Dode Teetzel is to get a dollar a week for looking after him and feeding him. Only Elmer and I know of his whereabouts. And once a week the boy can canter over on Buntie and keep in touch with his pup.

We have a tacit understanding that the occurrences of yesterday morning are a closed chapter, are not to be referred to by word or deed. Duncan himself found it necessary to team in to Buckhorn and left word with Struthers that he would stay in town over night. The call for the Buckhorn trip was, of course, a polite fabrication, an expedient _pax in bello_ to permit the dust of battle to settle a little about this troubled house of McKail. All day to-day I have felt rather languid. I suppose it's the lethargy which naturally follows after all violence. Any respectable woman, I used to think, could keep a dead-line in her soul, beyond which the impulses of evil dare not venture. But I must have been wrong.... All week I've been looking for a letter from Peter Ketley. But for once in his life he seems to have forgotten us.

_Sunday the Twentieth_

I've been wondering to-day just what I'd do if I had to earn my own living. I could run a ranch, I suppose, if I still had one, but two or three years of such work would see me a hatchet-faced old termagant with fallen arches and a prairie-squint. Or I could raise chickens and peddle dated eggs in a flivver-and fresco hen-coops with whitewash until the trap-nest of time swallowed me up in oblivion. Or I could take a rural school somewhere and teach the three R's to little Slovenes and Frisians and French-Canadians even more urgently in need of soap and water. Or perhaps I could be housekeeper for one of our new beef-kings in his new Queen-Anne Norman-Georgian Venetian palace of Alberta sandstone with tesselated towers and bungalow sleeping-porches. Or I might even peddle magazines, or start a little bakery in one of the little board-fronted shops of Buckhorn, or take in plain sewing and dispose of home-made preserves to the élite of the community.

But each and all of them would be mere gestures of defeat. I'm of no value to the world. There was a time when I regarded myself as quite a Somebody, and prided myself on having an idea or two. Didn't Percy even once denominate me as "a window-dresser"? There was a time when I didn't have to wait to see if the pearl-handled knife was the one intended for the fish-course, and I could walk across a waxed floor without breaking my neck and do a bit of shopping in the Rue de la Paix without being taken for a tourist. But that was a long, long time ago. And life during the last few years has both humbled me and taught me my limitations. I'm a house-wife, now, and nothing more--and not even a successful house-wife. I've let everything fall away except the thought of my home and my family. And now I find that the basket into which I so carefully packed all my eggs hasn't even a bottom to it.

But I've no intention of repining. Heaven knows I've never wanted to sit on the Mourner's Bench. I've never tried to pull a sour mug, as Dinky-Dunk once inelegantly expressed it. I love life and the joy of life, and I want all of it I can get. I believe in laughter, and I've a weakness for men and women who can sing as they work. But I've blundered into a black frost, and even though there was something to sing about, there's scarcely a blue-bird left to do the singing. But sometime, somewhere, there'll be an end to that silence. The blight will pass, and I'll break out again. I know it. I don't intend to be held down. I _can't_ be held down. I haven't the remotest idea of how it's going to happen, but I'm going to love life again, and be happy, and carol out like a meadow-lark on a blue and breezy April morning. It may not come to-morrow, and it may not come the next day. But it's going to come. And knowing it's going to come, I can afford to sit tight, and abide my time....

I've just had a letter from Uncle Chandler, enclosing snap-shots of the place he's bought in New Jersey. It looks very palatial and settled and Old-Worldish, shaded and shadowed with trees and softened with herbage, dignified by the hand of time. It reminds me how many and many a long year will have to go by before our bald young prairie can be tamed and petted into a homeyness like that. Uncle Chandler has rather startled me by suggesting that we send Elmer through to him, to go to school in the East. He says the boy can attend Montclair Academy, that he can be taken there and called for every day by faithful old Fisher, in the cabriolet, and that on Sunday he can be toted regularly to St. Luke's Episcopal Church, and occasionally go into New York for some of the better concerts, and even have a governess of his own, if he'd care for it. And in case I should be worrying about his welfare Uncle Chandler would send me a weekly night-letter "describing the condition and the activities of the child," as the letter expresses it. It sounds very appealing, but every time I try to think it over my heart goes down like a dab-chick. My Dinkie is such a little fellow. And he's my first-born, my man-child, and he means so much in my life. Yet he and his father are not getting along very well together. It would be better, in many respects, if the boy could get away for a while, until the raw edges healed over again. It would be better for both of them. But there's one thing that would happen: he would grow away from his mother. He'd come back to me a stranger. He'd come back a little ashamed of his shabby prairie mater, with her ten-years-old style of hair-dressing and her moss-grown ideas of things and her bald-looking prairie home with no repose and no dignifying background and neither a private gym nor a butler to wheel in the cinnamon-toast. He'd be having all those things, under Uncle Chandler's roof: he'd get used to them and he'd expect them.

But there's one thing he wouldn't and couldn't have. He wouldn't have his mother. And no one can take a mother's place, with a boy like that. No one could understand him, and make allowances for him, and explain things to him, as his own mother could. I've been thinking about that, all afternoon as I ironed his waists and his blue flannellet pajamas with frogs on like his dad's. And I've been thinking of it all evening as I patched his brown corduroy knickers and darned his little stockings and balled them up in a neat little row. I tried to picture myself as packing them away in a trunk, and putting in beside them all the clothes he would need, and the books that he could never get along without, and the childish little treasures he'd have to carry away to his new home. But it was too much for me. There was one thing, I began to see, which could never, never happen. I could never willingly be parted from my Dinkie. I could think of nothing to pay me up for losing him. And he needed me as I needed him. For good or bad, we'd have to stick together. Mother and son, together in some way we'd have to sink or swim!

_Wednesday the Thirtieth_

The tension has been relieved by Dinky-Dunk going off to Calgary. Along with him he has taken a rather formidable amount of his personal belongings. But he explains this by stating that business will keep him in the city for at least six or seven weeks. He has been talking a good deal about the Barcona coal-mine of late, and the last night he was with us he talked to Gershom for an hour and more about the advantages of those newer mines over the Drumheller. The newer field has a solid slate roof which makes drifting safe and easy, a finer type of coal, and a chance for big money once the railway runs in its spur and the officials wake up to the importance of giving them the cars they need. The whole country, Dinky-Dunk claims, is underlaid with coal, and our province alone is estimated to contain almost seventeen per cent. of the world's known supply. And my lord and master expressed the intention of being in on the clean-up.

I don't know how much of this was intended for my ears. But it served to disquiet me, for reasons I couldn't quite discern. And the same vague depression crept over me when Dinky-Dunk took his departure. I kept up my air of blitheness, it is true, to the last moment, and was as casual as you please in helping Duncan to pack and reminding him to put his shaving-things in his bag and making sure the last button was on his pajamas. I kissed him good-by, as a dutiful wife ought, and held Pauline Augusta up in the doorway so that she might attempt a last-minute hand-waving at her daddy.

But I slumped, once it was all over. I felt mysteriously alone in an indifferent big world with the rime of winter creeping along its edges. Even Gershom, after the children had had their lesson, became conscious of my preoccupation and went so far as to ask if I wasn't feeling well.

I smilingly assured him that there was nothing much wrong with me.

"_Lerne zu leiden ohne zu klagen!_" as the dying Frederick said to a singularly foolish son.

"But you're upset?" persisted Gershom, with his valorous brand of timidity that so often reminds me of a robin defending her eggs.

"No, it's not that," I said with a shake of the head. "It's only that I'm--I'm a trifle too chilly to be comfortable."

And the foolish youth, at that, straightway fell to stoking the fire. I had to laugh a little. And that made him study me with solemn eyes.

"Just think, Gershom," I said as I gathered up my sewing, "my heart is perishing of cold in a province which is estimated to contain almost seventeen per cent. of the world's known coal supply!"

And that, apparently, left him with something to think about as I made my way off to bed ... It's hard to write coherently, I find, when you're not living coherently ...

Syd Woodward, of Buckhorn, having learned that I can drive a tractor, has asked me if I'll take part in the plowing-match to-morrow. And I've given my promise to show Mere Man what a woman can do in the matter of turning a mile-long furrow. I feel rather audacious over it all. And I'm glad to inject a little excitement into life ... I'm saving up for a new sewing-machine ... Tarzanette has got rather badly cut up in some of our barb-wire fencing.

_Friday the Fifteenth_

The plowing-match was good fun, and I enjoyed it even more than I had expected. The men "kidded" me a good deal, and gave me a cheer at the end (I don't quite know whether it was for my work or my costume) and I had to pose for photographs, and a moving-picture man even followed me about for a round, shooting me as I turned my prairie stubble upside down. But the excitement of the plowing-match has been eclipsed by a bit of news which has rather taken my breath away. _It is Peter Ketley who has bought the Harris Ranch._

_Saturday the Twenty-Third_

The rains have brought mushrooms, slathers of mushrooms, and I joy in gathering them.

Yesterday afternoon I rode past the Harris Ranch. The old place brought back a confusion of memories. But I was most disturbed by the signs of building going on there. It seems to mean a new shack on Alabama Ranch. And a new shack of very considerable dimensions. I've been wondering what this implies. I don't know whether to be elated or depressed. And what business is it, after all, of mine?

My Dinkie--I have altogether given up trying to call my Dinkie anything but Dinkie--came home two evenings ago with a discolored eye and a distinct air of silence. Gershom, too, seemed equally reticent. So I set about discreetly third-degreeing Poppsy, who finally acknowledged, with awe in her voice, that Dinkie had been in a fight.

It was, according to my petticoated Herodotus, a truly terrible fight. Noses got bloodied, and no one could make the fighters stop. But Dinkie was unquestionably the conqueror. Yet, oddly enough, I am informed that he cried all through the combat. He was a crying fighter. And he had his fight with Climmie O'Lone--trust the Irish to look for trouble!--who seems to have been accepted as the ring-master of his younger clan. Their differences arose out of the accusation that Dinkie, my bashful little Dinkie, had been forcing his unwelcomed attention on one Doreen O'Lone, Climmie's younger sister. That's absurd, of course. And Dinkie must have realized it. He didn't want to fight, acknowledged Poppsy, from the first. He even cried over it. And Doreen also cried. And Poppsy herself joined in.

I fancy it was a truly Homeric struggle, for it seems to have lasted for round after round. It lasted, I have been able to gather, until Climmie was worsted and down on his back crying "Enough!" Which Poppsy reports Dinkie made him say three times, until Doreen nodded and said she'd heard. But my young son, apparently, is one of those crying fighters, who are reckoned, if I remember right, as the worst breed of belligerents!

I have decided not to tell Dinkie what I know. But I'm rather anxious to get a glimpse of this young Mistress Doreen, for whom lances are already being shattered in the lists of youth. The O'Lones regard themselves as the landed aristocracy of the Elk-trail District. And Doreen O'Lone impresses me as a very musical appellative. Yet I prefer to keep my kin free from all entangling alliances, even though they have to do with a cattle-king's offspring....

I had a short letter from Dinky-Dunk to-day, asking me to send on a package of papers which he had left in a pigeon-hole of his desk here. It was a depressingly non-committal little note, without a glimmer of warmth between the lines. I'm afraid there's a certain ugly truth which will have to be faced some day. But I intend to stick to the ship as long as the ship can keep afloat. I am so essentially a family woman that I can't conceive of life without its home circle. Home, however, is where the heart is. And it seems to take more than one heart to keep it going. I keep reminding myself that I have my children at the same time that I keep asking myself why my children are not enough, why they can't seem to fill my cup of contentment as they ought. Now that their father is so much away, a great deal of their training is falling on my shoulders. And I must, in some way, be a model to them. So I'll continue to show them what a Penelope I can be. Perhaps, after all, they will prove our salvation. For our offspring ought to be the snow-fences along the wind-harried rails of matrimony. They should prevent drifting along the line, and from terminal to lonely terminal should keep traffic open ... I have to-night induced Poppsy to write a long and affectionate letter to her _pater_, telling him all the news of Casa Grande. Perhaps it will awaken a little pang in the breast of her absent parent.

_Monday the Twenty-Fifth_

I have aroused the ire of the Dour Man. He has sent me a message strongly disapproving of my conduct. He even claims that I've humiliated him. I never dreamed, when that movie-man with the camera followed me about at the plowing-match, that my husband would wander into a Calgary picture-house and behold his wife in driving gauntlets and Stetson mounted on a tractor and twiddling her fingers at the camera-operator, just to show how much at home she felt! Dinky-Dunk must have experienced a distinctly new thrill when he saw his own wife come riding through that pictorial news weekly. He would have preferred not recognizing me, I suppose. But there I was, duly named and labeled--and hence the ponderous little note of disapproval.

But I'm not going to let Duncan start a quarrel over trivialities like this. I intend to sit tight. There'd be little use in argument, anyway, for Duncan would only ignore me as the predatory tom-cat ignores the foolishly scolding robin. I'm going to be a regular mallard, and stick to these home regions until the ice forms. And our most mountainous troubles, after all, can't quite survive being exteriorated through the ink-well. It relieves me to write about them. But I wish I had a woman of my own age to talk to. I get a bit lonely, now that winter is slipping down out of the North again. And I find that I'm not so companionable as I ought to be. It comes home to me, now and then, how far away from the world we are, how remote from everything that counts. The tragedy of life with Chaddie McKail, I suppose, is that she's let existence narrow down to just one thing, to her family. Other women seem to have substitutes. But I've about forgotten how to be a social animal. I seem to grow as segregative as the timber-wolf. There's nothing for me in the woman's club life one gets out here. I can't force myself into church work, and the rural reading-club is something beyond me. I simply couldn't endure those Women's Institute meetings which open with a hymn and end up with sponge-cake and green tea, after a platitudinous paper on the Beauty of Prairie Life. It has its beauties, God knows, or we'd all go mad. We women, in this brand-new land, try to bolster ourselves up with the belief that we have greatnesses which the rest of the world must get along without. But that is only the flaunting of _La Panache_, the feather of courage in our cap of discouragement. There is so much, so much, we are denied! So much we must do without! So much we must see go to others! So much we must never even hope for! Oh, pioneers, great you are and great you must be, to endure what you have endured! You must be strong in your hours of secret questioning and you must be strong in your quest for consolation. If nothing else, you must at least be strong. And these western men of ours should all be strong men, should all be great men, because they must have been the children of great mothers. A prairie mother _has_ to be a great woman. She must be great to survive, to endure, to leave her progeny behind her. I've heard the Wise Men talk about nature looking after her own. I've heard sentimentalists sing about the strength that lies in the soil. But, oh, pioneers, you know what you know! In your secret heart of hearts you remember the lonely hours, the lonely years, the lonely graves! For in the matter of infant mortality alone, prairie life shows a record shocking to read. We are making that better, it is true, with our district nursing and our motherhood clubs and our rural phones and our organized letting in of light and passing on of knowledge. We are not so overburdened as those nobler women who went before us. But, oh, pioneers along these lonely northern trails, I salute you and honor you for your courage! Your greatness will never be known. It will be seen only in the great country which you gave up your lives to bring to birth!

_Wednesday the Twenty-Seventh_

What weather-cocks we are! My blue Monday is over and done with, this is a crystalline winter day with all the earth at peace with itself, and I've just had a letter from Peter asking if I could take care of his sister's girl, Susie Mumford, until after Christmas. The Mumfords, it seems, are going through the divorce-mill, and Susie's mother is anxious that her one and only child should be afar from the scene when the grist of liberty is a-grinding.

I know nothing of Susie except what Peter has told me, that she is not yet nineteen, that she is intelligent, but obstreperous, and much wiser than she pretends to be, that the machinery of life has always run much too smoothly about her for her own good, and that a couple of months of prairie life might be the means of introducing her to her own soul.

That's all I know of Susie, but I shall welcome her to Casa Grande. I'll be glad to see a city girl again, to talk over face-creams and the _Follies_ and Tchaikowsky and brassieres and Strindberg with. And I'll be glad to do a little toward repaying big-hearted old Peter for all his kindnesses of the past. Susie may be both sophisticated and intractable, but I await her with joy. She seems almost the answer to my one big want.

But Casa Grande, I have been realizing, will have to be refurbished for its coming guest. We have grown a bit shoddy about the edges here. It's hard to keep a house spick and span, with two active-bodied children running about it. And my heart, I suppose, has not been in that work of late. But I've been on a tour of inspection, and I realize it's time to reform. So Struthers and I are about to doll up these dilapidated quarters of ours. And I intend to have my dolorously neglected Guest Room (for such I used to call it) done over before the arrival of Susie....

I rode over to the Teetzels' this afternoon, to explain about our cattle getting through on their land. It was the road-workers who broke down the Teetzel fence, to squat on a coulée-corner for their camp. And they hadn't the decency to restore what they had wrecked. So Bud Teetzel and I rode seven miles up the new turn-pike and overtook those road-workers and I harangued their foreman for a full fifteen minutes. But it made little impression on him. He merely grinned and stared at me with a sort of insolent admiration on his face. And when I had finished he audibly remarked to one of his teamsters that I made a fine figure of a woman on horseback.

Bud says they're thinking of selling out if they can get their price. The old folks want to move to Victoria, and Bud and his brother have a hankering to try their luck up in the Peace River District. I asked Bud if he wouldn't rather settle down in one of the big cities. He merely laughed at me. "No thank you, lady! This old prair-ee is comp'ny enough for me!" he said as he loped, brown as a nut, along the trail as tawny as a lion's mane, with a sky of steel-cold blue smiling down on his lopsided old sombrero. I studied him with a less impersonal eye. He was a handsome and husky young giant, with the joy of life still frankly imprinted on his face.

"Bud," I said as I loped along beside him, "why haven't you ever married?"

That made him laugh again. Then he turned russet as he showed me the white of an eye.

"All the peaches seemed picked, in this district," he found the courage to proclaim.

This made me trot out the old platitude about the fish in the sea being as good as any ever caught--and there really ought to be an excise tax on platitudes, for being addicted to them is quite as bad as being addicted to alcohol, and quite as benumbing to the brain.

But Bud, with his next speech, brought me up short.

"Say, lady, if _you_ was still in the runnin' I'd give 'em a race that'd make a coyote look like a caterpillar on crutches!"

He said it solemnly, and his solemnity kept it respectful. But it was my turn to laugh. And ridiculous as it may sound, this doesn't impress me as such a dark world as I had imagined! A woman, after all, is a good deal like mother earth: each has to be cultivated a little to keep it mellow.

... Where the Female is, there also is the Unexpected. For when I got home I found that my decorous Poppsy, my irreproachable Poppsy, had succumbed before the temptation to investigate my new sewing-machine. And once having nibbled at the fruit of the tree of knowledge, she went rampaging through the whole garden. She made a stubborn effort to exhaust the possibilities of all the little hemmers, and tried the shirrer and the fire-stitch ruffler, and obviously had a fling at the binder and a turn at the tucker. What she did to the tension-spring heaven only knows. And my brand-new machine is on the blink. And my meek-eyed little Poppsy isn't as impeccable as the world about her imagined!

_Wednesday the Third_

Susie Mumford arrived yesterday. The weather, heaven be thanked, was perfect, an opal day with the earth as fresh-smelling as Poppsy just out of her bath. There was just enough chill in the air to make one's blood tingle and just enough warmth in the sunlight to make it feel like a benediction. Whinstane Sandy, in fact, avers that we're in for a spell of Indian Summer.

I motored in to Buckhorn and met Susie, who wasn't in the least what I expected. I was looking for a high-spirited and insolent-eyed young lady who'd probably be traveling with a French maid and a van-load of trunks, after the manner of Lady Alicia. But the Susie I met was a tired and listless and rather white-faced girl who reminds me just enough of her Uncle Peter to make me like her. The poor child knows next to nothing of the continent on which she was born, and the immensity of our West has rather appalled her. She told me, driving home, that she had never before been this side of the Adirondacks. Yet she has crossed the Atlantic eight times and knows western Europe about as well as she knows Long Island itself. There is a matter-of-factness about Susie which makes her easy to get along with. Poppsy took to her at once and was a garrulous and happy witness of Susie's unpacking. Dinkie, on the other hand, developed an altogether unlooked-for shyness and turned red when Susie kissed him. There was no melting of the ice until the strange lady produced a very wonderful toy air-ship, which you wind up and which soars right over the haystacks, if you start it right. This was a present which Peter sent out. Dinkie, in fact, spent most of his spare time last night writing a letter to his Uncle Peter, a letter which he intimated he had no wish for the rest of the family to read. He was willing to acknowledge, this morning, that since he and Susie both had the same Uncle Peter, they really ought to be cousins....

Susie has not been sleeping well, and for all her weariness last night had to take five grains of veronal before she could settle down. The result is that she looks whiter than ever this morning and ate very little of Struthers' really splendiferous breakfast. But she made a valorous enough effort to be blithe and has rambled about Casa Grande with the febrile, quick curiosity of a young setter, making friends with the animals and for the first time in her life picking an egg out of a nest. I was afraid, at first, that she was going to complain about the quietness of existence out here, for our pace must seem a slow one, after New York. But Susie says the one thing she wants is peace. It's not often a girl not yet out of her teens makes any such qualified demand on life. I can't help feeling that the break-up of her family must be depressing her more than she pretends. She speaks about it in a half-joking way, however, and said this morning: "Dad certainly deserves a little freedom!" We sat for an hour at the breakfast-table, pow-wowing about everything under the blessed sun.

In some ways Susie is a very mature woman, for nineteen and three-quarters. She is also an exceptionally companionable one. She has a sort of lapis-lazuli eye with paler streaks in the iris, like banded agate. It is a brooding eye, with a great deal of beauty in it. And she has a magnolia-white skin which one doesn't often see on the prairie. It's not the sort of skin, in fact, which could last very long on the open range. It's the sort that's had too much bevel plate between it and the buffeting winds of the world. But it's lovely to look upon, especially when it's touched with its almost imperceptible shell-pink of excitement as it was this afternoon when Susie climbed on Buntie and tried a canter or two about the corrals. Susie, I noticed, rode well. I couldn't quite make out why her riding made me at once think of Theobald Gustav. But she explained, later, that she had been taught by a German riding-master--and then I understood.

But I must not overlook Gershom, who duly donned his Sunday best in honor of Susie's arrival and who is already undertaking to educate the brooding-eyed young lady from the East. He explained to her that there were eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles of Canada still unexplored, and Susie said: "Then lead me into the most far-away part of it!" And when he told her, during their first meal together, that the human brain was estimated to contain half a billion cells and that the number of brain impressions collected by an average person during fifty years of life aggregated three billion, one hundred and fifty-five million, seven hundred and sixty thousand, Susie sighed and said it was no wonder women were so contradictory. Which impressed me as very like one of my own retorts to Gershom. I saw Susie studying him, studying him with a quiet and meditative eye. "I believe your Gershom is one of the few good men in the world," she afterward acknowledged to me. And I've been wondering why one so young should be saturated with cynicism.

A small incident occurred to-night which disturbed me more than I can explain to myself. Susie, who had been looking through one of Dinkie's school scribblers, guardedly passed the book over to me where I sat sewing in front of the fire. For, whatever may happen, a prairie mother can always find plenty of sewing to do. I looked at the bottom of the page which Susie pointed out to me. There I saw two names, one above the other, with certain of the letters stricken out, two names written like this:

[E][l]m[e][r] McKai[l]----love Do[r][e][e]n O'[L]on[e]----friendship

[Transcriber's note: In original, letters in brackets are struck out, each with a diagonal slash.]

And that set me off in a brown study which even Susie seemed to fathom. She smiled understandingly and turned and inspected Dinkie, bent over his arithmetic, with an entirely new curiosity.

"I suppose that's what every mother has to face, some day," she said as she sat down beside me in front of the fire.

But it seemed a fire without warmth. Life, apparently, had brought me to another of its Great Divides. My boy had a secret apart from his mother. My son was no longer all mine.

_Friday the Fifth_

This morning at breakfast, when Dinkie and I were alone at the table, I crossed over to him and sat down beside him.

"Dinkie," I said, with my hand on his tousled young head, "whom do you love best in all the world?"

"Mummy!" he said, looking me straight in the eye. And at that I drank in a deep breath.

"Are you sure?" I demanded.

"As sure as death and taxes," he said with his one-sided little smile. It was a phrase which his father used to use, on similar occasions, in the long, long ago. And it didn't quite drive the mists out of my heart.

"And who comes next?" I asked, with my hand still on his head.

"Buntie," he replied, with what I suspected to be a barricaded look on his face.

"No, no," I told him. "It has to be a human being."

"Then Poppsy," he admitted.

"And who next?" I persisted.

"Whinnie!" exclaimed my son.

But I had to shake my head at that.

"Aren't you forgetting somebody very important?" I hinted.

"Who?" he asked, deepening just a trifle in color.

"How about daddy?" I asked. "Isn't it about time for him there?"

"Yes, daddy," he dutifully repeated. But his face cleared, and my own heart clouded, as he went through the empty rite.

Dinkie was studying that clouded face of mine, by this time, and I began to feel embarrassed. But I was determined to see the thing through. It was hard, though, for me to say what I wanted to.

"Isn't there somebody, somebody else you are especially fond of?" I inquired, as artlessly as I could. And it hurt like cold steel to think that I had to fence with my own boy in such a fashion.

Dinkie looked at me and then he looked out of the window.

"I think I like Susie," he finally admitted.

"But in your own life, Dinkie, in your work and your play, in your school, isn't--isn't there _somebody_?" I found the courage to ask.

Dinkie's face grew thoughtful. For just a moment, I thought I caught a touch of the Holbein Astronomer in it.

"There's lots of boys and girls I like," he noncommittally asserted. And I began to see that it was hopeless. My boy had reservations from his own mother, reservations which I would be compelled to respect. He was no longer entirely and unequivocally mine. There was a wild-bird part of him which had escaped, which I could never recapture and cage again. The thing that his father had foretold was really coming about. My laddie would some day grow out of my reach. I would lose him. And my happiness, which had been trying its wings for the last few days, came down out of the sky like a shot duck. All day long, for Susie's sake, I've tried to be light-hearted. But my efforts make me think of a poor old worn-out movie-hall piano doing its pathetic level best to be magnificently blithe. It's a meaningless clatter in a meaningless world.

_Thursday the Eleventh_

It ought to be winter, according to the almanac, but our wonderful Indian Summer weather continues. Susie and I have been "blue-doming" to-day. We converted ourselves into a mounted escort for Gershom and the kiddies as far as the schoolhouse, and then rode on to Dead Horse Lake, in the hope of getting a few duck. But the weather was too fine, though I managed to bring down a couple of mallard, after one of which Susie, having removed her shoes and stockings, waded knee-deep in the slough. She enjoys that sort of thing: it's something so entirely new to the child of the city. And Susie, I might add, is already looking much better. She is sleeping soundly, at last, and has promised me there shall be no more night-caps of veronal. What is more, I am getting to know her better--and I have several revisions to make.

In the first place, it is not the family divorce cloud that has been darkening Susie's soul. She let the cat out of the bag, on the way home this afternoon. Susie has been in love with a man who didn't come up to expectations. She was very much in love, apparently, and disregarded what people said about him. Then, much to her surprise, her Uncle Peter took a hand in the game. It must have been rather a violent hand, for a person so habitually placid. But Peter, apparently, wasn't altogether ignorant of the club-talk about the young rake in question. At any rate, he decided it was about time to act. Susie declined to explain in just what way he acted. Yet she admits now that Peter was entirely in the right and she, for a time, was entirely in the wrong. But it is rather like having one's appendix cut out, she protests, without an anesthetic. It takes time to heal such wounds. Susie obviously was bowled over. She is still suffering from shock. But I like the spirit of the girl. She's not the kind that one disappointment is going to kill. And prairie life is already doing her good. For she announced this morning that her clothes were positively getting tight for her. And such clothes they are! Such delicate silks and cobwebs of lace and pale-pink contraptions of satin! Such neatly tailored skirts and short-vamped shoes and thing-a-ma-jigs of Irish linen and platinum and gold trinkets to deck out her contemptuous little body with. For Susie takes them all with a shrug of indifference. She loves to slip on my oil-stained old hunting-jacket and my weather-beaten old golf-boots and go meandering about the range.

Another revision which I am compelled to make is that while I expected to be the means of cheering Susie up, Susie has quite unconsciously been the means of rejuvenating _me_. I think I've been able to catch at least a hollow echo of her youth from her. I _know_ I have. Two days ago, when we motored in to Buckhorn with my precious marketing of butter and eggs--and Susie never before quite realized how butter and eggs reached the ultimate consumer--a visiting Odd-Fellows' band was playing a two-step on the balcony of the Commercial Hotel. Susie and I stopped the car, and while Struthers stared at us aghast from the back seat, we two-stepped together on the main street of Buckhorn. We just let the music go to our heads and danced there until the crowd in front of the band began to right-about-face and a cowboy in chaps brazenly announced that he was Susie's next partner. So we danced to our running-board, stepped into our devil-wagon, and headed for home, in the icy aura of Struthers' sustained indignation.

I begin to get terribly tired of propriety. I don't know whether it's Struthers, or Struthers and Gershom combined, or having to watch one's step so when there are children about one. But I'm tired of being respectable. I'm tired of holding myself in. I warn the world that I'm about ready for anything, anything from horse-stealing to putting a dummy-lady in Whinstane Sandy's bed. I don't believe there's any wickedness that's beyond me. I'm a reckless and abandoned woman. And if that cold-blooded old Covenanter doesn't get home from Calgary pretty soon I'm going buckboard riding with Bud Teetzel!