Chapter VIII: Part 8

On Saturday Dinkie smuggled the verminous Rowdy to the upper bathroom and gave him a thorough but quite unrelished soaping ... Dinkie, by the way, is now a "cub" in the Boy Scouts and after adorning himself in khaki goes off on hikes and takes lessons in woodcraft. Saturday the Scouts of his school marched behind a real band and Lossie and I sat in the car waiting for my laddie to appear. He wiggled one hand, and smiled sheepishly, as he caught sight of us. But he kept "eyes front" and refused to give any further sign as he marched bravely on behind that brave music. He is learning the law of the pack. For some first frail ideas of service are beginning to incubate in that egoistic little bean of his. And he's suffering, I suppose, the old contest between the ancestral lust to kill and the new-born inclination to succor and preserve. That means he may some day be "a gentleman." And I've a weakness for that old Newman definition of a gentleman as one who never inflicts pain--"tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd"--conducting himself toward his enemy as if he were some day to be his friend. And I also wish there were a few more of them in this hard old world of ours!

Speaking of gentlemen, there's a Captain Goodhue here whom I rather like. Lois Murchison brought us together in the tea-room of the Palliser. In more ways than one he reminds me of Peter. But Captain Goodhue is a much older man, and is English, coming from a very excellent family in Sussex. He's one of those iron-gray ex-Army men who still believe in a monocle and can be loyal to a queen even though she wears a basque with darts in it. And he doesn't talk to a woman with that ragging air of condescension which seems to be peculiar to western American civilization. He is courteous and thoughtful and sincere, though I noticed that he winced a trifle when I suddenly remembered, as he was taking his departure, that the McKails were living in what must have once been his house. He blinked, like a well-groomed old eagle, when I reminded him of this. I never dreamed, of course, that the subject would be painful to him. But it was an honor, he acknowledged with a bow, to pass his household gods on to a lady to whom so much had already been given.

When I asked Lois about it, later on, she rather indifferently acknowledged that the old gentleman had been making a mess of his different business ventures. He was much better at golf than getting in on the ground-floor of a land deal. He was too old fogy, said Slinkie, to make good in the West. He still kept his head up, but they'd pretty well picked him to the bones.... Lois, by the way, describes me as something new in her menagerie and drops in to see me at the most unexpected moments. Then her tongue goes like a mower-knife. She is persuaded that I should permanent-wave my hair, lower my waist-line, and go in for amethysts. "And interest yourself, my dear, in an outside man or two," she has sagely advised me. "For husbands, you'll find, always accept you at the other mutt's valuation!"

I was tempted to make her open her jade-green eyes, for a moment, by telling her I was already interested in an outside man or two and that my lord and master hadn't been much influenced by the extraneous appreciations. But I'm a little afraid of Slinkie and her serpent's tongue. And I'm a little afraid of this new circle into which my Duncan has so laboriously engineered himself. They more and more impress on my simple old prairie soul that the single-track woman is the woman who gets most out of life, that there's nothing really great and nothing really enduring that is not built on loyalty and truth. Character is Fate, as I once before inscribed in this book of my life. And I've been sitting up to-night, while the eternal bridge game is going on below, asking myself if all is well with Chaddie McKail. Have I, or have I not, conceded too much? Am I turning into nothing more than a mush of concession? Haven't I been bribed by comfort, and blinded to a situation which I am now almost afraid to face? Haven't I been selfishly scheming for the welfare of my children and endangering all their future and my own by the price I am paying? Haven't I been crazily manning a rickety old pump, trying to keep afloat a family hulk whose seams are wide open and whose timbers are water-logged? And how long can this sort of thing go on? And what will be the end of it?

I try to warn myself not to smash my goods to kill a rat, as the Chinese say. I try to flatter myself that I am not letting circumstances stampede me into any hasty decision. There's many a woman, I suppose, with a husband whose legal promise has outlived his loyalty. But all is not well here about my heart. I know that, by the way it keeps sending up little trial-balloons, to see which way the wind is really blowing.

... And Sunday night Cattalo Charlie went home quite drunk. And our local member, emboldened by his seventh highball, offhandedly invited me to accompany him on a little run up to Banff, stabbing me with a hurt look when I told him I'd see when Duncan could get away from his work....

I wonder if spring is coming to Casa Grande? And at Alabama Ranch? And are the pussy-willows showing in the slough-ends? And why doesn't Peter Ketley ever write to me?

_Saturday the Sixteenth_

Lossie and Gershom, I find, have drifted into the habit of writing to each other. It is, of course, all purely platonic and pedagogic, arising out of a common interest in my Dinkie's academic advancement. But Lossie borrowed Dinkie this morning to have a photograph taken with him, one copy of which she has very generously promised to send on to Gershom.... Struthers has sent me a very satisfactory report from Casa Grande, which I dreamed last night had burned to the ground, compelling me and my kiddies to live in the old prairie-schooner, laboriously pulled about the prairie by Tithonus and Calamity Kate. And when I applied at Peter's door for a handful of meal for my starving children, he called me worse than a fallen woman and drove me off into the wilderness.

Duncan asked me to-day if I'd motor up to the mines with him for the week-end. I had to tell him that I'd promised to take Elmer and Pauline Augusta to hear Kathleen Parlow and that it wouldn't seem quite fair to break my word. Duncan said that I was the best judge of that. Then he slammed a drawer shut and asked me, in his newer manner, how long I intended to pull this iceberg stuff. "For I can't see," he concluded after calling out for Tokudo to bring his hat and coat, "that I'm getting such a hell of a lot out of this arrangement!"

I asked him, as quietly as I could, what he expected of me. But I could feel my heart pounding quick against my ribs. I am not, and never pretended to be, any stained-glass saint. And there were a few things I felt it was about time to unload. But Tokudo cat-footed back with the coat, and I could hear Lossie's clear laugh as she came in through the front door with the returning Dinkie, and some inner voice warned me to hold my peace. So Duncan and I merely stood there staring at each other, for a moment or two, across an abysmal and unbridgeable gulf of silence. Then he strode out to his car without as much as a howdy-do to the startled and slightly mystified Lossie.

_Monday the Eighteenth_

I have just learned that we were blackballed from the Country Club. My husband, at least, has met with that experience.

It was Lois who let the cat out of the bag. She wasn't clear on all the details, but it was that old has-been of a Goodhue who was at the bottom of it all, according to the lady known as Slinkie. Duncan and he had clashed, from the first. Then Duncan had bought up his paper, and compelled him to mortgage his home. It was because of something to do with the Barcona Mines directorate, Lois thought, that Captain Goodhue had had Duncan blackballed when he applied for membership in the Country Club, the Captain being vice-president of the original holding company. Lois laughed none too pleasantly when she added that her Charley and my Duncan had joined hands to go after the old man's scalp. And they had got it. They turned him inside out, before they got through with him. They took his fore-lock and his teepee and his last string of wampum. And the old snob, of course, would never forgive them.

... They took his fore-lock, and his teepee ... And it was Chaddie McKail and her bairns who were now housing warm in that captured teepee! And all this toiling and moiling, on the part of my husband, all this scheming and intriguing and juggling with figures, had been a campaign for power, a plotting and working to get even with this haughty old enemy who could carry his defeat so lightly! To be blackballed like that, I remembered, was to be proclaimed not a gentleman. And it must have cut deep. At one time, I suppose, Duncan would have called his monocled captain out. But men seem to fight differently nowadays. They fight differently, but no less grimly. And Duncan, whether it is a virtue or a vice in his make-up, would always be a fighter.... Yet I have no sense of gratitude to Lois Murchison for depositing her painful truths in my lap. She warned me, in her artless soprano, that there wasn't much good in sentimentalizing the situation. But she has thrown a shadow across the house which I was trying to make into a home. Without quite knowing it, she has cheapened her life-mate in my eyes. Without quite intending it, she has left my own husband more ignominious than he once stood. I was trying hard to school myself into a respect for his material successes. I was struggling to excuse a great many things by the engrossing nature of his work. But the motive behind all his efforts seemed suddenly a sordid one, in many ways a mean one.

I keep remembering what Lois said about not sentimentalizing a situation. But I'm not yet such a mush of concession that I can't tell black from white. And there's some part of us, some vague but unescapable part of us, which we must respect, otherwise we have no right to walk God's good earth....

I want to get away, for a day or two, to think things out. I think, before Duncan gets back to-morrow, I shall take Poppsy and run up to Banff. I may get my view-point back. And the mountain quietness may do me good....

I keep having that same dull ache of disappointment which came to me as a girl, after I'd idolized a great man called Meredith and after I'd almost prayed to a great poet called Browning, on finding that one was so imperfectly monogamous and that the other philandered and talked foolishly to women. I had thrust my girlish faith in their hands, as so often befalls with the young, and they had betrayed it.... But for the second time since I married, I have been reading _Modern Love_. And I can almost forgive the Apollo of Box Hill for that betrayal which he knew nothing about.

_Thursday the Twenty-Eighth_

This is Thursday the twenty-eighth of April. I want to be sure of that. For there are very few things I can be sure of now.

The bottom has fallen out of my world. I sit here, telling myself to be calm. But it's not easy to sit quiet when you face the very worst that all life could confront you with. _My Dinkie has run away._

My boy has left me, has left his home, has vanished like smoke into the Unknown. He is gone and I have no trace of him.

I find it hard to write. Yet I _must_ write, for the mere expression of what I feel tends to ease the ache. It helps to keep me sane. And already I realize I was wrong when I wrote "the very worst that all life could confront you with." For my laddie, after all, is not dead. He must still be alive. And while there's life, there's hope.

I got back from Banff yesterday morning about nine, and Hilton was there with the car to meet me, as I had told him to be. I was anxious to know at once if everything was all right, but I found it hard to put a question so personal before that impersonal-eyed Englishman. So I strove to give my interrogation an air of the casual by offhandedly inquiring: "How's Rowdy, Hilton?"

"Dead, ma'am," was his prompt reply.

This rather took my breath away.

"Do you mean to say that Rowdy is _dead_?" I insisted, noticing Poppsy's color change as she listened.

"Killed, ma'am," said the laconic Hilton.

"By whom?" I demanded.

"Mr. Murchison, ma'am," was the answer.

"How?" I asked, feeling my vague dislike for that particular name sharpen up to something dangerously like hatred.

"He always comes up the drive a bit fast-like, ma'am. He hit the pup, and that was the end of him!"

"Does Dinkie know?" was my first question, after that.

"He _saw_ it, ma'am," admitted my car-driver.

"Saw what?"

"Saw Mr. Murchison throw the dog over the wall into the brush!"

"What did he say?"

"He swore a bit, ma'am, and then laughed," admitted Hilton, after a pause.

"Dinkie laughed?" I cried, incredulous.

"No; Mr. Murchison, ma'am," explained Hilton.

"What did Dinkie say?" I insisted. And again the man on the driving-seat remained silent a moment or two.

"It was what he _did_, ma'am," he finally remarked.

"What did he do?" I demanded.

"Ran into the house, ma'am, and snatched the icepick off the kitchen table. Then he went to the big car like a mad 'un, he did. Pounded holes in every blessed tire with his pick!"

"And then what?" I asked, with my heart up in my throat.

Hilton waited until he had taken a crowded corner before answering.

"Then he found the dead dog, ma'am, and bathed it, and borrowed the garden spade from me. Then he took it somewheres back in the ravine and buried it. I gave him the tool-box off the old roadster, to put what was left of the pup in."

"And then?" I prompted, with a quaver in my voice I couldn't control.

"He met Mr. Murchison coming out and he called him w'at I'd not like to repeat, ma'am, until Mr. McKail stepped out to see what was wrong, and interfered."

"_How_ did he interfere?" was my next question.

"By taking the lad into the house, ma'am," was my witness's retarded reply.

"Then what happened?" I exacted.

I waited, knowing what was coming, but I dreaded to hear it.

"He gave him a threshing, ma'am," I heard Hilton's voice saying, far away, as though it came to me over a long-distance telephone on a wet night.

I sat rigid as we mounted American Hill. I sat rigid as we swerved in through the ridiculous manor-like gate and up the winding drive and in under the ugly new porte-cochère. I didn't even wait for Poppsy as I got out of the car. I didn't even speak to Tokudo as he ran mincingly to take my things. I walked straight to the breakfast-room where I saw my husband sitting at the end of the oblong white table, stirring a cup of coffee with a spoon.

"Where's Dinkie?" I asked, trying to keep my voice low but not quite succeeding.

Duncan looked up at me with a coldly meditative eye.

"Where he usually is at this time of day," he finally answered.

"Where?" I repeated.

"At school, of course," admitted my husband as he reached out for a piece of buttered toast. He was making a pretense at being very tranquil-minded. But his hand, I noticed, wasn't so steady as it might have been.

"Is he all right?" I demanded, with my voice rising in spite of myself.

"Considerably better, I imagine, than he has been for some time," was the deliberate answer from the man with the bloodshot eyes at the end of the table.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked. And any one of intelligence, I suppose, could see I was making that question a challenge.

"I mean that since you saw him last he's had a damned good whaling," said Duncan, with his jaw squared, so that he reminded me of a King-Lud bulldog.

I paid no attention to Tokudo, who came into the room to repeat that his master was wanted at the telephone.

"Do you mean you struck that child?" I demanded, leaning on the table and looking straight into his eyes, which met mine quite unabashed, and with an air of mockery about them.

My husband nodded as he pushed back his chair.

"He got a good one," he asserted as he rose to his feet and rather leisurely brushed a crumb or two from his vest-front. He could even afford to smile as he said it. My expression, I suppose, would have made any man smile. But there was something maddening in his mockery, at such a moment. There was something gratuitously cruel in his parade of unconcern. Yet, oddly enough, as I looked at his slightly blotched face I couldn't help remembering that that was the face I had once kissed and held close against my cheek, had _wanted_ to hold against my cheek. And now I hated it.

I had to wait and cast about for words of hatred strong enough to carry the arrows of enmity which nothing could stop me from delivering. But while I waited Tokudo announced for the third time that my husband was wanted at the telephone. And a very simple thing happened. My husband answered his call.

I saw Duncan turn and walk out of the room. I could hear his steps in the hallway, loud on the waxed hardwood and low on the rugs. I could hear his deliberated chest-tones as he talked over the wire, talked quietly and earnestly, talked me and my hatred out of his head and out of his world. And I realized, as I sat there at the table-end with my gloves twisted up under my hands and my heart even more twisted up under my ribs, that it was all useless, that it was all futile. He was beyond the reach of my resentment. We were in different worlds, forevermore.

I was still sitting there when he looked in at the door, with his hat and coat on, on his way out. I could feel him there, without directly seeing him. And I could feel, too, that he wanted to say something. But I declined to lift my head, and I could hear the door close as he went out to the waiting car.

I sat there for a long time, thinking about my Dinkie. Twice I almost surrendered to the impulse to telephone to Lossie Brown. But I knew it would be no easy matter to get in touch with her. And in two hours it would be twelve, and any minute after that my boy would be home again. I tried to cross-examine Tokudo, but I could get nothing out of that tight-lipped Jap. I watched the clock. I noticed Hilton, when he got back, raking blood-stains off the gravel of the driveway. I wandered about, like a lost turkey-hen, trying to dramatize my meeting with Dinkie, doing my best to cooper together some incident which might keep our first minute or two together from being too hard on my poor kiddie. I heard the twelve o'clock whistles, at last, and then the Westminster-chimes of the over-ornate clock in the library announce that noon had come. And still the minutes dragged on.

And when the tension was becoming almost unbearable I heard a step on the gravel and my heart started to pound.

But instead of Dinkie, it was Lossie, Lossie with smiling lips and inquiring brown eyes and splashes of rose in her cheeks from rapid walking.

"Where's Dinkie?" I asked.

She stopped short, still smiling.

"That's exactly what I was going to ask?" I heard her saying. Then her smile faded as she searched my face. "There's--there's nothing happened, has there?"

I groped my way to a pillar of the porte-cochère and leaned against it.

"Didn't Dinkie come to school this morning?" I asked as the earth wavered under my feet.

"No," acknowledged Lossie, still searching my face. And a frown of perplexity came into her own.

I knew then what had happened. I knew it even before I went up to Dinkie's room and started my frantic search through his things. I could see that a number of his more treasured small possessions were gone. I delved forlornly about, hoping that he might have left some hidden message for me. But I could find nothing. I sat looking at his books and broken toys, at the still open copy of _The Count of Monte Cristo_ which he must have been poring over only the night before, at his neatly folded underclothes and the little row of gravel-worn shoes. They took on an air of pathos, an atmosphere of the memorial. Yet, oddly enough, it was Lossie, and Lossie alone, who broke into tears. The more she cried, in fact, the calmer I found myself becoming, though all the while that dead weight of misery was hanging like lead from my heart.

I went at once to the telephone and called up Duncan's office. He was still there, though I had to wait several minutes before I could get in touch with him.

I had thought, at first, that he would be offhandedly skeptical at the message which I was sending him over the wire, the message that my boy had run away. He might even be flippantly indifferent, and remind me that much worse things could have happened.

But I knew at once that he was genuinely alarmed at the news which I'd given him. It apparently staggered him for a moment. Then he said in his curt telephonic chest-tones, "I'll be up at the house, at once."

He came, before I'd even completed a second and more careful search. His face was cold and non-committal enough, but his color was gone and there was a look that was almost one of contrition in his troubled eyes, which seemed unwilling to meet mine. He questioned Lossie and cross-examined Hilton and Tokudo, and then called up the Chief of Police. Then he telephoned to the different railway stations, and carried Lossie off in the car to the McArthurs', to interview Benny, and came back an hour later with that vague look of frustration still on his face.

He sat down to luncheon, but he ate very little. He was silent for quite a long time.

"Your boy's all right," he said in a much softer voice than I had expected from him. "He's big enough to look after himself. And we'll be on his trail before nightfall. He can't go far."

"No; he can't go far," I echoed, trying to fortify myself with the knowledge that he must have taken little more than a dollar from the gilded cast-iron elephant which he used as a bank.

"I don't want this to get in the papers," explained my husband. "It's--it's all so ridiculous. I've put Kearney and two of his men on the job. He's a private detective, and he'll keep busy until he gets the boy back."

Duncan got up from the table, rather heavily. He stood hesitating a moment and then stepped closer to my chair.

"I know it's hard," he said as he put a hand on my shoulder. "But it'll be all right. We'll get your boy back for you."

I didn't speak, because I knew that if I spoke I'd break down and make an idiot of myself. My husband waited, apparently expecting me to say something. Then he took his hand away.

"I'll get busy with the car," he said with a forced matter-of-factness, "and let you know when there's any news. I've wired Buckhorn and sent word to Casa Grande--and we ought to get some news from there."

But there was no news. The afternoon dragged away and the house seemed like a tomb. And at five o'clock I did what I had wanted to do for six long hours. I sent off a forty-seven word telegram to Peter Ketley, telling him what had happened....

Duncan came back, at seven o'clock, to get one of the new photographs of Dinkie and Lossie for identification purposes. They had rounded up a small boy at Morley and Kearney was motoring out to investigate. We'd know by midnight....

It is well after midnight, and Duncan has just had a phone-message from Morley. The little chap they had rounded up was a Barnado boy fired with a sudden ambition to join his uncle in the gold-fields of Australia. Somewhere, in the blackness of this big night, my homeless Dinkie is wandering unguarded and alone.

_Friday the Twenty-Ninth_

I have had no word from Peter.... I've had no news to end the ache that pins me like a spear-head to the wall of hopelessness. Duncan, I know, is doing all he can. But there is so little to do. And this world of ours, after all, is such a terrifyingly big one.

_Saturday the Thirtieth_

I was called to the phone before breakfast this morning and it was the blessed voice of Peter I heard from the other end of the wire. My telegram had got out to him from Buckhorn a day late. But he had no definite news for me. He was quite fixed in his belief, however, that Dinkie would be bobbing up at his old home in a day or two.

"The boy will travel this way," he assured me. "He's bound to do that. It's as natural as water running down-hill!"

Duncan asked me whom I'd been talking to, and I had to tell him. His face clouded and the familiar quick look of resentment came into his eyes.

"I can't see what that Quaker's got to do with this question," he barked out. But I held my peace.

_Sunday the First_

I have found a message from my Dinkie. I came across it this morning, by accident. It was in my sewing-basket, the basket made of birch-bark and stained porcupine quills and lined with doe-skin, which I'd once bought from a Reservation squaw in Buckhorn with a tiny papoose on her back. Duncan had upbraided me for passing out my last five-dollar bill to that hungry Nitchie, but the poor woman needed it.

My fingers were shaking as I unfolded the note. And written there in the script I knew so well I read:

"Darligest Mummsey:

I am going away. But dont worry about me for I will be alright. I
couldn't stay Mummsey after what hapened. Some day I will come
back to you. But I'm not as bad as all that. I'll love you always
as much as ever. I can take care for myself so don't worry,
please. And please feed my two rabits reglar and tell Benny I'll
save his jacknife and rember every day I'm rembering you. X X X X
X X X

Your aff'cte son,

DINKIE."

It seemed like a voice from the dead, it was bittersweet consolation, and, in a way, it stood redemption of Dinkie himself. I'd been upbraiding him, in my secret heart of hearts, for his silence to his mother. That's a streak of his father in him, had been my first thought, that unthinking cruelty which didn't take count of the anguish of others. But he hadn't forgotten me. Whatever happens, I have at least this assuaging secret message from my son. And some day he'll come back to me. "Ye winna leave me for a', laddie?" I keep saying, in the language of old Whinstane Sandy. And my mind goes back, almost six years at a bound, to the time he was lost on the prairie. That time, I tell myself, God was good to me. And surely He will be good to me again!

_Tuesday the Third_

We still have no single word of our laddie.... They all tell me not to worry. But how can a mother keep from worrying? I had rather an awful nightmare last night, dreaming that Dinkie was trying to climb the stone wall about our place. He kept falling back with bleeding fingers, and he kept calling and calling for his mother. Without being quite awake I went down to the door in my night-gown, and opened it, and called out into the darkness: "Is anybody there? Is it you, Dinkie?"

My husband came down and led me back to bed, with rather a frightened look on his face.

They tell me not to worry, but I've been up in Dinkie's room turning over his things and wondering if he's dead, or if he's fallen into the hands of cruel people who would ill-use a child. Or perhaps he has been stolen by Indians, and will come back to me with a morose and sullen mind, and with scars on his body....

_Thursday the Fifth_

What a terrible thing is loneliness. The floors of Hell, I'm sure, are paved with lonesome hearts. Day by day I wait and long for my laddie. Always, at the back of my brain, is that big want. Day by day I brood about him and night by night I dream of him. I turn over his old playthings and his books, and my throat gets tight. I stare at the faded old snap-shots of him, and my heart turns to lead. I imagine I hear his voice, just outside the door, or just beyond a bend in the road, and a two-bladed sword of pain pushes slowly through my breast-bone. Dear old Lossie comes twice a day, and does her best to cheer me up. And Gershom has offered to give up his school and join in the search. Peter Ketley, he tells me, has been on the road for a week, in a car covered with mud and clothes that have never come off.

_Friday the Sixth_

There is no news of my Dinkie. And _that_, I remind myself, is the only matter that counts.

Lois Murchison drove up to-day in her hateful big car. She did not find me a very agreeable hostess, I'm afraid, but curled up like a nonchalant green snake in one of my armchairs and started to smoke and talk. She asked where Duncan was and I had to explain that he'd been called out to the mines on imperative business. And that started her going on the mines. Duncan, she said, should clean up half a million before he was through with that deal. He had been very successful.

"But don't you feel, my dear," she went on with quiet venom in her voice, "that a great deal of his success has depended on that bandy-legged little she-secretary of his?"

"Is she that wonderful?" I asked, trying to seem less at sea than I was.

"She's certainly wonderful to him!" announced the woman known as Slinkie. And having driven that poisoned dart well into the flesh, she was content to drop her cigarette-end into the ash-receiver, reach for her blue-fox furs, and announce that she'd have to be toddling on to the hair-dresser's.

Lois Murchison's implication, at that moment, didn't bother me much, for I had bigger troubles to occupy my thoughts. But the more I dwell on it, the more I find myself disturbed in spirit. I resent the idea of being upset by a wicked-tongued woman. She has, however, raised a ghost which will have to be laid. To-morrow I intend to go down to my husband's office and see his secretary, "to inspect the whaup," as Whinnie would express it, for I find myself becoming more and more interested in her wonderfulness.... Peter sent me a hurried line or two to-day, telling me to sit tight as he thought he'd have news for me before the week was out.

I suspect him of trying to trick me into some forlorn new lease of hope. But I have pinned my faith to Peter--and I know he would not trifle with anything so sacred as mother-love.

_Saturday the Seventh_

There is no news of my Dinkie.... But there is news of another nature.

Between ten and eleven this morning I had Hilton motor me down to Duncan's office in Eighth Avenue. It struck me as odd, at first, that I had never been there before. But Duncan, I remembered, had never asked me, the domestic fly, to step into his spider's parlor of commerce. And I found a ridiculous timidity creeping over me as I went up in the elevator, and found the door-number, and saw myself confronted by a cadaverous urchin in horn-rimmed specs, who thrust a paper-covered novel behind his chair-back and asked me what I wanted. So I asked him if this was Mr. McKail's office.

"Sure," he said in the established vernacular of the West.

"What is your name, little boy?" I inquired, with the sternest brand of condescension I could command.

The young monkey drew himself up at that and flushed angrily. "Oh, I don't know as I'm so little," he observed, regarding me with a narrowing eye as I stepped unbidden beyond the sacred portals.

"Where will I find Mr. McKail's secretary?" I asked, noticing the door in the stained-wood partition with "Private" on its frosted glass. The youth nodded his head toward the door in question and crossed to a desk where he proceeded languidly to affix postage-stamps to a small pile of envelopes.

I hesitated for a moment, as though there was something epochal in the air, as though I was making a step which might mean a great deal to me. And then I stepped over to the door and opened it.

I saw a young woman seated at a flat-topped desk, with a gold-banded fountain-pen in her fingers, checking over a column of figures. She checked carefully on to the end of her column, and then she raised her head and looked at me.

Her face stood out with singular distinctness, in the strong side-light from the office-window. And the woman seated at the flat-topped desk was Alsina Teeswater.

I don't know how long I stood there without speaking. But I could see the color slowly mount and recede on Alsina Teeswater's face. She put down her fountain-pen, with much deliberation, and sat upright in her chair, with her barricaded eyes every moment of the time on my face.

"So this has started again?" I finally said, in little more than a whisper.

I could see the girl's lips harden. I could see her fortifying herself behind an entrenchment of quietly marshaled belligerency.

"It has never stopped, Mrs. McKail," she said in an equally low voice, but with the courage of utter desperation.

It took some time, apparently, for that declaration to filter through to my brain. Everything seemed suddenly out of focus; and it was hard to readjust vision to the newer order of things. But I was calmer, under the circumstances, than I expected to be.

"I'm glad I understand," I finally admitted.

The woman at the desk seemed puzzled. Then she looked from me to her column of figures and from her column of figures to the huddled roofs and walls of the city and the greening foot-hills and the solemn white crowns of the Rockies behind them.

"Are you quite sure, Mrs. McKail, that you do understand?" she asked at last, with just a touch of challenge in the question.

"Isn't it quite simple now?" I demanded.

She found the courage to face me again.

"I don't think this sort of thing is ever simple," she replied, with much more emotion than I had expected of her.

"But it's at least clear how it must end," I found the courage to point out to her.

"Is that clear to _you_?" demanded the woman who was stepping into my shoes. It seemed odd, at the moment, that I should feel vaguely sorry for her.

"Perhaps you might make it clearer," I prompted.

"I'd rather Duncan did that," she replied, using my husband's first name, obviously, without knowing she had done so.

"Wouldn't it be fairer--for the two of us--now? Wouldn't it be cleaner?" I rather tremulously asked of her.

She nodded and stared down at the sheet covered with small columns of figures.

"I don't know whether you know it or not," she said with a studied sort of quietness, "but last week Mr. McKail began making arrangements to establish a residence in Nevada. He will have to live there, of course, for at least six months, perhaps even longer."

I could feel this sinking in, like water going through blotting-paper. The woman at the desk must have misinterpreted my silence, for she was moved to say, in a heavier effort at self-defense, "He _knew_, of course, that you cared for some one else."

I looked at her, as though she were a thousand miles away. I stood there impressed by the utter inadequacy of speech. And the thing that puzzled me was that there was an air of honesty about the woman. She still so desperately clung to her self-respect that she wanted me to understand both her predicament and her motives. I could hear her explaining that my husband had no intention of going to Reno, but would live in Virginia City, where he was taking up some actual mining interests. Such things were not pleasant, of course. But this one could be put through without difficulty. Mr. McKail had been assured of that.

I tried to pull myself together, wondering why I should so suddenly feel like a marked woman, a pariah of the prairies, as friendless and alone as a leper. Then I thought of my children. And that cleared my head, like a wind sweeping clean a smoky room.

"But a case has to be made out," I began. "It would have to be proved that I----"

"There will be no difficulty on that point, Mrs. McKail," went on the other woman as I came to a stop. "Provided the suit is not opposed."

The significance of that quietly uttered phrase did not escape me. Our glances met and locked.

"There are the children," I reminded her. And she looked a very commercialized young lady as she sat confronting me across her many columns of figures.

"There should be no difficulty there--_provided_ the suit is not opposed," she repeated with the air of a physician confronted by a hypochondriacal patient.

"The children are mine," I rather foolishly proclaimed, with my first touch of passion.

"The children are yours," she admitted. And about her hung an air of authority, of cool reserve, which I couldn't help resenting.

"That is very generous of you," I admitted, not without ironic intent.

She smiled rather sadly as she sat looking at me.

"It's something that doesn't rest with either of us," she said with the suspicion of a quaver in her voice. And _she_, I suddenly remembered, might some day sit eating her pot of honey on a grave. I realized, too, that very little was to be gained by prolonging that strangest of interviews. I wanted quietude in which to think things over. I wanted to go back to my cell like a prisoner and brood over my sentence....

And I have thought things over. I at last see the light. From this day forward there shall be no vacillating. I am going back to Casa Grande.

I have always hated this house; I have always hated everything about the place, without having the courage to admit it. I have done my part, I have made my effort, and it was a wasted effort. I wasn't even given a chance. And now I shall gather my things together and go back to my home, to the only home that remains to me. I shall still have my kiddies. I shall have my Poppsy and--But sharp as an arrow-head the memory of my lost boy strikes into my heart. My Dinkie is gone. I no longer have him to make what is left of my life endurable....

It is raining to-night, I notice, steadily and dismally. It is a dark night, outside, for lost children....

Duncan has just come home, wet and muddy, and gone up to his room. The gray-faced solemnity with which he strode past me makes me feel sure that he has been conversing with his lady-love. But what difference does it make? What difference does _anything_ make? In the matter of women, I have just remembered, what may be one man's meat is another man's poison. But I can't understand these reversible people, like house-rugs, who can pretend to love two ways at once.... I only know one man, in all the wide world, who has not shattered my faith in his kind. He is one of those neck-or-nothing men who never change.

There are many ranchers, out in this country, who keep what they call a blizzard-line. It's a rope that stretches in winter from their house-door to their shed or their stable, a rope that keeps them from getting lost when a blizzard is raging. Peter, I know, has been my blizzard-line. And in some way, please God, he will yet lead me back to warmth. He is himself out there in the cold, accepting it, all the time, with the same quiet fortitude that a Polar bear might. But he will thole through, in the end. For with all his roughness he can be unexpectedly adroit. Whinstane Sandy once told me something he had learned about Polar bears in his old Yukon days: with all their heaviness, they can go where a dog daren't venture. If need be, they can flatten out and slide over a sheet of ice too thin to support a running dog. And the drift-ice may be widening, but I refuse to give up my hope of hope. "Let the mother go," as the Good Book says, "that it may be well with thee!" ...

I have just remembered that I tried to shoot my husband once. He may make use of _that_, when he gets down to Virginia City. It might, in fact, help things along very materially. And Susie's eyes will probably pop out, when she reads it in a San Francisco paper....

I've thought of so many clever things I should have said to Alsina Teeswater. As I look back, I find it was the other lady who did about all the talking. There were old ulcerations to be cleared away, of course, and I let her talk about the same as you let a dentist work with his fingers in your mouth.... But now I must go up and make sure my Poppsy is safely tucked in. I have just opened the door and looked out. It is storming wretchedly. God pity any little boys who are abroad on such a night!

_Two Hours Later_

It is well past midnight. But there is no sleep this night for Chaddie McKail. I am too happy to sleep. I am too happy to act sane. For my boy is safe. _Peter has found my Dinkie!_

I was called to the telephone, a little after eleven, but couldn't hear well on the up-stairs extension, so I went to the instrument down-stairs, where the operator told me it was long-distance, from Buckhorn. So I listened, with my heart in my mouth. But all I could get was a buzz and crackle and an occasional ghostly word. It was the storm, I suppose. Then I heard Peter's voice, thin and faint and far away, but most unmistakably Peter's voice.

"Can you hear me now?" he said, like a man speaking from the bottom of the sea.

"Yes," I called back. "What is it?"

"Get ready for good news," said that thin but valorous voice that seemed to be speaking from the tip-top mountains of Mars. But the crackling and burring cut us off again. Then something must have happened to the line, or we must have been switched to a better circuit. For, the next moment, Peter's voice seemed almost in the next room. It seemed to come closer at a bound, like a shore-line when you look at it through a telescope.

"Is that any better?" he asked through his miles and miles of rain-swept blackness.

"Yes, I can hear you plainly now," I told him.

"Ah, yes, that _is_ better," he acknowledged. "And everything else is, too, my dear. For I've found your Dinkie and----"

"You've found Dinkie?" I gasped.

"I have, thank God. And he's safe and sound!"

"Where?" I demanded.

"Fast asleep at Alabama Ranch."

"Is he all right?"

"As fit as a fiddle--all he wants is sleep."

"_Oh, Peter!_" It was foolish. But it was all I could say for a full minute. For my boy was alive, and safe. My laddie had been found by Peter--by good old Peter, who never, in the time of need, was known to fail me.

"Where are you now?" I asked, when reason was once more on her throne.

"At Buckhorn," answered Peter.

"And you went all that way through the mud and rain, just to tell me?" I said.

"I had to, or I'd blow up!" acknowledged Peter. "And now I'd like to know what you want me to do."

"I want you to come and get me, Peter," I said slowly and distinctly over the wire.

There was a silence of several seconds.

"Do you understand what that means?" he finally demanded. His voice, I noticed, had become suddenly solemn.

"Yes, Peter, I understand," I told him. "Please come and get me!" And again the silence was so prolonged that I had to cut in and ask: "Are you there?"

And Peter's voice answered "Yes."

"Then you'll come?" I exacted, determined to burn all my bridges behind me.

"I'll be there on Monday," said Peter, with quiet decision. "I'll be there with Tithonus and Tumble-Weed and the old prairie-schooner. And we'll all trek home together!"

"_Skookum!_" I said with altogether unbecoming levity.

I patted the telephone instrument as I hung up the receiver. Then I sat staring at it in a brown study.

Then I went careening up-stairs and woke Poppsy out of a sound sleep and hugged her until her bones were ready to crack and told her that our Dinkie had been found again. And Poppsy, not being quite able to get it through her sleepy little head, promptly began to bawl. But there was little to bawl over, once she was thoroughly awake. And then I went careening down to the telephone again, and called up Lossie's boarding-house, and had her landlady root the poor girl out of bed, and heard _her_ break down and have a little cry when I told her our Dinkie had been found. And the first thing she asked me, when she was able to talk again, was if Gershom Binks had been told of the good news. And I had to acknowledge that I hadn't even _thought_ of poor old Gershom, but that Peter Ketley would surely have passed the good word on to Casa Grande, for Peter always seemed to think of the right thing.

And then I remembered about Duncan. For Duncan, whatever he may have been, was still the boy's father. And he must be told. It was my duty to tell him. So once more I climbed the stairs, but this time more slowly. I had to wait a full minute before I found the courage, I don't know why, to knock on Duncan's bedroom door.

I knocked twice before any answer came.

"What is it?" asked the familiar sleepy _bass_--and I realized what gulfs yawned between us when my husband on one side of that closed door could be lying lost in slumber and I on the other side of it could find life doing such unparalleled things to me. I felt for him as a girl home, tired from her first dance, feels for a young brother asleep beside a Noah's Ark.

"What is it?" I heard Duncan's voice repeating from the bed.

"It's me," I rather weakly proclaimed.

"What has happened?" was the question that came after a moment's silence.

I leaned with my face against the painted door-panel. It was smooth and cool and pleasant to press one's skin against.

"They've found Dinkie," I said. I could hear the squeak of springs as my husband sat up in bed.

"Is he all right?"

"Yes, he's all right," I said with a great sigh. And I listened for an answering sigh from the other side of the door.

But instead of that Duncan's voice asked: "Where is he?"

"At Alabama Ranch," I said, without realizing what that acknowledgment meant. And again a brief period of silence intervened.

"Who found him?" asked my husband, in a hardened voice.

"Peter Ketley," I said, in as collected a voice as I could manage. And this time the significance of the silence did not escape me.

"Then your cup of happiness ought to be full," I heard the voice on the other side of the door remark with heavy deliberateness. I stood there with my face leaning against the cool panel.

"It is," I said with a quiet audacity which surprised me almost as much as it must have surprised the man on the bed a million miles away from me.

_Sunday the Eighth_

How different is life from what the fictioneers would paint it! How hopelessly mixed-up and macaronic, how undignified in what ought to be its big moments and how pompous in so many of its pettinesses!

I told my husband to-day that Poppsy and I were going back to Casa Grande. And that, surely, ought to have been the Big Moment in the career of an unloved invertebrate. But the situation declined to take off, as the airmen say.

"I guess that means it's about time we got unscrambled," the man I had once married and lived with quietly remarked.

"Wasn't that your intention?" I just as quietly inquired.

"It's what I've had forced on me," he retorted, with a protective hardening of the Holbein-Astronomer jaw-line.

"I'm sorry," was all I could find to say.

He turned to the window and stared out at his big white iron fountain set in his terraced lawn behind his endless cobble-stone walls. I couldn't tell, of course, what he was thinking about. But I myself was thinking of the past, the irrecoverable past, the irredeemable past, the singing years of my womanly youth that seemed to be sealed in a lowered coffin on which the sheltering earth would soon be heaped, on which the first clods were already dropping with hollow sounds. We each seemed afraid to look the other full in the eyes. So we armored ourselves, as poor mortals must do, in the helmets of pretended diffidence and the breast-plates of impersonality.

"How are you going back?" my husband finally inquired. Whatever ghosts it had been necessary to lay, I could see, he had by this time laid. He no longer needed to stare out at the white iron fountain of which he was so proud.

"I've sent for the prairie-schooner," I told him.

His flush of anger rather startled me.

"Doesn't that impress you as rather cheaply theatrical?" he demanded.

"I fancy it will be very comfortable," I told him, without looking up. I'd apparently been attributing to him feelings which, after all, were not so desolating as I might have wished.

"Every one to his own taste," he observed as he called rather sharply to Tokudo to bring him his humidor. Then he took out a cigar and lighted it and ordered the car. And that was the lee and the long of it. That was the way we faced our Great Divide, our forked trail that veered off East and West into infinity!

_Thursday the Eleventh_

The trek is over. And it was not one of triumph. For we find ourselves, sometimes, in deeper water than we imagine. Then we have to choke and gasp for a while before we can get our breath back.