Chapter II: Part 2

Dinky-Dunk's face softened a little, and he seemed almost ready to smile. But he very quickly clouded up again, just as my own heart clouded up. For I knew, notwithstanding my willingness to deny it, that I was once more acting on impulse, very much as I'd acted on impulse four long years ago in that residuary old horse-hansom in Central Park when I agreed to marry Duncan Argyll McKail before I was even in love with him. But, like most women, I was willing to let Reason step down off the bridge and have Intuition pilot me through the more troubled waters of a life-crisis. For I knew that I was doing the right thing, even though it seemed absurd, even though at first sight it seemed too prodigious a sacrifice, just as I'd done the right thing when in the face of tribal reasoning and logic I'd gone kiting off to a prairie-ranch and a wickiup with a leaky roof. It was a tumble, but it was a tumble into a pansy-bed. And I was thinking that luck would surely be with me a second time, though thought skidded, like a tire on a wet pavement, every time I tried to foresee what this newer change would mean to me and mine.

"You're not going to face another three years of drudgery and shack-dirt," declared Dinky-Dunk, following, oddly enough, my own line of thought. "You went through that once, and once was enough. It's not fair. It's not reasonable. It's not even thinkable. You weren't made for that sort of thing, and--"

"Listen to me," I broke in, doing my best to speak calmly and quietly. "Those three years were really the happiest three years of all my life. I love to remember them, for they mean so much more than all the others. There were a lot of the frills and fixin's of life that we had to do without. But those three years brought us closer together, Dinky-Dunk, than we have ever been since we moved into this big house and got on bowing terms again with luxury. I don't know whether you've given it much thought or not, husband o' mine, but during the last year or two there's been a change taking place in us. You've been worried and busy and forever on the wing, and there have been days when I've felt you were almost a stranger to me, as though I'd got to be a sort of accident in your life. Remember, Honey-Chile, I'm not blaming you; I'm only pointing out certain obvious truths, now the time for a little honest talk seems to have cropped up. You were up to your ears in a fight, in a tremendously big fight, for success and money; and you were doing it more for me and Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee than for yourself. You couldn't help remembering that I'd been a city girl and imagining that prairie-life was a sort of penance I was undergoing before passing on to the joys of paradise in an apartment-hotel with a mail-chute outside the door and the sound of the Elevated outside the windows. And you were terribly wrong in all that, for there have been days and days, Dinky-Dunk, when I've been homesick for that old slabsided ranch-shack and the glory of seeing you come in ruddy and hungry and happy for the ham and eggs and bread I'd cooked with my own hands. It seemed to bring us so gloriously close together. It seemed so homy and happy-go-lucky and soul-satisfying in its completeness, and we weren't forever fretting about bank-balances and taxes and over-drafts. I was just a rancher's wife then--and I can't help feeling that all along there was something in that simple life we didn't value enough. We were just rubes and hicks and clodhoppers and hay-tossers in those days, and we weren't staying awake nights worrying about land-speculations and water-fronts and trying to make ourselves millionaires when we might have been making ourselves more at peace with our own souls. And now that our card-house of high finance has gone to smash, I realize more than ever that I've got to be at peace with my own soul and on speaking terms with my own husband. And if this strikes you as an exceptionally long-winded sermon, my beloved, it's merely to make plain to you that I haven't surrendered to any sudden wave of emotionalism when I talk about migrating over to that Harris Ranch. It's nothing more than good old hard-headed, practical self-preservation, for I wouldn't care to live without you, Dinky-Dunk, any more than I imagine you'd care to live without your own self-respect."

I sat back, after what I suppose was the longest speech I ever made in my life, and studied my lord and master's face. It was not an easy map to decipher, for man, after all, is a pretty complex animal and even in his more elemental moments is played upon by pretty complex forces. And if there was humility on that lean and rock-ribbed countenance of my soul-mate there was also antagonism, and mixed up with the antagonism was a sprinkling of startled wonder, and tangled up with the wonder was a slightly perplexed brand of contrition, and interwoven with that again was a suggestion of allegiance revived, as though he had forgotten that he possessed a wife who had a heart and mind of her own, who was even worth sticking to when the rest of the world was threatening to give him the cold shoulder. He felt abstractedly down in his coat pocket for his pipe, which is always a helpful sign.

"It's big and fine of you, Chaddie, to put it that way," he began, rather awkwardly, and with just a touch of color coming to his rather gray-looking cheek-bones. "But can't you see that now it's the children we've got to think of?"

"I _have_ thought of them," I quietly announced. As though any mother, on prairie or in metropolis, didn't think of them first and last and in-between-whiles! "And that's what simplifies the situation. I want them to have a fair chance. I'd rather they--"

"It's not quite that criminal," cut in Dinky-Dunk, with almost an angry flush creeping up toward his forehead.

"I'm only taking your own word for that," I reminded him, deliberately steeling my heart against the tides of compassion that were trying to dissolve it. "And I'm only taking what is, after all, the easiest course out of the situation."

Dinky-Dunk's color receded, leaving his face even more than ever the color of old cheese, for all the tan of wind and sun which customarily tinted it, like afterglow on a stubbled hillside.

"But Lady Alicia herself still has something to say about all this," he reminded me.

"Lady Alicia had better rope in her ranch when the roping is good," I retorted, chilled a little by her repeated intrusion into the situation. For I had no intention of speaking of Lady Alicia Newland with bated breath, just because she had a title. I'd scratched dances with a duke or two myself, in my time, even though I could already see myself once more wielding a kitchen-mop and tamping a pail against a hog-trough, over at the Harris Ranch.

"You're missing the point," began Dinky-Dunk.

"Listen!" I suddenly commanded. A harried roebuck has nothing on a young mother for acuteness of hearing. And thin and faint, from above-stairs, I caught the sound of a treble wailing which was promptly augmented into a duet.

"Poppsy's got Pee-Wee awake," I announced as I rose from my chair. It seemed something suddenly remote and small, this losing of a fortune, before the more imminent problem of getting a pair of crying babies safely to sleep. I realized that as I ran upstairs and started the swing-box penduluming back and forth. I even found myself much calmer in spirit by the time I'd crooned and soothed the Twins off again. And I was smiling a little, I think, as I went down to my poor old Dinky-Dunk, for he held out a hand and barred my way as I rounded the table to resume my seat opposite him.

"You don't despise me, do you?" he demanded, holding me by the sleeve and studying me with a slightly mystified eye. It was an eye as wistful as an old hound's in winter, an eye with a hunger I'd not seen there this many a day.

"Despise you, Acushla?" I echoed, with a catch in my throat, as my arms closed about him. And as he clung to me, with a forlorn sort of desperation, a soul-Chinook seemed to sweep up the cold fogs that had gathered and swung between us for so many months. I'd worried, in secret, about that fog. I'd tried to tell myself that it was the coming of the children that had made the difference, since a big strong man, naturally, had to take second place to those helpless little mites. But my Dinky-Dunk had a place in my heart which no snoozerette could fill and no infant could usurp. He was my man, my mate, my partner in this tangled adventure called life, and so long as I had him they could take the house with the laundry-chute and the last acre of land.

"My dear, my dear," I tried to tell him, "I was never hungry for money. The one thing I've always been hungry for is love. What'd be the good of having a millionaire husband if he looked like a man in a hair-shirt on every occasion when you asked for a moment of his time? And what's the good of life if you can't crowd a little affection into it? I was just thinking we're all terribly like children in a Maypole dance. We're so impatient to get our colored bands wound neatly about a wooden stick, a wooden stick that can never be ours, that we make a mad race of what really ought to be a careless and leisurely joy. We don't remember to enjoy the dancing, and we seem to get so mixed in our ends. So _carpe diem_, say I. And perhaps you remember that sentence from Epictetus you once wrote out on a slip of paper and pinned to my bedroom door: 'Better it is that great souls should live in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great houses!'"

Dinky-Dunk, as I sat brushing back his top-knot, regarded me with a sad and slightly acidulated smile.

"You'd need all that philosophy, and a good deal more, before you'd lived for a month in a place like the Harris shack," he warned me.

"Not if I knew you loved me, O Kaikobad," I very promptly informed him.

"But you do know that," he contended, man-like. I was glad to find, though, that a little of the bitterness had gone out of his eyes.

"Feather-headed women like me, Diddums, hunger to hear that sort of thing, hunger to hear it all the time. On that theme they want their husbands to be like those little Japanese wind-harps that don't even know how to be silent."

"Then why did you say, about a month ago, that marriage was like Hogan's Alley, the deeper one got into it the tougher it was?"

"Why did you go off to Edmonton for three whole days without kissing me good-by?" I countered. I tried to speak lightly, but it took an effort. For my husband's neglect, on that occasion, had seemed the first intimation that the glory was over and done with. It had given me about the same feeling that we used to have as flapperettes when the circus-manager mounted the tub and began to announce the after-concert, all for the price of ten cents, one dime!

"I wanted to, Tabbie, but you impressed me as looking rather unapproachable that day."

"When the honey is scarce, my dear, even bees are said to be cross," I reminded him. "And that's the thing that disturbs me, Dinky-Dunk. It must disturb any woman to remember that she's left her happiness in one man's hand. And it's more than one's mere happiness, for mixed up with that is one's sense of humor and one's sense of proportion. They all go, when you make me miserable. And the Lord knows, my dear, that a woman without a sense of humor is worse than a dipper without a handle."

Dinky-Dunk sat studying me.

"I guess it was my own sense of proportion that got out of kilter, Gee-Gee," he finally said. "But there's one thing I want you to remember. If I got deeper into this game than I should have, it wasn't for what money meant to me. I've never been able to forget what I took you away from. I took you away from luxury and carted you out here to the end of Nowhere and had you leave behind about everything that made life decent. And the one thing I've always wanted to do is make good on that over-draft on your bank-account of happiness. I've wanted to give back to you the things you sacrificed. I knew I owed you that, all along. And when the children came I saw that I owed it to you more than ever. I want to give Dinky-Dink and Poppsy and Pee-Wee a fair chance in life. I want to be able to start them right, just as much as you do. And you can't be dumped back into a three-roomed wickiup, with three children to bring up, and feel that you're doing the right thing by your family."

It wasn't altogether happy talk, but deep down in my heart I was glad we were having it. It seemed to clear the air, very much as a good old-fashioned thunder-storm can. It left us stumbling back to the essentials of existence. It showed us where we stood, and what we meant to each other, what we must mean to each other. And now that the chance had come, I intended to have my say out.

"The things that make life decent, Dinky-Dunk, are the things that we carry packed away in our own immortal soul, the homely old things like honesty and self-respect and contentment of mind. And if we've got to cut close to the bone before we can square up our ledger of life, let's start the carving while we have the chance. Let's get our conscience clear and know we're playing the game."

I was dreadfully afraid he was going to laugh at me, it sounded so much like pulpiteering. But I was in earnest, passionately in earnest, and my lord and master seemed to realize it.

"Have you thought about the kiddies?" he asked me, for the second time.

"I'm always thinking about the kiddies," I told him, a trifle puzzled by the wince which so simple a statement could bring to his face. His wondering eye, staring through the open French doors of the living-room, rested on my baby grand.

"How about _that_?" he demanded, with a grim head-nod toward the piano.

"That may help to amuse Lady Alicia," I just as grimly retorted.

He stared about that comfortable home which we had builded up out of our toil, stared about at it as I've seen emigrants stare back at the receding shores of the land they loved. Then he sat studying my face.

"How long is it since you've seen the inside of the Harris shack?" he suddenly asked me.

"Last Friday when I took the bacon and oatmeal over to Soapy and Francois and Whinstane Sandy," I told him.

"And what did you think of that shack?"

"It impressed me as being sadly in need of soap and water," I calmly admitted. "It's like any other shack where two or three men have been batching--no better and no worse than the wickiup I came to here on my honeymoon."

Dinky-Dunk looked about at me quickly, as though in search of some touch of malice in that statement. He seemed bewildered, in fact, to find that I was able to smile at him.

"But that, Chaddie, was nearly four long years ago," he reminded me, with a morose and meditative clouding of the brow. And I knew exactly what he was thinking about.

"I'll know better how to go about it this time," I announced with my stubbornest Doctor Pangless grin.

"But there are two things you haven't taken into consideration," Dinky-Dunk reminded me.

"What are they?" I demanded.

"One is the matter of ready money."

"I've that six hundred dollars from my Chilean nitrate shares," I proudly announced. "And Uncle Carlton said that if the Company ever gets reorganized it ought to be a paying concern."

Dinky-Dunk, however, didn't seem greatly impressed with either the parade of my secret nest-egg or the promise of my solitary plunge into finance. "What's the other?" I asked as he still sat frowning over his empty pipe.

"The other is Lady Alicia herself," he finally explained.

"What can she do?"

"She may cause complications."

"What kind of complications?"

"I can't tell until I've seen her," was Dinky-Dunk's none too definite reply.

"Then we needn't cross that bridge until we come to it," I announced as I sat watching Dinky-Dunk pack the bowl of his pipe and strike a match. It seemed a trivial enough movement. Yet it was monumental in its homeliness. It was poignant with a power to transport me back to earlier and happier days, to the days when one never thought of feathering the nest of existence with the illusions of old age. A vague loneliness ate at my heart, the same as a rat eats at a cellar beam.

I crossed over to my husband's side and stood with one hand on his shoulder as he sat there smoking. I waited for him to reach out for my other hand. But the burden of his troubles seemed too heavy to let him remember. He smoked morosely on. He sat in a sort of self-immuring torpor, staring out over what he still regarded as the wreck of his career. So I stooped down and helped myself to a very smoky kiss before I went off up-stairs to bed. For the children, I knew, would have me awake early enough--and nursing mothers needs must sleep!

_Thursday the Second_

I have won my point. Dinky-Dunk has succumbed. The migration is under way. The great trek has begun. In plain English, we're moving.

I rather hate to think about it. We seem so like the Children of Israel bundled out of a Promised Land, or old Adam and Eve turned out of the Garden with their little Cains and Abels. "We're up against it, Gee-Gee," as Dinky-Dunk grimly observed. I could see that we were, without his telling me. But I refused to acknowledge it, even to myself. And it wasn't the first occasion. This time, thank heaven, I can at least face it with fortitude, if not with relish. I don't like poverty. And I don't intend to like it. And I'm not such a hypocrite as to make a pretense of liking it. But I do intend to show my Dinky-Dunk that I'm something more than a household ornament, just as I intend to show myself that I can be something more than a breeder of children. I have given my three "hostages to fortune"--and during the last few days when we've been living, like the infant Moses, in a series of rushes, I have awakened to the fact that they are indeed hostages. For the little tikes, no matter how you maneuver, still demand a big share of your time and energy. But one finally manages, in some way or another. Dinky-Dunk threatens to expel me from the Mothers' Union when I work over time, and Poppsy and Pee-Wee unite in letting me know when I've been foolish enough to pass my fatigue-point. Yet I've been sloughing off some of my old-time finicky ideas about child-raising and reverting to the peasant-type of conduct which I once so abhorred in my Finnish Olga. And I can't say that either I or my family seem to have suffered much in the process. I feel almost uncannily well and strong now, and am a wolf for work. If nothing else happened when our apple-cart went over, it at least broke the monotony of life. I'm able to wring, in fact, just a touch of relish out of all this migrational movement and stir, and Casa Grande itself is already beginning to remind me of a liner's stateroom about the time the pilot comes aboard and the donkey-engines start to clatter up with the trunk-nets.

For three whole days I simply ached to get at the Harris Ranch shack, just to show what I could do with it. And I realized when Dinky-Dunk and I drove over to it in the buckboard, on a rather nippy morning when it was a joy to go spanking along the prairie trail with the cold air etching rosettes on your cheek-bones, that it was a foeman well worthy of my steel. At a first inspection, indeed, it didn't look any too promising. It didn't exactly stand up on the prairie-floor and shout "Welcome" into your ears. There was an overturned windmill and a broken-down stable that needed a new roof, and a well that had a pump which wouldn't work without priming. There was an untidy-looking corral, and a reel for stringing up slaughtered beeves, and an overturned Red River cart bleached as white as a buffalo skeleton. As for the wickiup itself, it was well-enough built, but lacking in windows and quite unfinished as to the interior.

I told Dinky-Dunk I wanted two new window-frames, beaverboard for inside lining, and two gallons of paint. I have also demanded a lean-to, to serve as an extra bedroom and nursery, and a brand-new bunk-house for the hired "hands" when they happen to come along. I have also insisted on a covered veranda and sleeping porch on the south side of the shack, and fly-screens, and repairs to the chimney to stop the range from smoking. And since the cellar, which is merely timbered, will have to be both my coal-hole and my storage-room, it most assuredly will have to be cemented. I explained to Dinky-Dunk that I wanted eave-troughs on both the shack and the stable, for the sake of the soft-water, and proceeded to point out the need of a new washing-machine, and a kiddie-coop for Poppsy and Pee-Wee as soon as the weather got warm, and a fence, hog-tight and horse-high, about my half-acre of kitchen garden.

Dinky-Dunk sat staring at me with a wry though slightly woebegone face.

"Look here, Lady-Bird, all this sort of thing takes 'rhino,' which means ready money. And where's it going to come from?"

"I'll use that six hundred, as long as it lasts," I blithely retorted. "And then we'll get credit."

"But my credit is gone," Dinky-Dunk dolorously acknowledged.

"Then what's the matter with mine?" I demanded. I hadn't meant to hurt him, when I said that. But I refused to be downed. And I intended to make my ranch a success.

"It's still quite unimpaired, I suppose," he said in a thirty-below-zero sort of voice.

"Goose!" I said, with a brotherly pat on his drooping shoulder. But my lord and master refused to be cheered up.

"It's going to take more than optimism to carry us through this first season," he explained to me. "And the only way that I can see is for me to get out and rustle for work."

"What kind of work?" I demanded.

"The kind there's a famine for, at this very moment," was Dinky-Dunk's reply.

"You don't mean being somebody else's hired man?" I said, aghast.

"A hired man can get four dollars a day and board," retorted my husband. "And a man and team can get nine dollars a day. We can't keep things going without ready money. And there's only one way, out here, of getting it."

Dinky-Dunk was able to laugh at the look of dismay that came into my face. I hadn't stopped to picture myself as the wife of a hired "hand." I hadn't quite realized just what we'd descended to. I hadn't imagined just how much one needed working capital, even out here on the edge of Nowhere.

"But never that way, Diddums!" I cried out in dismay, as I pictured my husband bunking with a sweaty-smelling plowing-gang of Swedes and Finns and hoboing about the prairie with a thrashing outfit of the Great Unwashed. He'd get cooties, or rheumatism, or a sunstroke, or a knife between his ribs some fine night--and then where'd I be? I couldn't think of it. I couldn't think of Duncan Argyll McKail, the descendant of Scottish kings and second-cousin to a title, hiring out to some old skinflint of a farmer who'd have him up at four in the morning and keep him on the go until eight at night.

"Then what other way?" asked Dinky-Dunk.

"You leave it to me," I retorted. I made a bluff of saying it bravely enough, but I inwardly decided that instead of sixteen yards of fresh chintz I'd have to be satisfied with five yards. Poverty, after all, is not a picturesque thing. But I didn't intend to be poor, I protested to my troubled soul, as I went at that Harris Ranch wickiup, tooth and nail, while Iroquois Annie kept an eye on Dinkie and the Twins.

These same Twins, I can more than ever see, are going to be somewhat of a brake on the wheels of industry. I have even been feeding on "slops," of late, to the end that Poppsy and Pee-Wee may thrive. And already I see sex-differences asserting themselves. Pee-Wee is a bit of a stoic, while his sister shows a tendency to prove a bit of a squealer. But Poppsy is much the daintier feeder of the two. I'll probably have to wean them both, however, before many more weeks slip by. As soon as we get settled in our new shack and I can be sure of a one-cow supply of milk I'll begin a bottle-feed once in every twenty-four hours. Dinky-Dunk says I ought to take a tip from the Indian mother, who sometimes nurses her babe until he's two and three years old. I asked Ikkie--as Dinkie calls Iroquois Annie--about this and Ikkie says the teepee squaw has no cow's milk and has to keep on the move, so she feeds him breast-milk until he's able to eat meat. Ikkie informs me that she has seen a papoose turn away from its mother's breast to take a puff or two at a pipe. From which I assume that the noble Red Man learns to smoke quite early in life.

Ikkie has also been enlightening me on other baby-customs of her ancestors, explaining that it was once the habit for a mother to name her baby for the first thing seen after its birth. That, I told Dinky-Dunk, was probably why there were so many "Running Rabbits," and "White Pups" and "Black Calfs" over on the Reservation. And that started me maun enlarging on the names of Indians he'd known, the most elongated of which, he acknowledged, was probably "The-Man-Who-Gets-Up- In-The-Middle-Of-The-Night-To-Feed-Oats-To-His-Pony," while the most descriptive was "Slow-To-Come-Over-The-Hill," though "Shot-At-Many-Times" was not without value, and "Long-Time-No-See-Him," as the appellative for a disconsolate young squaw, carried a slight hint of the Indian's genius for nomenclature. Another thing mentioned by Dunkie, which has stuck in my memory, was his running across a papoose's grave in an Indian burying-ground at Pincer Creek, when he was surveying, where the Indian baby had been buried--above-ground, of course--_in an old Saratoga trunk_. That served to remind me of Francois' story about "Old Sun," who preceded "Running Rabbit"--note the name--as chief of the Alberta Blackfoot tribe, and always carried among his souvenirs of conquest a beautiful white scalp, with hair of the purest gold, very long and fine, but would never reveal how or where he got it. Many a night, when I couldn't sleep, I've worried about that white scalp, and dramatized the circumstances of its gathering. Who was the girl with the long and lovely tresses of purest gold? And did she die bravely? And did she meet death honorably and decently, or after the manner of certain of the Jesuits' _Relations_?...

I have had a talk with Whinnie, otherwise Whinstane Sandy, who has been ditching at the far end of our half-section. I explained the situation to him quite openly, acknowledging that we were on the rocks but not yet wrecked, and pointing out that there might be a few months before the ghost could walk again. And Whinstane Sandy has promised to stick. Poor old Whinnie not only promised to stick, but volunteered that if he could get over to Seattle or 'Frisco and raise some money on his Klondike claim our troubles would be a thing of the past. For Whinnie, who is an old-time miner and stampeder, is, I'm afraid, a wee bit gone in the upper story. He dreams he has a claim up North where there's millions and millions in gold to be dug out. On his moose-hide watch-guard he wears a nugget almost half as big as a praline, a nugget he found himself in ninety-nine, and he'd part with his life, I believe, before he'd part with that bangle of shiny yellow metal. In his chest of black-oak, too, he keeps a package of greasy and dog-eared documents, and some day, he proclaims, those papers will bring him into millions of money.

I asked Dinky-Dunk about the nugget, and he says it's genuine gold, without a doubt. He also says there's one chance in a hundred of Whinnie actually having a claim up in the gold country, but doubts if the poor old fellow will ever get up to it again. It's about on the same footing, apparently, as Uncle Carlton's Chilean nitrate mines. For Whinnie had a foot frozen, his third winter on the Yukon, and this, of course, has left him lame. It means that he's not a great deal of good when it comes to working the land, but he's a clever carpenter, and a good cement-worker, and can chore about milking the cows and looking after the stock and repairing the farm implements. Many a night, after supper, he tells us about the Klondike in the old days, about the stampedes of ninety-eight and ninety-nine, and the dance-halls and hardships and gamblers and claim-jumpers. I have always had a weakness for him because of his blind and unshakable love for my little Dinkie, for whom he whittles out ships and windmills and decoy-ducks. But when I explained things to simple-minded old Whinnie, and he offered to hand over the last of his ready money--the money he was hoarding dollar by dollar to get back to his hidden _El Dorado_--it brought a lump up into my throat.

I couldn't accept his offer, of course, but I loved him for making it. And whatever happens, I'm going to see that Whinnie has patches on his panties and no holes in his socks as long as he abides beneath our humble roof-tree. I intend to make the new bunk-house just as homy and comfortable as I can, so that Whinnie, under that new roof, won't feel that he's been thrust out in the cold. But I must have my own house for myself and my babes. Soapy Stennet, by the way, has been paid off by Dinky-Dunk and is moving on to the Knee-Hill country, where he says he can get good wages breaking and seeding. Soapy, of course, was a good man on the land, but I never took a shine to that hard-eyed Canuck, and we'll get along, in some way or other, without him. For, in the language of the noble Horatius, "I'll find a way, or make it!"

On the way back to Casa Grande to-night, after a hard day's work, I asked Dinky-Dunk if we wouldn't need some sort of garage over at the Harris Ranch, to house our automobile. He said he'd probably put doors on the end of one of the portable granaries and use that. When I questioned if a car of that size would ever fit into a granary he informed me that we couldn't keep our big car.

"I can get seventeen hundred dollars for that boat," he explained. "We'll have to be satisfied with a tin Lizzie, and squander less on gasoline."

So once again am I reminded that the unpardonable crime of poverty is not always picturesque. But I wrestled with my soul then and there, and put my pride in my pocket and told Dinky-Dunk I didn't give a rip what kind of a car I rode in so long as I had such a handsome _chauffeur_. And I reached out and patted him on the knee, but he was too deep in his worries about business matters, I suppose, to pay any attention to that unseemly advance.

To-night after supper, when the bairns were safely in bed, I opened up the baby grand, intent on dying game, whatever happened or was to happen. But my concert wasn't much of a success. When you do a thing for the last time, and know it's to be the last time, it gives you a graveyardy sort of feeling, no matter how you may struggle against it. And the blither the tune the heavier it seemed to make my heart. So I swung back to the statelier things that have come down to us out of the cool and quiet of Time. I eased my soul with the _Sonata Appassionata_ and lost myself in the _Moonlight_ and pounded out the _Eroica_. But my fingers were stiff and my touch was wooden--so it was small wonder my poor lord and master tried to bury himself in his four-day-old newspaper. Then I tried Schubert's _Rosamonde_, though that wasn't much of a success. So I wandered on through Liszt to Chopin. And even Chopin struck me as too soft and sugary and far-away for a homesteader's wife, so I sang

"In the dead av the night, acushla,
When the new big house is still,"--

to see if it would shake any sign of recognition out of my harried old Dinky-Dunk.

As I beheld nothing more than an abstracted frown over the tip-top edge of his paper, I defiantly swung into _The Humming Coon_, which apparently had no more effect than Herman Lohr. So with malice aforethought I slowly and deliberately pounded out the Beethoven Funeral March. I lost myself, in fact, in that glorious and melodic wail of sorrow, merged my own puny troubles in its god-like immensities, and was brought down to earth by a sudden movement from Dinky-Dunk.

"Why rub it in?" he almost angrily demanded as he got up and left the room....

But that stammering little soul-flight has done me good. It has given me back my perspective. I refuse to be downed. I'm still the captain of my soul. I'm still at the wheel, no matter if we are rolling a bit. And life, in some way, is still going to be good, still well worth the living!

_Wednesday the Eighth_

Dinky-Dunk has had word that Lady Alicia is on her way west. He seems to regard that event as something very solemn, but I refuse to take seriously either her ladyship or her arrival. To-night, I'm more worried about Dinkie, who got at the floor-shellac with which I'd been furbishing up the bathroom at Casa Grande. He succeeded in giving his face and hair a very generous coat of it--and I'm hoping against hope he didn't get too much of it in his little stomach. He seems normal enough, and in fairly good spirits, but I had to scrub his face with coal-oil, to get it clean, and his poor little baby-skin is burnt rather pink.

The winter has broken, the frost is coming out of the ground and the mud is not adding to our joy in life. Our last load over to the Harris shack was ferried and tooled through a batter. On the top of it (the _load_, and not the batter!) I placed Olie's old banjo, for whatever happens, we mustn't be entirely without music.

Yesterday Dinky-Dunk got Paddy saddled and bridled for me. Paddy bucked and bit and bolted and sulked and tried to brush his rider off against the corral posts. But Dinky-Dunk fought it out with him, and winded him, and mastered him, and made him meek enough for me to slip up into the saddle. My riding muscles, however, have gone flabby, and two or three miles, for the first venture, was all I cared to stand. But I'm glad to know that Paddy can be pressed into service again, whenever the occasion arises. Poor old Bobs, by the way, keeps looking at me with a troubled and questioning eye. He seems to know that some unsettling and untoward event is on the way. When a coyote howled last night, far off on the sky-line, Bobs poured out his soul in an answering solo of misery. This morning, when I was pretty busy, he poked his head between my knees. I had a dozen things calling me, but I took the time to rub his nose and brush back his ears and tell him he was the grandest old dog on all God's green earth. And he repaid me with a look of adoration that put springs under my heels for the rest of the morning, and came and licked Pee-Wee's bare heels, and later Poppsy's, when I was giving them their bath.

_Friday the Tenth_

Lady Alicia has arrived. So have her trunks, eleven in number--count 'em!--trunks of queer sizes and shapes, of pigskin and patent leather and canvas, with gigantic buckles and straps, and all gaudily initialed and plastered with foreign labels. Her ladyship had to come, of course, at the very worst time of year, when the mud was at its muckiest and the prairie was at its worst. The trails were simply awful, with the last of the frost coming out of the ground and mother earth a foot-deep sponge of engulfing stickiness. All the world seemed turned to mud. I couldn't go along, of course, when Dinky-Dunk started off in the Teetzels' borrowed spring "democrat" to meet his English cousin at the Buckhorn station, with Whinstane Sandy and the wagon trailing behind for the luggage.

We expected a lady in somewhat delicate health, so I sent along plenty of rugs and a foot-warmer, and saw that the house was well heated, and the west room bed turned down. Even a hot-water bottle stood ready and waiting to be filled.

But Lady Alicia, when she arrived with Dinky-Dunk just before nightfall, didn't impress me as very much of an invalid. She struck me more as a very vital and audacious woman, neither young nor old, with an odd quietness of manner to give a saber-edge to her audacity. I could hear her laughing, musically and not unpleasantly, at the mud-coated "democrat," which on its return looked a good deal like a 'dobe hut mounted on four chariot wheels. But _everything_, for that matter, was covered with mud, horses and harness and robes and even the blanket in which Lady Alicia had wrapped herself. She had done this, I could see, to give decent protection to a Redfern coat of plucked beaver with immense reveres, though there was mud enough on her stout tan shoes, so unmistakably English in their common-sense solidity, and some on her fur turban and even a splash or two on her face. That face, by the way, has an apple-blossom skin of which I can see she is justly proud. And she has tourmaline eyes, with reddish hazel specks in an iris of opaque blue, and small white teeth and lips with a telltale curve of wilfulness about them. She isn't exactly girlish, but with all her worldly wisdom she has a touch of the clinging-ivy type which must make her inordinately appealing to men. Her voice is soft and full-voweled, with that habitual rising inflection characteristic of the English, and that rather insolent drawl which in her native land seems the final flower of unchallenged privilege. Her hands are very white and fastidious looking, and most carefully manicured. She is, in fact, wonderful in many ways, but I haven't yet decided whether I'm going to like her or not. Her smile strikes me as having more glitter than warmth, and although she is neither tall nor full-bodied, she seems to have the power of making point take the place of weight. Yet, oddly enough, there is an occasional air of masculine loose-jointedness about her movements, a half-defiant sort of slouch and swagger which would probably carry much farther in her Old World than in our easier-moving New World, where disdain of decorum can not be regarded as quite such a novelty.

It wasn't until she was within the protecting door of Casa Grande that I woke up to the fact of how incongruous she stood on a northwest ranch. She struck me, then, as distinctly an urban product, as one of those lazy and silk-lined and limousiny sort of women who could face an upholstery endurance-test without any apparent signs of heart-failure, but might be apt to fall down on engine-performance. Yet I was determined to suspend all judgment, even after I could see that she was making no particular effort to meet me half-way, though she did acknowledge that Dinkie, in his best bib and tucker, was a "dawling" and even proclaimed that his complexion--due, of course, to the floor-shellac and coal-oil--reminded her very much of the higher-colored English children. She also dutifully asked about Poppsy and Pee-Wee, after announcing that she found the house uncomfortably hot, and seemed surprised that Dinky-Dunk should descend to the stabling and feeding and watering of his own horses.

She appeared rather constrained and ill-at-ease, in fact, until Dinky-Dunk had washed up and joined us. Yet I saw, when we sat down to our belated supper, that the fair Allie had the abundant and honest appetite of a healthy boy. She also asked if she might smoke between courses--which same worried the unhappy Dinky-Dunk much more than it did me. My risibilities remained untouched until she languidly remarked that any woman who had twins on the prairie ought to get a V.C.

But she automatically became, I retorted, a K.C.B. This seemed to puzzle the cool-eyed Lady Alicia.

"That means a Knight Commander of the Bath," she said with her English literalness.

"Exactly," I agreed. And Dinky-Dunk had to come to her rescue and explain the joke, like a court-interpreter translating Cree to the circuit judge, so that by the time he got through it didn't seem a joke at all and his eyes were flashing me a code-signal not to be too hard on a tenderfoot. When, later on, Lady Alicia looked about Casa Grande, which we'd toiled and moiled and slaved to make like the homestead prints in the immigration pamphlets, she languidly acknowledged that it was rather ducky, whatever that may mean, and asked Dinky-Dunk if there'd be any deer-shooting this spring. I notice, by the way, that she calls him "Dooncan" and sometimes "Cousin Doonk," which strikes me as being over-intimate, seeing he's really her second cousin. It seems suggestive of some hidden joke between them. And Duncan addresses her quite openly as "Allie."

This same Allie has brought a lady's maid with her whom she addresses, _more Anglico_, simply by her surname of "Struthers." Struthers is a submerged and self-obliterating and patient-eyed woman of nearly forty, I should say, with a face that would be both intelligent and attractive, if it weren't so subservient. But I've a floaty sort of feeling that this same maid knows a little more than she lets on to know, and I'm wondering what western life will do to her. In one year's time, I'll wager a plugged nickel against an English sovereign, she'll not be sedately and patiently dining at second-table and murmuring "Yes, me Lady" in that meek and obedient manner. But it fairly took my breath, the adroit and expeditious manner in which Struthers had that welter of luggage unstrapped and unbuckled and warped into place and things stowed away, even down to her ladyship's rather ridiculous folding canvas bathtub. In little more than two shakes she had a shimmering litter of toilet things out on the dresser tops, and even a nickel alcohol-lamp set up for brewing the apparently essential cup of tea. It made me wish that I had a Struthers or two of my own on the string. And that made my thoughts go hurtling back to my old Hortense and how we had parted at the Hotel de L'Athenee, and to Theobald Gustav and his aunt the Baroness, and the old lost life that seemed such years and years away....

But I promptly put the lid down on those over-disturbing reminiscences. There should be no _post-mortems_ in this family circle, no jeremiads over what has gone before. This is the New World and the new age where life is too crowded for regrets. I am a woman twenty-seven years old, married and the mother of three children. I am the wife of a rancher who went bust in a land-boom and is compelled to start life over again. I must stand beside him, and start from the bottom. I must also carry along with me all the hopes and prospects of three small lives. This, however, is something which I refuse to accept as a burden and a handicap. It is a weight attached to me, of course, but it's only the stabilizing weight which the tail contributes to the kite, allowing it, in the end, to fly higher and keep steadier. It won't seem hard to do without things, when I think of those kiddies of mine, and hard work should be a great and glorious gift, if it is to give them the start in life which they deserve. We'll no longer quarrel, Diddums and I, about whether Dinkie shall go to Harvard or McGill. There'll be much closer problems than that, I imagine, before Dinkie is out of his knickers. Fate has shaken us down to realities--and my present perplexity is to get possession of six new milk-pans and that new barrel-churn, not to mention the flannelette I simply must have for the Twins' new nighties!...

_Saturday the Eleventh_

These imperturbable English! I didn't know whether I should take off my hat to 'em or despise 'em. They seem to come out of a different mold to what we Americans do. Lady Alicia takes everything as a matter of course. She seems to have accepted one of the finest ranches west of the Peg as impassively as an old work-horse accepts a new shoe. Even the immensity of our western prairie-land hasn't quite stumped her. She acknowledged that Casa Grande was "quaint," and is obviously much more interested in Iroquois Annie, the latter being partly a Redskin, than in my humble self. I went up in her estimation a little, however, when I coolly accepted one of her cigarettes, of which she has brought enough to asphyxiate an army. I managed it all right, though it was nearly four long years since I'd flicked the ash off the end of one--in Chinkie's yacht going up to Monte Carlo. But I was glad enough to drop the bigger half of it quietly into my nasturtium window-box, when the lady wasn't looking.

The lady in question, by the way, seems rather disappointed to find that Casa Grande has what she called "central heating." About the middle of next February, when the thermometer is flirting with the forty-below mark, she may change her mind. I suppose the lady expected to get a lodge and a deer-park along with her new home, to say nothing of a picture 'all--open to the public on Fridays, admission one shilling--and a family ghost, and, of course, a terrace for the aforesaid ghost to ambulate along on moonlight nights.

But the thing that's been troubling me, all day long, is: Now that Lady Alicia has got her hand-made ranch, what's she going to do with it? I scarcely expect her to take me into her confidence on the matter, since she seems intent on regarding me as merely a bit of the landscape. The disturbing part of it all is that her aloofness is so unstudied, so indifferent in its lack of deliberation. It makes me feel like a bump on a log. I shouldn't so much mind being actively and martially snubbed, for that would give me something definite and tangible to grow combative over. But you can't cross swords with a Scotch mist.

With Dinky-Dunk her ladyship is quite different. I never see that look of mild impatience in her opaque blue eyes when he is talking. She flatters him openly, in fact, and a man takes to flattery, of course, as a kitten takes to cream. Yet with all her outspokenness I am conscious of a tremendous sense of reservation. Already, more than once, she has given me a feeling which I'd find it very hard to describe, a feeling as though we were being suspended over peril by something very fragile. It's the feeling you have when you stand on one of those frail little Alpine bridges that can sway so forebodingly with your own weight and remind you that nothing but a rustic paling or two separates you from the thousand-footed abysses below your heels.

But I mustn't paint the new mistress of Casa Grande all in dark colors. She has her good points, and a mind of her own, and a thought or two of her own. Dinky-Dunk was asking her about Egypt. That country, she retorted, was too dead for her. She couldn't wipe out of her heart the memory of what man had suffered along the banks of the Nile, during the last four thousand years, what millions of men had suffered there because of religion and war and caste.

"I could never be happy in a country of dead races and dead creeds and dead cities," protested Lady Alicia, with more emotion than I had expected. "And those are the things that always stare me in the face out there."

This brought the talk around to the New World.

"I rather fancy that a climate like yours up here," she coolly observed, "would make luxuries of furniture and dress, and convert what should be the accidents of life into essentials. You will always have to fight against nature, you know, and that makes man attach more importance to the quest of comfort. But when he lives in the tropics, in a surrounding that leaves him with few desires, he has time to sit down and think about his soul. That's why you can never have a great musician or a great poet in your land of blizzards, Cousin Dooncan. You are all kept too busy laying up nuts for the winter. You can't afford to turn gipsy and go off star-gazing."

"You can if you join the I. W. W.," I retorted. But the allusion was lost on her.

"I can't imagine a Shelley or a Theocritus up here on your prairie," she went on, "or a Marcus Aurelius in the real-estate business in Winnipeg."

Dinky-Dunk was able to smile at this, though I wasn't.

"But we have the glory of doing things," I contended, "and somebody, I believe, has summed up your Marcus Aurelius by saying he left behind him a couple of beautiful books, an execrable son, and a decaying nation. And we don't intend to decay! We don't live for the moment, it's true. But we live for To-morrow. We write epics in railway lines, and instead of working out sonnets we build new cities, and instead of sitting down under a palm-tree and twiddling our thumbs we turn a wilderness into a new nation, and grow grain and give bread to the hungry world where the gipsies don't seem quite able to make both ends meet!"

I had my say out, and Lady Alicia sat looking at me with a sort of mild and impersonal surprise. But she declined to argue about it all. And it was just as well she didn't, I suppose, for I had my Irish up and didn't intend to sit back and see my country maligned.

But on the way home to the Harris Ranch last night, with Dinky-Dunk silent and thoughtful, and a cold star or two in the high-arching heavens over us, I found that my little fire of enthusiasm had burnt itself out and those crazy lines of John Davidson kept returning to my mind:

"After the end of all things,
After the years are spent,
After the loom is broken,
After the robe is rent,
Will there be hearts a-beating,
Will friend converse with friend,
Will men and women be lovers,
After the end?"