Chapter VI: Part 6

I found myself singing for all I was worth as I did my work this morning. Dinky-Dunk came and stood in the door and said it sounded like old times. I feel strong again and have ventured to ask my lord and master if I couldn't have the weentiest gallop on Paddy once more. But he's made me promise to wait for a week or two. The last two or three nights have been quite cold, and away off, miles and miles across the prairie, we can see the glow of fires where different ranchers are burning their straw, after the wind-stackers have blown it from the threshing machines. Sometimes it burns all night long.

_Friday the Twenty-first_

I have this morning found out why Olga won't eat mushrooms. It was very cold again last night, for this time of year. Percy came over, and we had a ripping fire and popped Ontario pop-corn with Ontario maple sirup poured over it. Olga and Olie and Terry all came in and sat about the stove. And being absolutely happy and contented and satisfied with life in general, we promptly fell to talking horrors, the same as a cook stirs lemon juice into her pudding-sauce, I suppose, to keep its sweetness from being too cloying. That revel in the by-paths of the Poesque began with Dinky-Dunk's casual reference to the McKinnon ranch and Percy's inquiry as to why its earlier owner had given it up. So Dinky-Dunk recounted the story of Andrew Cochrane's death. And it was noticeable that poor old Olie betrayed visible signs of distress at this tale of a young ranchman being frozen to death alone in his shack in mid-winter. So Dinky-Dunk, apparently with malice prepense, enlarged on his theme, describing how all young Cochrane's stock had starved in their stalls and how his collie dog which had been chained to a kennel-box outside the shack had first drawn attention to the tragedy. A government inspector, in riding past, had noticed the shut-up shack, had pounded on the door, and had promptly discovered the skeleton of the dog with a chain and collar still attached to the clean-picked neckbones. And inside the shack he had found the dead man himself, as life-like, because of the intense cold, as though he had fallen asleep the night before.

It was not a pleasant story, and my efforts to picture the scene gave me rather a bristly feeling along the pin-feather area of my anatomy. And again undoubted signs of distress were manifest in poor Olie. The face of that simple-souled Swede took on such a look of wondering trouble that Dinky-Dunk deliberately and at great detail told of a ghost that had been repeatedly seen in an abandoned wickyup a little farther west in the province.

And that, of course, fired the Celtic soul of Terry, who told of the sister of his Ould Counthry master who had once been taken to a hospital. And just at dusk on the third day after that his young master was walking down the dark hall. As he passed his sister's door, there she stood all in white, quietly brushing her hair, as plain as day to his eyes. And with that the master rushed down-stairs to his mother asking how Sheila had got back from the hospital. And his old mother, being slow of movement, started for Sheila's room. But before she so much as reached the foot of the stairs a neighbor woman came running in, wiping her eyes with her shawl-end and saying, "Poor Sheila died this minute over t' the hospital!" I can't tell it as Terry told it, and I don't know whether he himself believed in it or not, but the huge bulk of Olie Larson sat there bathed in a fine sweat, with his eyes fixed on the stove front. He was by no means happy, and yet he seemed unable to tear himself away, just as Gimlets and I used to sit chained to the spot while Grandfather Heppelwhite continued to intone the dolorous history of the "Babes in the Woods" until our ultimate and inevitable collapse into tears!

So Percy, who is not without his spirit of ragging, told several whoppers, which he later confessed came from the Society of Psychical Research records. And I huskily recounted Uncle Carlton's story of the neurasthenic lady patient who went into a doctor's office and there beheld a skull standing on his polished rosewood desk. Then, as she sat staring at it, this skull started to move slowly toward her. It later turned out to be only a plaster-of-Paris paper weight, and a mouse had got inside it and found a piece of cracker there--and a cracker, I had to explain to Percy, was the name under which a biscuit usually masqueraded in America. That mouse, in its efforts to get the last of that cracker, had, of course, shifted the skull along the polished wood.

This reminded Dinky-Dunk of the three medical students who had tried to frighten their landlady's daughter by smuggling an arm from the dissecting room and hiding it under the girl's pillow. Dinky-Dunk even solemnly avowed that the three men were college chums of his. They waited to hear the girl's scream, but as there was nothing but silence they finally stole into the room. And there they saw the girl sitting on the floor, holding the arm in her hands. As she sat there she was mumbling to herself and eating one end of it! Of course the poor thing had gone stark staring mad.

Olie groaned audibly at this and wiped his forehead with his coat-sleeve. But before he could get away Terry started to tell of the four-bottle Irish sea captain who was sober only when at sea and one night in port stumbled up to bed three sheets in the wind. When he had navigated into what he thought was his own room he was astounded to find a man already in bed there, and even drunker than he was himself, too drunk, in fact, to move. And even the candles had been left burning. But the old captain climbed over next to the wall, clothes and all, and would have been fast asleep in two minutes if two stout old ladies hadn't come in and started to cry and say a prayer or two at the side of the bed. Thereupon the old captain, muddled as he was, quietly but inquisitively reached over and touched the man beside him. _And that man was cold as ice!_ The captain gave one howl and made for the door. But the old ladies went first, and they all rolled down the stairs one after the other and the three of them up and ran like the wind. "And niver wanst did they stop," declared the brogue-mouthing Terry, "till they lept flat against the sea-wall!"

Olie, who had moved away to the far end of the table, got up at this point and went to the door and looked out. He sighed lugubriously as he stared into the darkness of the night. The outer gloom, apparently, was too much for him, as he came slowly and reluctantly back to his chair at the far end of the table and it was plain to see that he was as frightened as a five-year-old child. The men, I suppose, would have badgered him until midnight, for Terry had begun a story of a negro who'd been sent to rob a grave and found the dead man not quite dead. But I declared that we'd had enough of horrors and declined to hear anything more about either ghosts or deaders. I was, in fact, getting just a wee bit creepy along the nerve-ends myself. And Babe whimpered a little in his cradle and brought us all suddenly back from the Wendigo Age to the time of the kerosene lamp. "Fra' witches and warlocks," I solemnly intoned, "fra' wurricoos and evil speerits, and fra' a' ferly things that wheep and gang bump in the nicht, Guid Lord deliver us!" And that incantation, I feel sure, cleared the air for both my own sprite-threatened offspring and for the simple-minded Olie himself, although Dinky-Dunk explained that my Scotch was rather worse than the stories.

But it was this morning after breakfast that I learned from Olga why she never cared to eat mushrooms. And all day long her story has been hanging between me and the sun, like a cloud. Not that there is anything so wonderful about the story itself, outside of its naked tragedy. But I think it was more the way that huge placid-eyed girl told it, with her broken English and her occasional pauses to grope after the right word. Or perhaps it was because it came as such a grim reality after the trifling grotesqueries of the night before. At any rate, as I heard it this morning it seemed as terrible as anything in Tolstoi's _Heart of Darkness_, and more than once sent my thoughts back to the sorrows of the house of OEdipus. It startled me a little, too, for I never thought to catch an echo of Greek tragedy out of the full soft lips of a Finnish girl who was helping me wash my breakfast dishes.

It began as I was deciding on my dinner menu, and looked to see if all our mushrooms had been used up. That prompted me to ask the girl why she never ate them. I could see a barricaded look come into her eyes but she merely shrugged and said that sometimes they were poison and killed people. I told her that this was absurd and that any one with ordinary intelligence soon got to know a meadow mushroom when he saw one. But sometimes, Olga insisted, they were death cups. If you ate a death cup you died, and nothing could save you. I tried to convince her that this was just a peasant superstition, but she announced that she had seen death cups, many of them, and had seen people who had been killed by them. And then brokenly, and with many heavy gestures of hesitation, she told me the story.

Nearly seventy miles northwest of us, up near her old home, so she said, a Pole named Andrei Przenikowski and his wife used to live. They had one son, whose name was Jozef. They were poor, always poor, and could never succeed. So when Jozef was fifteen years old he went to the coast to make his fortune. And the old father and mother had a hard time of it, for old Andrei found it no easy thing to get about, having had his feet frozen years before. He stumped around like a hen with frost-bitten claws, Olga said, and his wife, old as she was, had to help him in the fields. One whole winter, he told Olga's father, they had lived on turnips. But season after season dragged on, and still they existed, God knows how. Of Jozef they never heard again. But with Jozef himself it was a different story. The boy went up to Alaska, before the days of the Klondike strike. There he worked in the fisheries, and in the lumber camps, and still later he joined a mining outfit. Then he went in to the Yukon.

That was twelve years after he had first left home. He was a strong man by this time and spoke English very well. And the next year he struck luck, and washed up a great deal of gold, thousands of dollars' worth of gold. But he saved it all, for he had never forgotten the old folks on their little farm. So he gathered up his money and went down to Seattle, and then crossed to Vancouver. From there he made his way back to his old home, dressed like a man of the world and wearing a big gold watch and chain and a gold ring. And when he walked in on the old folks they failed to recognize him--and that Jozef thought the finest of jokes. He filled the little sod-covered shack with his laughter, for he was happy. He knew that for the rest of their days their troubles had all ended. So he walked about and made plans, but still he did not tell them who he was. It was so good a joke that he intended to make the most of it. But he said that he had news of their Jozef, who was not so badly off for a ne'er-do-well. Before he left the next day, he promised, they should be told about their boy. And he laughed again and slapped his pocketful of gold and the two old folks sat blinking at him in awe, until he announced that he was hungry and confided to them that his friend Jozef had once told him there were wonderful mushrooms round-about at that season of the year.

Andrei and his wife talked together in the cow-shed, before the old man hobbled out to gather the mushrooms. Poverty and suffering had made them hard and the sight of this stranger with so much gold was too much for them. So it was a plate full of death cups which Andrei's wife cooked for the brown-faced stranger with the loud laugh. And they stood about and watched him eat them. Then he died, as Andrei knew he must die. But the old woman hid in the cow-shed until it was over, for it took some time. Together then the old couple searched the dead man's bags and his pockets. They found papers and certain marks on his body. They knew then that they had murdered their own son. The old man hobbled all the way to the nearest village, where he sent a letter to Olga's father and bought a clothes-line to take home. The journey took him an entire day. With that clothes-line Andrei Przenikowski and his wife hanged themselves, from one of the rafters in the cow-shed.

Olga said that she was only five years old then, but she remembered driving over with the others, after the letter had come to her father's place. She can still remember seeing the two old bodies hanging side by side and twisting slowly about in the wind. And she saw what was left of the mushrooms. She says she can never forget it and dreams of it quite often. And Olga is not what you would call emotional. She told me, as she dried her hands and hung up the dish-pan, that she can still see her people staring down at what was left of that plate of poisoned death cups, which had turned quite black, almost as black as the dead man she saw them lift up on the dirty bed.

_Monday the Twelfth_

Yesterday was Sunday and Olga in her best bib and tucker sat out in the sun with Dinky-Dink. She seemed perfectly happy merely to hold him. I looked out, to make sure he was all right, for a few days before Olga had nearly given me heart failure by balancing my boy on one huge hand, as though he were a mutton-chop, so that the adoring Olie might see him kick. As I stood watching Olga crooning above Buddy Boy, Percy rode up. Then he came over and joined Olga, who carefully lifted up the veil covering Dinky-Dink's face, and showed him off to the somewhat intimidated Percy. Percy poked a finger at him, and made absurd noises, and felt his legs as Olga directed and then sat down in front of Olga.

They talked there for a long time, quite oblivious of everything about them. At least Percy talked, for Olga's replies seemed mostly monosyllabic. But she kept bathing him in that mystic moonlight stare of hers and sometimes she showed her teeth in a slow and wistful sort of smile. Percy clattered on, quite unconscious that I was standing in the doorway staring at him. They seemed to be great pals. And I've been wondering what they talked about.

_Wednesday the Fourteenth_

To-day after dinner Dinky-Dunk took the Boy and held him up on Paddy's back, where he looked like a bump on a log. And that started me thinking that it wouldn't be so long before my little Snoozerette had a pony of his own and would be cantering off across the prairie like a monkey on a circus horse. For I want my boy to ride, and ride well. And then a little later he would be cantering off to school. And then it wouldn't be such a great while before he'd be hitting the trail side by side with some clear-eyed prairie girl on a dappled pinto, and I'd be a silvery-haired old lady wondering if that clear-eyed girl was good enough for my son! And there I was, as usual, dreaming of the future!

All day long the fact that Dinky-Dunk is getting extravagant has been hitting me just under the fifth rib. So I asked him if we could really afford a six-cylinder car with tan slip-covers and electric lights. "Afford it?" he echoed, "of course we can afford it. We can afford anything. Hang it all, our lean days are over and we haven't had the imagination to wake up to the fact. And d'you know what I'm going to do if certain things come my way? I'm going to send you and the Babe down to New York for the winter!"

"And where will you be?" I promptly inquired. The look of mingled pride and determination went out of his face.

"Oh, I'll have to hang around the Polar regions up here to look after things. But you and the Boy have got to have your chance. And I'll come down for two weeks at Easter and bring you home with me!"

"And will you be enjoying it up here?" I inquired.

"Of course I won't," acknowledged Dinky-Dunk. "But think what it will mean to you, Gee-Gee, to have a few months in the city again! And think what you've been missing!"

"Goosey-goosey-gander!" I said as I got his foolish old head in Chancery. "I want you to listen to me. There's nothing I've been missing. And you are plum locoed, Honey Chile, if you think I could ever be happy away from you, in New York or any other city. And I wouldn't go there for the winter if you gave me the Plaza and all the Park for a back yard!"

That declaration of mine seemed to puzzle him. "But think what it would mean to the Boy!" he contended.

"Well, what?" I demanded.

"Oh, good--er--good pictures and music and all that sort of thing!" he vaguely explained. I couldn't help laughing at him.

"But, Dinky-Dunk, don't you think Babe's a month or so too young to take up Debussy and the Post-Impressionists, you big, foolish, adorable old muddle-headed captor of helpless ladies' hearts!" And I firmly announced that he could never, never get rid of me.

_Thursday the Fifteenth_

Now that Olga is working altogether inside with me she is losing quite a little of her sunburn. Her skin is softer and she has acquired a little more of the Leonardo di Vinci look. She almost seems to be getting spiritualized--but it may be simply because she's lengthened her skirts. She loves Babe, and, I'm afraid, is rather spoiling him. I find her a better and better companion, not only because she talks more, but because she seems in some way to be climbing up to a newer level. Between whiles, I'm teaching her to cook. She learns readily, and is proud of her progress. But the thing of which she is proudest is her corsets. And they _do_ make a difference. Even Dinky-Dunk has noticed this. Yesterday he stood and stared after her.

"By gum," he sagely remarked, "that girl is getting a figure!" Men are so absurd. When this same Olga was going about half uncovered he never even noticed her. Now that she's mystified her nether limbs with a little drapery he stands staring after her as though she were a Venus de Milo come to life. And Olga is slowly but surely losing a little of her Arcadian simplicity. Yesterday I caught her burning up her cowhide boots. She is ashamed of them. And she is spending most of her money on clothes, asking me many strange questions as to apparel and carrying off my fashion magazines to her bedroom for secret perusal. For the first time in her life she is using cold cream. And the end seems to justify the means, for her skin is now like apple blossoms. Rodin, I feel sure, would have carried that woman across America on his back, once to have got her into his atelier!

Last week I persuaded Terry to take a try at Meredith and lent him my green cloth copy of _Harry Richmond_. Three days ago I found the seventh page turned down at the corner, and suspecting that this marked the final frontier of his advance, I tied a strand of green silk thread about the volume. It was still there this morning, though Terry daily and stoutly maintains that he's getting on grand with that fine green book of mine! But at noon to-day when Dinky-Dunk got back from Buckhorn he handed Terry a parcel, and I noticed the latter glanced rather uneasily about as he unwrapped it. This afternoon I discovered that it held two new books in paper covers. One was _The Hidden Hand_ and the other was called _The Terror of Tamaraska Gulch_. Terry, of late, has been doing his reading in his own room. And Nick Carter, apparently, is not to be so easily displaced. But a man who can make you read his books for the third time must be a genius. If I were an author, that's the sort of man I'd envy. And I think I'll try Percival Benson with _The Terror of Tamaraska Gulch_ when Terry is through with it!

_Friday the Sixteenth_

We were just finishing dinner to-day, and an uncommonly good one it seemed to me, and I was looking contentedly about my little family circle, wondering what more life could hold for a big healthy hulk of a woman like me, when the drone and purr of an approaching motor-car broke through the sound of our talk. Dinky-Dunk, in fact, was laying down the law about the farmer of the West, maintaining that he was a broader-spirited and bigger-minded man than his brother of the East, and pointing out that the westerner's wife was a queen who if she had little ease at least had great honor. And I was just thinking that one glorious thing about this same queen was that she at least escaped from all the twentieth-century strain and dislocation in the relationship between city men and women, when the hum of that car brought me back to earth and reminded me that I might have a tableful of guests to feed. The car itself drew up, with a flutter of its engine, half-way between the shack and the corral, and at that sound I imagine we all rather felt like Robinson Crusoes listening to the rattle of an anchor cable in Juan Fernandez's quietest bay. And through the open window I could make out a huge touring-car pretty well powdered with dust and with no less than six men in it.

Terry, all eyes, dove for the window, and Olie, all mouth, for the door. Olga leaned half-way across the table to look out, and I did a little staring myself. The only person who remained quiet was Dinky-Dunk. He knocked out his pipe, stuck it in his pocket, put on his hat and caught up a package of papers from his work table. Then he stalked out, with his gray fighting look about the eyes. He went out just as one of the bigger men was about to step down from the car, so that the bigger man changed his mind and climbed back in his seat, like a king reascending his throne. And they all sat there so sedate and non-committal and dignified, rather like dusty pallbearers in an undertaker's wagonette, that I promptly decided they had come to foreclose a mortgage and take my Dinky-Dunk's land away from him, at one fell swoop!

I could see my lord walk right up to the running-board, with curt little nods to his visitors, and I knew by the trim of his shoulders that there was trouble ahead. Yet they started talking quietly enough. But inside of two minutes my Dinky-Dunk was shaking his fist in the face of one of the younger and bigger men and calling him a liar and somewhat tautologically accusing him of knowing that he was a liar and that he always had been one. This altogether ungentlemanly language naturally brought forth language quite as ungentlemanly from the accused, who stood up in the car and took his turn at dancing about and shaking his own fist. And then the others seemed to take sides, and voices rose to a shout, and I saw that there was going to be another fight at Casa Grande--and I promptly decided to be in it. So off went my apron and out I went.

It was funny. For, oddly enough, the effect of my entrance on the scene was like that on a noisy class-room at the teacher's return. The tumult stopped, rather sheepishly, and that earful of men instinctively slipped on their armor plate of over-obsequious sex gallantry. They knew I wasn't a low-brow. I went right up to them, though something about their funereal discomfiture made me smile. So Dinky-Dunk, mad as a wet hen though he was, had to introduce every man-jack of them to me! One was a member of Parliament, and another belonged to some kind of railway committee, and another was a road construction official, and another was a mere capitalist who owned two or three newspapers. The man Dinky-Dunk had been calling a liar was a civil engineer, although it seemed to me that he had been acting decidedly uncivil. They ventured a platitude about the beautiful Indian summer weather and labored out a ponderous joke or two about such a bad-tempered man having such a good-looking wife--for which I despised them all. But I could see that even if my intrusion had put the soft pedal on their talk it had also left everything uncomfortably tentative and non-committal. For some reason or other this was a man's fight, one which had to be settled in a man's way. So I decided to retire with outward dignity even if with inward embarrassment. But I resented their uncouth commercial gallantry almost as much as I abominated their trying to bully my True Love. And I gave them one Parthian shot as I turned away.

"The last prize-fight I saw was in a sort of _souteneur's_ cabaret in the Avenue des Tilleuls," I sweetly explained to them. "But that was nearly three years ago. So if there is going to be a bout in my back yard, I trust you gentlemen will be so good as to call me!"

And smiling up into their somewhat puzzled faces, I turned on my heel and went into the house. One of the men laughed loud and deep, at this speech of mine, and a couple of the others seemed to sit puzzling over it. Yet two minutes after I was inside the shack that most uncivil civil engineer and Dinky-Dunk were at it again. Their language was more than I should care to repeat. The end of it was, however, that the six dusty pallbearers all stepped stiffly down out of their car and Dinky-Dunk shouted for Olie and Terry. At first I thought it was to be a duel, only I couldn't make out how it could be fought with a post-hole augur and a few lengths of jointed gaspipe, for this was what the men carried away with them.

Away across the prairie I could see them apparently engaged in the silly and quite profitless occupation of putting down a post-hole where it wasn't in the least needed, and then clustering about this hole like a bunch of professorial bigwigs about a new specimen on a microscope slide. Then they moved on and made another hole, and still another, until I got tired of watching them. It was two hours later before they came back. Their voices now seemed more facetious and there was more laughing and joking, Dinky-Dunk and the uncivil civil engineer being the only quiet ones. And then the car engine purred and hummed and they climbed heavily in and lighted cigars and waved hands and were off in a cloud of dust.

But Dinky-Dunk, when he came back to the shack with his papers, was in no mood for talking. And I knew better than to try to pump him. To-night he came in early for supper and announced that he'd have to leave for Winnipeg right away and might even have to go on to Ottawa. So I cooked his supper and packed his bag and held Babe up for him to kiss good-by. But still I didn't bother him with questions, for I was afraid of bad news. And he knew that I knew I could trust him.

He kissed me good-by in a tragically tender, or rather a tenderly tragic sort of way, which made me wonder for a moment if he was possibly never coming back again. So I made 'em all wait while I took one extra, for good measure, in case I should be a grass widow for the rest of my days.

To-night, however, I sat Terry down at the end of the table and third degreed him to the queen's taste. The fight, as far as I can learn from this circuitous young Irishman, is all about a right of way through our part of the province. Dinky-Dunk, it seems, has been working for it for over a year. And the man he called wicked names had been sent out by the officials to report on the territory. My husband claims he was bribed by the opposition party and turned in a report saying our district was without water. He also proclaimed that our land--_our_ land, mark you!--was unvaryingly poor and inferior soil! No wonder my Dinky-Dunk had stormed! Then Terry rather disquieted me by chortlingly announcing that they had put one over on the whole bunch. For, three days before, he'd quietly put down twenty soil and water-test holes and carefully filled them in again. But he'd found what he was after. And that little army of paid knockers, he acknowledged, had been steered into the neighborhood where the soil was deepest and the water was nearest. And that soon showed who the liar was, for of course everything came out as Dinky-Dunk wanted it to come out!

But this phase of it I didn't discuss with Terry, for I had no desire to air my husband's moral obliquities before his hired man. Yet I am still disturbed by what I have heard. Oh, Dinky-Dunk, I never imagined you were one bit sly, even in business!

_Sunday the Eighteenth_

Olie and Terry seem convinced of the fact that Dinky-Dunk's farming has been a success. We have saved all our wheat crop, and it's a whopper. Terry, with his crazy Celtic enthusiasms, says that by next year they'll be calling Dinky-Dunk the Wheat King of the West. Olga and Percy went buggy riding this afternoon. I wish I had some sort of scales to weight my Snoozerette. I know he's doubled in the last three weeks.

_Sunday the Twenty-fifth_

My Dinky-Dunk is home again. He looks a little tired and hollow-eyed, but when the Boy crowed and smiled up at him his poor tired face softened so wonderfully that it brought the tears to my eyes. I finally persuaded him to stop petting Babe and pay a little attention to me. After supper he opened up his extra hand-bag and hauled out the heaps of things he'd brought Babe and me. Then I sat on his knee and held his ears and made him blow away the smoke, every shred of it, so I could kiss him in my own particular places.

_Tuesday the Twenty-seventh_

Dinky-Dunk has sailed off to Buckhorn to do some telegraphing he should have done Saturday night. My suspicions about his slyness, by the way, were quite unfounded. It was the guileless-eyed Terry who led those railway officials out to the spot where he'd already secretly tested for water and found signs of it. And Terry can't even understand why Dinky-Dunk is so toweringly angry about it all!

_Wednesday the Twenty-eighth_

When Dinky-Dunk came in last night, after his drive out from Buckhorn, there was a look on his face that rather frightened me. I backed him up against the door, after he'd had a peep at the Boy, and said, "Let me smell your breath, sir!" For with that strange light in his eyes I surely thought he'd been drinking. "Lips that touch liquor," I sang, "shall never touch mine!"

But I was mistaken. And Dinky-Dunk only laughed in a quiet inward rumbling sort of way that was new to him. "I believe I am drunk, Boca Chica," he solemnly confessed, "drunk as a lord!" Then he took both my hands in his.

"D'you know what's going to happen?" he demanded. And of course I didn't. Then he hurled it point-blank at me.

"_The railway's going to come!_"

"Come where?" I gasped.

"Come here, right across our land! It's settled. And there's no mistake about it this time. Inside of ten months there'll be choo-choo cars steaming past Casa Grande!"

"Skookum!" I shouted.

"And there'll be a station within a mile of where you stand! And inside of two years this seventeen or eighteen hundred acres of land will be worth forty dollars an acre, easily, and perhaps even fifty. And what that means you can figure out for yourself!"

"Whoopee!" I gasped, trying in vain to figure out how much forty times seventeen hundred was.

But that was not all. It would do away with the road haul to the elevator, which might have taken most of the profit out of his grain growing. To team wheat into Buckhorn would have been a terrible discount, no matter what luck he might have with his crops. So he'd been moving heaven and earth to get the steel to come his way. He'd pulled wires and interviewed members and guaranteed a water-tank supply and promised a right of way and made use of his old engineering friends--until his battle was won. And his last fight had been against the liar who'd sent in false reports about his district. But that was over now, and Casa Grande will no longer be the jumping-off place of civilization, the dot on the wilderness. It will be on the time-tables and the mail-routes, and I know my Dinky-Dunk will be the first mayor of the new city, if there ever is a city to be mayor of!

_Friday the Thirtieth_

Dinky-Dunk came in at noon to-day, tiptoed over to the crib to see if the Boy was all right, and then came and put his hands on my shoulders, looking me solemnly in the eye: "What do you suppose has happened?" he demanded.

"Another railroad," I ventured.

He shook his head. Of course it was useless for me to try to guess. I pushed my finger against Dinky-Dunk's Adam's apple and asked him what the news was.

"Percival Benson Woodhouse has just calmly announced to me that, next week, _he's going to marry Olga_," was my husband's answer.

And he wondered why I smiled.

_Sunday the First_

Little Dinky-Dink is fast asleep in his hand-carved Scandinavian cradle. The night is cool, so we have a fire going. Big Dinky-Dunk, who has been smoking his pipe, is sitting on one side of the table, and I am sitting on the other. Between us lies the bundle of house-plans which have just been mailed up to us from Philadelphia. This is the second night we've pored over them. And we've decided what we're to do at Casa Grande. We're to have a telephone, as soon as the railway gets through, and a wind-mill and running water, and a new barn with a big soft-water tank at one end, and a hot-water furnace in the new house and sleeping porches and a butler's pantry and a laundry chute--and next winter in California, if we want it. And Dinky-Dunk blames himself for never having had brains enough to plant an avenue or two of poplars or Manitoba maples about Casa Grande, for now we'll have to wait a few years for foliage and shade. And he intends to have a playground for little Dinky-Dink, for he agrees with me that our boy must be strong and manly and muscular, and must not use tobacco in any form until he is twenty at least. And Dinky-Dunk has also agreed that I shall do all the punishing--if any punishing is ever necessary! His father, by the way, has just announced that he wants Babe to go to McGill and then to Oxford. But I have been insisting on Harvard, and I shall be firm about this.

That promised to bring us to a dead-lock, so we went back to our house-plans again, and Dinky-Dunk pointed out that the new living-room would be bigger than all our present shack and the annex put together. And that caused me to stare about our poor little cat-eyed cubby-hole of a wickyup and for the first time realize that our first home was to be wiped off the map. And nothing would ever be the same again, and even the prairie over which I had stared in my joy and my sorrow would always be different! A lump came in my throat. And when Olga came in and I handed Dinky-Dink to her she could see that my lashes were wet. But she couldn't understand.

So I slipped over to the piano and began to play. Very quietly I sang through Herman Lohr's Irish song that begins:

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

But before I got to the last two verses I'm afraid my voice was rather shaky.

In the dead av the year, acushla,
When me wide new fields are brown,
I think av a wee ould house,
At the edge av an ould gray town!

I think av the rush-lit faces,
Where the room and loaf was small:
_But the new years seem the lean years,
And the ould years, best av all!_

Dinky-Dunk came and stood close beside me. "Has my Gee-Gee a big sadness in her little prairie heart?" he asked as he slipped his arms about me. But I was sniffling and couldn't answer him. And the cling of his blessed big arms about me only seemed to make everything worse. So I was bawling openly when he held up my face and helped himself to what must have been a terribly briny kiss. But I slipped away into my bedroom, for I'm not one of those apple-blossom women who can weep and still look pretty. And for two blessed hours I've been sitting here, Matilda Anne, wondering if our new life will be as happy as our old life was.... Those old days are over and gone, and the page must be turned. And on that last page I was about to write "_Tamám shud_." But kinglike and imperative through the quietness of Casa Grande I hear the call of my beloved little _tenor robusto_--and if it is the voice of hunger it is also the voice of hope!

THE END

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