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Title: The Prairie Wife

Author: Arthur Stringer

Illustrator: Harvey Dunn

Release date: July 19, 2006 [eBook #18875]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18875

Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRAIRIE
WIFE ***

The Prairie Wife

I stooped over the trap-door and lifted it up. "Get
down there quick!" — Page 109, The Prairie
Wife.

THE PRAIRIE WIFE

By ARTHUR STRINGER

With Frontispiece in Color by
H . T. D U N N

A. L. BURT COMPANY
PUBLISHERS – – NEW YORK
Published by Arrangement with The Bobbs, Merrill
Company

Copyright 1915
The Curtis Publishing Company

Copyright 1915
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

TO VAN
WHO KNOWS AND LOVES

THE WEST
AS WE LOVE HIM!

Contents

Thursday the Nineteenth 1
Saturday the Twenty-first 16
Monday the Twenty-third 33
Wednesday the Twenty-fifth 41
Thursday the Twenty-sixth 48
Saturday the Twenty-eighth 57
Wednesday the First 61
Thursday the Second 64
Friday the Third 67
Saturday the Fourth 68
Monday the Sixth 73
Wednesday the Eighth 80
Saturday the Tenth 88
Sunday the Eleventh 91
Monday the Twelfth 93
Sunday the Eighteenth 101
Monday the Nineteenth 103
Tuesday the Twentieth 105
Thursday the Twenty-second 115
Saturday the Twenty-fourth 119
Tuesday the Twenty-seventh 128
Thursday the Twenty-ninth 133
Friday the Fifth 136
Sunday the Seventh 137
Tuesday the Ninth 138
Saturday the Twenty-first 142
Sunday the Twenty-ninth 150
Monday the Seventh 152
Friday the Eleventh 153
Sunday the Thirteenth 155
Wednesday the Sixteenth 156

Sunday the Twentieth 157
Sunday the Twenty-seventh 158
Wednesday the Thirtieth 159
Thursday the Thirty-first 160
Sunday the Third 167
Thursday the Seventh 171
Saturday the Ninth 172
Monday the Eleventh 175
Tuesday the Nineteenth 182
Sunday the Thirty-first 186
Tuesday the Ninth 188
Wednesday the Seventeenth 189
Thursday the Twenty-fifth 190
Tuesday the Second 191
Thursday the Fourth 193
Wednesday the Seventeenth 194
Saturday the Twenty-seventh 195
Tuesday the Sixth 198
Monday the Twelfth 199
Tuesday the Twentieth 202
Monday the Twenty-sixth 205
Wednesday the Twenty-eighth 207
Monday the Second 209
Thursday the Fifth 210
Tuesday the Tenth 214
Monday the Sixteenth 217
Tuesday the Twenty-fourth 220
Friday the Third 222
Thursday the Ninth 224
Wednesday the Fifteenth 228
Friday the Seventeenth 230
Saturday the Nineteenth 231
Friday the Twenty-eighth 233
Saturday the Twenty-ninth 234

Sunday the Thirtieth 236
Tuesday the First 237
Monday the Seventh 243
Sunday the Thirteenth 247
Monday the Twenty-eighth 249
Saturday the Second 251
Wednesday the Sixth 252
Tuesday the Twelfth 254
Thursday the Fourteenth 255
Wednesday the Fifth 256
Sunday the Ninth 260
Monday the Tenth 262
Tuesday the Eleventh 264
Wednesday the Thirteenth 265
Thursday the Fourteenth 267
Friday the Fifteenth 269
Saturday the Sixteenth 272
Monday the Seventeenth 275
Wednesday the Nineteenth 276
Friday the Twenty-first 277
Monday the Twelfth 290
Wednesday the Fourteenth 292
Thursday the Fifteenth 295
Friday the Sixteenth 298
Sunday the Eighteenth 307
Sunday the Twenty-fifth 308
Tuesday the Twenty-seventh 309
Wednesday the Twenty-eighth 310
Friday the Thirtieth 313
Sunday the First 314

THE PRAIRIE WIFE

Thursday the Nineteenth

Splash!... That's me, Matilda Anne! That's me falling plump into the pool of
matrimony before I've had time to fall in love! And oh, Matilda Anne,
Matilda Anne, I've got to talk to you! You may be six thousand miles away,
but still you've got to be my safety-valve. I'd blow up and explode if I didn't
express myself to some one. For it's so lonesome out here I could go and
commune with the gophers. This isn't a twenty-part letter, my dear, and it
isn't a diary. It's the coral ring I'm cutting my teeth of desolation on. For,
every so long, I've simply got to sit down and talk to some one, or I'd go
mad, clean, stark, staring mad, and bite the tops off the sweet-grass! It may
even happen this will never be sent to you. But I like to think of you reading
it, some day, page by page, when I'm fat and forty, or, what's more likely,
when Duncan has me chained to a corral-post or finally shut up in a padded
cell. For you were the one who was closest to me in the old days, Matilda
Anne, and when I was in trouble you were always the staff on which I
leaned, the calm-eyed Tillie-on-the-spot who never seemed to fail me! And
I think you will understand.
But there's so much to talk about I scarcely know where to begin. The funny
part of it all is, I've gone and married the Other Man. And you won't
understand that a bit, unless I start at the beginning. But when I look back,
there doesn't seem to be any beginning, for it's only in books that things
really begin and end in a single lifetime.
Howsomever, as Chinkie used to say, when I left you and Scheming Jack in
that funny little stone house of yours in Corfu, and got to Palermo, I found
Lady Agatha and Chinkie there at the Hotel des Palmes and the yacht being
coaled from a tramp steamer's bunkers in the harbor. So I went on with
them to Monte Carlo. We had a terrible trip all the way up to the Riviera,
and I was terribly sea-sick, and those lady novelists who love to get their
heroines off on a private yacht never dream that in anything but duckpond
weather the ordinary yacht at sea is about the meanest habitation between
Heaven and earth. But it was at Monte Carlo I got the cable from Uncle

Carlton telling me the Chilean revolution had wiped out our nitrate mine
concessions and that your poor Tabby's last little nest-egg had been
smashed. In other words, I woke up and found myself a beggar, and for a
few hours I even thought I'd have to travel home on that Monte Carlo
Viaticum fund which so discreetly ships away the stranded adventurer
before he musses up the Mediterranean scenery by shooting himself. Then I
remembered my letter of credit, and firmly but sorrowfully paid off poor
Hortense, who through her tears proclaimed that she'd go with me
anywhere, and without any thought of wages (imagine being hooked up by
a maid to whom you were under such democratizing obligations!) But I was
firm, for I knew the situation, might just as well be faced first as last.
So I counted up my letter of credit and found I had exactly six hundred and
seventy-one dollars, American money, between me and beggary. Then I sent
a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was code) and
later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates all the while to
the Hotel de L'Athénée, the long boxes duly piled up in tiers, like coffins at
the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness, called on me, in state. She
came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow landau of hers, where she looked
for all the world like an oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of
the danger of international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo
me away from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav—which made me
quite calmly and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of
under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and
put him in the shoe business in some nice New England town!
From Monte Carlo I scooted right up to Paris. Two days later, as I intended
to write you but didn't, I caught the boat-train for Cherbourg. And there at
the rail as I stepped on the Baltic was the Other Man, to wit, Duncan Argyll
McKail, in a most awful-looking yellow plaid English mackintosh. His face
went a little blank as he clapped eyes on me, for he'd dropped up to Banff
last October when Chinkie and Lady Agatha and I were there for a week.
He'd been very nice, that week at Banff, and I liked him a lot. But when
Chinkie saw him "going it a bit too strong," as he put it, and quietly tipped
Duncan Argyll off as to Theobald Gustav, the aforesaid D. A. bolted back to
his ranch without as much as saying good-by to me. For Duncan Argyll
McKail isn't an Irishman, as you might in time gather from that name of his.
He's a Scotch-Canadian, and he's nothing but a broken-down civil engineer

who's taken up farming in the Northwest. But I could see right away that he
was a gentleman (I hate that word, but where'll you get another one to take
its place?) and had known nice people, even before I found out he'd taught
the Duchess of S. to shoot big-horn. He'd run over to England to finance a
cooperative wheat-growing scheme, but had failed, because everything is so
unsettled in England just now.
But you're a woman, and before I go any further you'll want to know what
Duncan looks like.
Well, he's not a bit like his name. The West has shaken a good deal of the
Covenanter out of him. He's tall and gaunt and wide-shouldered, and has
brown eyes with hazel specks in them, and a mouth exactly like Holbein's
"Astronomer's," and a skin that is almost as disgracefully brown as an
Indian's. On the whole, if a Lina Cavalieri had happened to marry a Lord
Kitchener, and had happened to have a thirty-year-old son, I feel quite sure
he'd have been the dead spit, as the Irish say, of my own Duncan Argyll.
And Duncan Argyll, alias Dinky-Dunk, is rather reserved and quiet and, I'm
afraid, rather masterful, but not as Theobald Gustav might have been, for
with all his force the modern German, it seems to me, is like the bagpipes in
being somewhat lacking in suavity.
And all the way over Dinky-Dunk was so nice that he almost took my
breath away. He was also rather audacious, gritting his teeth in the face of
the German peril, and I got to like him so much I secretly decided we'd
always be good friends, old-fashioned, above-board, Platonic good friends.
But the trouble with Platonic love is that it's always turning out too nice to
be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice. So I had to look straight at the bosom
of that awful yellow-plaid English mackintosh and tell Dinky-Dunk the
truth. And Dinky-Dunk listened, with his astronomer mouth set rather grim,
and otherwise not in the least put out. His sense of confidence worried me.
It was like the quietness of the man who is holding back his trump. And it
wasn't until the impossible little wife of an impossible big lumberman from
Saginaw, Michigan, showed me the Paris Herald with the cable in it about
that spidery Russian stage-dancer, L——, getting so nearly killed in
Theobald's car down at Long Beach, that I realized there was a trump card
and that Dinky-Dunk had been too manly to play it.

I had a lot of thinking to do, the next three days.
When Theobald came on from Washington and met the steamer my
conscience troubled me and I should still have been kindness itself to him,
if it hadn't been for his proprietary manner (which, by the way, had never
annoyed me before), coupled with what I already knew. We had luncheon in
the Della Robbia room at the Vanderbilt and I was digging the marrons out
of a Nesselrode when, presto, it suddenly came over me that the baroness
was right and that I could never marry a foreigner. It came like a
thunderclap. But somewhere in that senate of instinct which debates over
such things down deep in the secret chambers of our souls, I suppose, the
whole problem had been talked over and fought out and put to the vote. And
in the face of the fact that Theobald Gustav had always seemed more nearly
akin to one of Ouida's demigods than any man I had ever known, the vote
had gone against him. My hero was no longer a hero. I knew there had been
times, of course, when that hero, being a German, had rather regarded this
universe of ours as a department-store and this earth as the particular
section over which the August Master had appointed him floor-walker. I had
thought of him as my Eisenfresser and my big blond Saebierassler. But my
eyes opened with my last marron and I suddenly sat back and stared at
Theobald's handsome pink face with its Krupp-steel blue eyes and its
haughtily upturned mustache-ends. He must have seen that look of appraisal
on my own face, for, with all his iron-and-blood Prussianism, he clouded up
like a hurt child. But he was too much of a diplomat to show his feelings.
He merely became so unctuously polite that I felt like poking him in his
steel-blue eye with my mint straw.
Remember, Matilda Anne, not a word was said, not one syllable about what
was there in both our souls. Yet it was one of life's biggest moments, the
Great Divide of a whole career—and I went on eating Nesselrode and
Theobald went on pleasantly smoking his cigarette and approvingly
inspecting his well-manicured nails.
It was funny, but it made me feel blue and unattached and terribly alone in
the world. Now, I can see things more clearly. I know that mood of mine
was not the mere child of caprice. Looking back, I can see how Theobald
had been more critical, more silently combative, from the moment I stepped
off the Baltic. I realized, all at once, that he had secretly been putting me to

a strain. I won't say it was because my dot had gone with The Nitrate
Mines, or that he had discovered that Duncan had crossed on the same
steamer with me, or that he knew I'd soon hear of the L—— episode. But
these prophetic bones of mine told me there was trouble ahead. And I felt so
forsaken and desolate in spirit that when Duncan whirled me out to
Westbury, in a hired motor-car, to see the Great Neck First defeated by the
Meadow Brook Hunters, I went with the happy-go-lucky glee of a truant
who doesn't give a hang what happens. Dinky-Dunk was interested in polo
ponies, which, he explained to me, are not a particular breed but just come
along by accident—for he'd bred and sold mounts to the Coronado and San
Mateo Clubs and the Philadelphia City Cavalry boys. And he loved the
game. He was so genuine and sincere and human, as we sat there side by
side, that I wasn't a bit afraid of him and knew we could be chums and
didn't mind his lapses into silence or his extension-sole English shoes and
crazy London cravat.
And I was happy, until the school-bell rang—which took the form of
Theobald's telephone message to the Ritz reminding me of our dinner
engagement. It was an awful dinner, for intuitively I knew what was
coming, and quite as intuitively he knew what was coming, and even the
waiter knew when it came,—for I flung Theobald's ring right against his
stately German chest. There'd be no good in telling you, Matilda Anne,
what led up to that most unlady-like action. I don't intend to burn incense in
front of myself. It may have looked wrong. But I know you'll take my word
when I say he deserved it. The one thing that hurts is that he had the
triumph of being the first to sever diplomatic relations. In the language of
Shorty McCabe and my fellow countrymen, he threw me down! Twenty
minutes later, after composing my soul and powdering my nose, I was
telephoning all over the city trying to find Duncan. I got him at last, and he
came to the Ritz on the run. Then we picked up a residuary old horse-
hansom on Fifth Avenue and went rattling off through Central Park. There I
—who once boasted of seven proposals and three times that number of
nibbles—promptly and shamelessly proposed to my Dinky-Dunk, though
he is too much of a gentleman not to swear it's a horrid lie and that he'd
have fought through an acre of Greek fire to get me!
But whatever happened, Count Theobald Gustav Von Guntner threw me
down, and Dinky-Dunk caught me on the bounce, and now instead of going

to embassy balls and talking world-politics like a Mrs. Humphry Ward
heroine I've married a shack-owner who grows wheat up in the Canadian
Northwest. And instead of wearing a tiara in the Grand Tier at the
Metropolitan I'm up here a dot on the prairie and wearing an apron made of
butcher's linen! Sursum corda! For I'm still in the ring. And it's no easy
thing to fall in love and land on your feet. But I've gone and done it. I've
taken the high jump. I've made my bed, as Uncle Carlton had the nerve to
tell me, and now I've got to lie in it. But assez d'Etrangers!
That wedding-day of mine I'll always remember as a day of smells, the
smell of the pew-cushions in the empty church, the smell of the lilies-of-
the-valley, that dear, sweet, scatter-brained Fanny-Rain-In-The-Face (she
rushed to town an hour after getting my wire) insisted on carrying, the smell
of the leather in the damp taxi, the tobaccoy smell of Dinky-Dunk's quite
impossible best man, who'd been picked up at the hotel, on the fly, to act as
a witness, and the smell of Dinky-Dunk's brand new gloves as he lifted my
chin and kissed me in that slow, tender, tragic, end-of-the-world way big
and bashful men sometimes have with women. It's all a jumble of smells.
Then Dinky-Dunk got the wire saying he might lose his chance on the
Stuart Ranch, if he didn't close before the Calgary interests got hold of it.
And Dinky-Dunk wanted that ranch. So we talked it over and in five
minutes had given up the idea of going down to Aiken and were
telephoning for the stateroom on the Montreal Express. I had just four hours
for shopping, scurrying about after cook-books and golf-boots and table-
linen and a chafing dish, and a lot of other absurd things I thought we'd
need on the ranch. And then off we flew for the West, before poor,
extravagant, ecstatic Dinky-Dunk's thirty-six wedding orchids' from
Thorley's had faded and before I'd a chance to show Fanny my nighties!
Am I crazy? Is it all wrong? Do I love my Dinky-Dunk? Do I? The Good
Lord only knows, Matilda Anne! O God, O God, if it should turn out that I
don't, that I can't? But I'm going to! I know I'm going to! And there's one
other thing that I know, and when I remember it, it sends a comfy warm
wave through all my body: Dinky-Dunk loves me. He's as mad as a hatter
about me. He deserves to be loved back. And I'm going to love him back.
That is a vow I herewith duly register. I'm going to love my Dinky-Dunk.
But, oh, isn't it wonderful to wake love in a man, in a strong man? To be

able to sweep him off, that way, on a tidal wave that leaves him rather white
and shaky in the voice and trembly in the fingers, and seems to light a little
luminous fire at the back of his eyeballs so that you can see the pupils glow,
the same as an animal's when your motor head-lights hit them! It's like
taking a little match and starting a prairie-fire and watching the flames
creep and spread until the heavens are roaring! I wonder if I'm selfish? I
wonder? But I can't answer that now, for it's supper time, and your Tabby
has the grub to rustle!

Saturday the Twenty-first

I'm alone in the shack to-night, and I'm determined not to think about my
troubles. So I'm going to write you a ream, Matilda Anne, whether you like
it or not. And I must begin by telling you about the shack itself, and how I
got here. All the way out from Montreal Dinky-Dunk, in his kindly way,
kept doing his best to key me down and make me not expect too much. But
I'd hold his hand, under the magazine I was pretending to read, and whistle
Home, Sweet Home! He kept saying it would be hard, for the first year or
two, and there would be a terrible number of things I'd be sure to miss. Love
Me and The World Is Mine! I hummed, as I leaned over against his big wide
shoulder. And I lay there smiling and happy, blind to everything that was
before me, and I only laughed when Dinky-Dunk asked me if I'd still say
that when I found there wasn't a nutmeg-grater within seven miles of my
kitchen.
"Do you love me?" I demanded, hanging on to him right in front of the car-
porter.
"I love you better than anything else in all this wide world!" was his slow
and solemn answer.
When we left Winnipeg, too, he tried to tell me what a plain little shack
we'd have to put up with for a year or two, and how it wouldn't be much
better than camping out, and how he knew I was clear grit and would help
him win that first year's battle. There was nothing depressing to me in the
thought of life in a prairie-shack. I never knew, of course, just what it would
be like, and had no way of knowing. I remembered Chinkie's little love of a
farm in Sussex, and I'd been a week at the Westbury's place out on Long
Island, with its terraced lawns and gardens and greenhouses and
macadamized roads. And, on the whole, I expected a cross between a
shooting-box and a Swiss chalet, a little nest of a home that was so small it
was sure to be lovable, with a rambler-rose draping the front and a crystal
spring bubbling at the back door, a little flowery island on the prairie where

we could play Swiss-Family-Robinson and sally forth to shoot prairie-
chicken and ruffed grouse to our hearts' content.
Well, that shack wasn't quite what I expected! But I mustn't run ahead of my
story, Matilda Anne, so I'll go back to where Dinky-Dunk and I got off the
side-line "accommodation" at Buckhorn, with our traps and trunks and
hand-bags and suitcases. And these had scarcely been piled on the wooden
platform before the station-agent came running up to Duncan with a yellow
sheet in his hand. And Duncan looked worried as he read it, and stopped
talking to his man called Olie, who was there beside the platform, in a big,
sweat-stained Stetson hat, with a big team hitched to a big wagon with
straw in the bottom of the box.
Olie, I at once told myself, was a Swede. He was one of the ugliest men I
ever clapped eyes on, but I found out afterward that his face had been
frozen in a blizzard, years before, and his nose had split. This had disfigured
him—and the job had been done for life. His eyes were big and pale blue,
and his hair and eyebrows were a pale yellow. He was the most silent man I
ever saw. But Dinky-Dunk had already told me he was a great worker, and a
fine fellow at heart. And when Dinky-Dunk says he'd trust a man, through
thick and thin, there must be something good in that man, no matter how
bulbous his nose is or how scared-looking he gets when a woman speaks to
him. Olie looked more scared than ever when Dinky-Dunk suddenly ran to
where the train-conductor was standing beside his car-steps, asked him to
hold that "accommodation" for half a minute, pulled his suit-case from
under my pile of traps, and grabbed little me in his arms.
"Quick," he said, "good-by! I've got to go on to Calgary. There's trouble
about my registrations."
I hung on to him for dear life. "You're not going to leave me here, Dinky-
Dunk, in the middle of this wilderness?" I cried out, while the conductor
and brakeman and station-agent all called and holloed and clamored for
Duncan to hurry.
"Olie will take you home, beloved," Dinky-Dunk tried to assure me. "You'll
be there by midnight, and I'll be back by Saturday evening!"

I began to bawl. "Don't go! Don't leave me!" I begged him. But the
conductor simply tore him out of my arms and pushed him aboard the tail-
end of the last car. I made a face at a fat man who was looking out a
window at me. I stood there, as the train started to move, feeling that it was
dragging my heart with it.
Then Dinky-Dunk called out to Olie, from the back platform: "Did you get
my message and paint that shack?" And Olie, with my steamer-rug in his
hand, only looked blank and called back "No." But I don't believe Dinky-
Dunk even heard him, for he was busy throwing kisses at me. I stood there,
at the edge of the platform, watching that lonely last car-end fade down into
the lonely sky-line. Then I mopped my eyes, took one long quavery breath,
and said out loud, as Birdalone Pebbley said Shiner did when he was lying
wounded on the field of Magersfontein: "Squealer, squealer, who's a
squealer?"
I found the big wagon-box filled with our things and Olie sitting there
waiting, viewing me with wordless yet respectful awe. Olie, in fact, has
never yet got used to me. He's a fine chap, in his rough and inarticulate way,
and there's nothing he wouldn't do for me. But I'm a novelty to him. His
pale blue eyes look frightened and he blushes when I speak to him. And he
studies me secretly, as though I were a dromedary, or an archangel, or a
mechanical toy whose inner mechanism perplexed him. But yesterday I
found out through Dinky-Dunk what the probable secret of Olie's
mystification was. It was my hat. "It ban so dam' foolish!" he fervently
confessed.
That wagon-ride from Buckhorn out to the ranch seemed endless. I thought
we were trekking clear up to the North Pole. At first there was what you
might call a road, straight and worn deep, between parallel lines of barb-
wire fencing. But this road soon melted into nothing more than a trail, a
never-ending gently curving trail that ribboned out across the prairie-floor
as far as the eye could see. It was a glorious afternoon, one of those opaline,
blue-arched autumn days when it should have been a joy merely to be alive.
But I was in an antagonistic mood, and the little cabin-like farmhouses that
every now and then stood up against the sky-line made me feel lonesome,
and the jolting of the heavy wagon made me tired, and by six o'clock I was
so hungry that my ribs ached. We had been on the trail then almost five

hours, and Olie calmly informed me it was only a few hours more. It got
quite cool as the sun went down, and I had to undo my steamer-rug and get
wrapped up in it. And still we went on. It seemed like being at sea, with a
light now and then, miles and miles away. Something howled dismally in
the distance, and gave me the creeps. Olie told me it was only a coyote. But
we kept on, and my ribs ached worse than ever.
Then I gave a shout that nearly frightened Olie off the seat, for I
remembered the box of chocolates we'd had on the train. We stopped and
found my hand-bag, and lighted matches and looked through it. Then I gave
a second and more dismal shout, for I remembered Dinky-Dunk had
crammed it into his suit-case at the last moment. Then we went on again,
with me a squaw-woman all wrapped in her blanket. I must have fallen
asleep, for I woke with a start. Olie had stopped at a slough to water his
team, and said we'd make home in another hour or two. How he found his
way across that prairie Heaven only knows. I no longer worried. I was too
tired to think. The open air and the swaying and jolting had chloroformed
me into insensibility. Olie could have driven over the edge of a canyon and
I should never have stopped him.
Instead of falling into a canyon, however, at exactly ten minutes to twelve
we pulled up beside the shack door, which had been left unlocked, and Olie
went in and lighted a lamp and touched a match to the fire already laid in
the stove. I don't remember getting down from the wagon seat and I don't
remember going into the shack. But when Olie came from putting in his
team I was fast asleep on a luxurious divan made of a rather smelly steer-
hide stretched across two slim cedar-trees on four little cedar legs, with a
bag full of pine needles at the head. I lay there watching Olie, in a sort of
torpor. It surprised me how quickly his big ungainly body could move, and
how adept those big sunburned hands of his could be.
Then sharp as an arrow through a velvet curtain came the smell of bacon
through my drowsiness. And it was a heavenly odor. I didn't even wash. I
ate bacon and eggs and toasted biscuits and orange marmalade and coffee,
the latter with condensed milk, which I hate. I don't know how I got to my
bed, or got my clothes off, or where the worthy Olie slept, or who put out
the light, or if the door had been left open or shut. I never knew that the bed
was hard, or that the coyotes were howling. I only know that I slept for ten

solid hours, without turning over, and that when I opened my eyes I saw a
big square of golden sunlight dancing on the unpainted pine boards of the
shack wall. And the funny part of it all was, Matilda Anne, I didn't have the
splitting headache I'd so dolorously prophesied for myself. Instead of that I
felt buoyant. I started to sing as I pulled on my stockings. And I suddenly
remembered that I was terribly hungry again.
I swung open the window beside me, for it was on hinges, and poked my
head out. I could see a corral, and a long low building which I took to be the
ranch stables, and another and newer-looking building with a metal roof,
and several stacks of hay surrounded by a fence, and a row of portable
granaries. And beyond these stretched the open prairie, limitless and
beautiful in the clear morning sunshine. Above it arched a sky of robin-egg
blue, melting into opal and pale gold down toward the rim of the world. I
breathed in lungfuls of clear, dry, ozonic air, and I really believe it made me
a little light-headed, it was so exhilarating, so champagnized with the
invisible bubbles of life.
I needed that etheric eye-opener, Matilda Anne, before I calmly and
critically looked about our shack. Oh, that shack, that shack! What a
comedown it was for your heart-sore Chaddie! In the first place, it seemed
no bigger than a ship's cabin, and not one-half so orderly. It is made of
lumber, and not of logs, and is about twelve feet wide and eighteen feet
long. It has three windows, on hinges, and only one door. The floor is rather
rough, and has a trap door leading into a small cellar, where vegetables can
be stored for winter use. The end of the shack is shut off by a "tarp"—which
I have just found out is short for tarpaulin. In other words, the privacy of
my bedroom is assured by nothing more substantial than a canvas drop-
curtain, shutting off my boudoir, where I could never very successfully
bouder, from the larger living-room.
This living-room is also the kitchen, the laundry, the sewing-room, the
reception-room and the library. It has a good big cookstove, which burns
either wood or coal, a built-in cupboard with an array of unspeakably ugly
crockery dishes, a row of shelves for holding canned goods, books and
magazines, cooking utensils, gun-cartridges, tobacco-jars, carpenter's tools
and a coal-oil lamp. There is also a plain pine table, a few chairs, one
rocking-chair which has plainly been made by hand, and a flour-barrel.

Outside the door is a wide wooden bench on which stands a big tin wash-
basin and a cake of soap in a sardine can that has been punched full of holes
along the bottom. Above it hung a roller towel which looked a little the
worse for wear. And that was to be my home, my one and only habitation,
for years and years to come! That little cat-eyed cubby-hole of a place!
I sat down on an overturned wash-tub about twenty paces from the shack,
and studied it with calm and thoughtful eyes. It looked infinitely worse
from the outside. The reason for this was that the board siding had first been
covered with tar-paper, for the sake of warmth, and over this had been
nailed pieces of tin, tin of every color and size and description. Some of it
was flattened out stove-pipe, and some was obviously the sides of tomato-
cans. Even tin tobacco-boxes and Dundee marmalade holders and the
bottoms of old bake-pans and the sides of an old wash-boiler had been
pieced together and patiently tacked over those shack-sides. It must have
taken weeks and weeks to do. And it suddenly impressed me as something
poignant, as something with the Vergilian touch of tears in it. It seemed so
full of history, so vocal of the tragic expedients to which men on the prairie
must turn. It seemed pathetic. It brought a lump into my throat. Yet that
Joseph's Coat of metal was a neatly done bit of work. All it needed was a
coat of paint or two, and it would look less like a crazy-quilt solidified into
a homestead. And I suddenly remembered Dinky-Dunk's question called out
to Olie from the car-end—and I knew he'd hurried off a message to have
that telltale tinning-job painted over before I happened to clap eyes on it.
As Olie had disappeared from the scene and was nowhere to be found, I
went in and got my own breakfast. It was supper over again, only I
scrambled my eggs instead of frying them. And all the while I was eating
that meal I studied those shack-walls and made mental note of what should
be changed and what should be done. There was so much, that it rather
overwhelmed me. I sat at the table, littered with its dirty dishes, wondering
where to begin. And then the endless vista of it all suddenly opened up
before me. I became nervously conscious of the unbroken silence about me,
and I realized how different this new life must be from the old. It seemed
like death itself, and it got a strangle hold on my nerves, and I knew I was
going to make a fool of myself the very first morning in my new home, in
my home and Dinky-Dunk's. But I refused to give in. I did something
which startled me a little, something which I had not done for years. I got

down on my knees beside that plain wooden chair and prayed to God. I
asked Him to give me strength to keep me from being a piker and make me
a wife worthy of the man who loved me, and lead me into the way of
bringing happiness to the home that was to be ours. Then I rolled up my
sleeves, tied a face towel over my head and went to work.
It was a royal cleaning-out, I can tell you. In the afternoon I had Olie down
on all fours scrubbing the floor. When he had washed the windows I had
him get a garden rake and clear away the rubbish that littered the dooryard.
I draped chintz curtains over the windows, and had Olie nail two shelves in
a packing-box and then carry it into my boudoir behind the drop-curtain.
Over this box I tacked fresh chintz (for the shack did not possess so
feminine a thing as a dresser) and on it put my folding-mirror and my
Tiffany traveling-clock and all my foolish shimmery silver toilet articles.
Then I tacked up photographs and magazine-prints about the bare wooden
walls—and decided that before the winter came those walls would be
painted and papered, or I'd know the reason why. Then I aired the bedding
and mattress, and unpacked my brand-new linen sheets and the ridiculous
hemstitched pillow-slips that I'd scurried so frenziedly about the city to get,
and stowed my things away on the box-shelves, and had Olie pound the life
out of the well-sunned pillows, and carefully remade the bed.
And then I went at the living-room. And it was no easy task, reorganizing
those awful shelves and making sure I wasn't throwing away things Dinky-
Dunk might want later on. But the carnage was great, and all afternoon the
smoke went heavenward from my fires of destruction. And when it was
over I told Olie to go out for a good long walk, for I intended to take a bath.
Which I did in the wash-tub, with much joy and my last cake of Roger-and-
Gallet soap. And I had to shout to poor ambulating Olie for half-an-hour
before I could persuade him to come in to supper. And even then he came
tardily, with countless hesitations and pauses, as though a lady temerarious
enough to take a scrub were for all time taboo to the race of man. And when
he finally ventured in through the door, round-eyed and blushing a deep
russet, he gaped at my white middy and my little white apron with that
silent but eloquent admiration which couldn't fail to warm the cockles of the
most unimpressionable housewife's heart.

Monday the Twenty-third

My Dinky-Dunk is back—and oh, the difference to me! I kept telling
myself that I was too busy to miss him. He came Saturday night as I was
getting ready for bed. I'd been watching the trail every now and then, all
day long, and by nine o'clock had given him up. When I heard him shouting
for Olie, I made a rush for him, with only half my clothes on, and nearly
shocked Olie and some unknown man, who'd driven Dinky-Dunk home, to
death. How I hugged my husband! My husband—I love to write that word.
And when I got him inside we had it all over again. He was just like a big
overgrown boy. And he put the table between us, so he'd have a chance to
talk. But even that didn't work. He smothered my laughing in kisses, and
held me up close to him and said I was wonderful. Then we'd try to get
down to earth again, and talk sensibly, and then there'd be another death-
clinch. Dinky-Dunk says I'm worse than he is. "Of course it's all up with a
man," he confessed, "when he sees you coming for him with that Australian
crawl-stroke of yours!"
For which I did my best to break in his floating ribs. Heaven only knows
how late we talked that night. And Dinky-Dunk had a bundle of surprises
for me. The first was a bronze reading-lamp. The second was a soft little
rug for the bedroom—only an Axminster, but very acceptable. The third
was a pair of Juliets, lined with fur, and oceans too big for me. And Dinky-
Dunk says by Tuesday we'll have two milk-cows, part-Jersey, at the ranch,
and inside of a week a crate of hens will be ours. Thereupon I couldn't help
leading Duncan to the inventory I had made of what we had, and the list, on
the opposite side, of what we had to have. The second thing under the
heading of "Needs" was "lamp," the fifth was "bedroom rug," the thirteenth
was "hens," and the next was "cow." I think he was rather amazed at the
length of that list of "needs," but he says I shall have everything in reason.
And when he kind of settled down, and noticed the changes in the living-
room and then went in and inspected the bedroom he grew very solemn, of
a sudden. It worried me.

"Lady Bird," he said, taking me in his arms, "this is a pretty hard life I've
trapped you into. It will have to be hard for a year or two, but we'll win out,
in the end, and I guess it'll be worth the fight!"
Dinky-Dunk is such a dear. I told him of course we'd win out, but I wouldn't
be much use to him at first. I'd have to get broken in and made bridle-wise.
"But, oh, Dinky-Dunk, whatever happens, you must always love me!"—and
I imagine I swam for him with my Australian crawl-stroke again. All I
remember is that we went to sleep in each other's arms. And as I started to
say and forgot to finish, I'd been missing my Dinky-Dunk more than I
imagined, those last few days. After that night it was no longer just a shack.
It was "Home." Home—it's such a beautiful word! It must mean so much to
every woman. And I fell asleep telling myself it was the loveliest word in
the English language.
In the morning I slipped out of bed before Dinky-Dunk was awake, for
breakfast was to be our first home meal, and I wanted it to be a respectable
one. Der Mensch ist was er isst—so I must feed my lord and master on the
best in the land. Accordingly I put an extra tablespoonful of cream in the
scrambled eggs, and two whole eggs in the coffee, to make dead sure it was
crystal-clear. Then, feeling like Van Roon when Berlin declared war on
France, I rooted out Dinky-Dunk, made him wash, and sat him down in his
pajamas and his ragged old dressing-gown.
"I suppose," I said as I saw his eyes wander about the table, "that you feel
exactly like an oyster-man who's just chipped his Blue-Point and got his
knife-edge in under the shell! And the next wrench is going to tell you
exactly what sort of an oyster you've got!"
Dinky-Dunk grinned up at me as I buttered his toast, piping hot from the
range. "Well, Lady Bird, you're not the kind that'll need paprika, anyway!"
he announced as he fell to. And he ate like a boa-constrictor and patted his
pajama-front and stentoriously announced that he'd picked a queen—only
he pronounced it kaveen, after the manner of our poor old Swedish Olie!
As that was Sunday we spent the morning "pi-rooting" about the place.
Dinky-Dunk took me out and showed me the stables and the hay-stacks and
the granaries—which he'd just waterproofed so there'd be no more spoilt

grain on that farm—and the "cool-hole" he used to use before the cellar was
built, and the ruins of the sod-hut where the first homesteader that owned
that land had lived. Then he showed me the new bunk-house for the men,
which Olie is finishing in his spare time. It looks much better than our own
shack, being of planed lumber. But Dinky-Dunk is loyal to the shack, and
says it's really better built, and the warmest shack in the West—as I'll find
before winter is over.
Then we stopped at the pump, and Dinky-Dunk made a confession. When
he first bought that ranch there was no water at the shack, except what he
could catch from the roof. Water had to be hauled for miles, and it was
muddy and salty, at that. They used to call it "Gopher soup." This lack of
water always worried him, he said, for women always want water, and
oodles of it. It was the year before, after he had left me at Banff, that he was
determined to get water. It was hard work, putting down that well, and up to
almost the last moment it promised to be a dry hole. But when they struck
that water, Dinky-Dunk says, he decided in his soul that he was going to
have me, if I was to be had. It was water fit for a queen. And he wanted his
queen. But of course even queens have to be well laved and well laundered.
He said he didn't sleep all night, after they found the water was there. He
was too happy; he just went meandering about the prairie, singing to
himself.
"So you were pretty sure of me, Kitten-Cats, even then?" I demanded.
He looked at me with his solemn Scotch-Canadian eyes. "I'm not sure of
you, even now," was his answer. But I made him take it back.
It's rather odd how Dinky-Dunk got this ranch, which used to be called the
Cochrane Ranch, for even behind this peaceful little home of ours there is a
touch of tragedy. Hugh Cochrane was one of Dinky-Dunk's surveyors when
he first took up railroad work in British Columbia. Hugh had a younger
brother Andrew, who was rather wild and had been brought out here and
planted on the prairie to keep him out of mischief. One winter night he rode
nearly thirty miles to a dance (they do that apparently out here, and think
nothing of it) and instead of riding home at five o'clock in the morning, with
the others, he visited a whisky-runner who was operating a "blind pig."
There he acquired much more whisky than was good for him and got lost

on the trail. That meant he was badly frozen and probably out of his mind
before he got back to the shack. He wasn't able to keep up a fire, of course,
or do anything for himself—and I suppose the poor boy simply froze to
death. He was alone there, and it was weeks and weeks before his body was
found. But the most gruesome part of it all is that his horses had been
stabled, tied up in their stalls without feed. They were all found dead, poor
brutes. They'd even eaten the wooden boards the mangers were built of.
Hugh Cochrane couldn't get over it, and was going to sell the ranch for
fourteen hundred dollars when Dinky-Dunk heard of it and stepped in and
bought the whole half-section. Then he bought the McKinnon place, a half-
section to the north of this, after McKinnon had lost all his buildings
because he was too shiftless to make a fire-guard. And when the railway
work was finished Dinky-Dunk took up wheat-growing. He is a great
believer in wheat. He says wheat spells wealth, in this country. Some people
call him a "land-miner," he says, but when he's given the chance to do the
thing as he wants to, he'll show them who's right.

Wednesday the Twenty-fifth

Dinky-Dunk and I have been making plans. He's promised to build an
annex to the shack, a wing on the north side, so I can have a store-room and
a clothes-closet at one end and a guest-chamber at the other. And I'm to
have a sewing-machine and a bread-mixer, and the smelly steer-hide divan
is going to be banished to the bunk-house. And Dinky-Dunk says I must
have a pinto, a riding-horse, as soon as he can lay hands on the right animal.
Later on he says I must have help, but out here in the West women are hard
to get, and harder to keep. They are snatched up by lonely bachelors like
Dinky-Dunk. They can't even keep the school-teachers (mostly girls from
Ontario) from marrying off. But I don't want a woman about, not for a few
months yet. I want Dinky-Dunk all to myself. And the freedom of isolation
like this is such a luxury! To be just one's self, in civilization, is a luxury, is
the greatest luxury in the world,—and also the most expensive, I've found
to my sorrow.
Out here, there's no object in being anything but one's self. Life is so simple
and honest, so back to first principles! There's joy in the thought of getting
rid of all the sublimated junk of city life. I'm just a woman; and Dinky-
Dunk is just a man. We've got a roof and a bed and a fire. That's all. And
what is there, really, after that? We have to eat, of course, but we really live
well. There's all the game we want, especially wild duck and prairie
chicken, to say nothing of jack-rabbit. Dinky-Dunk sallies out and pots
them as we need them. We get our veal and beef by the quarter, but it will
not keep well until the weather gets cooler, so I put what we don't need in
brine and use it for boiling-meat. We have no fresh fruit, but even
evaporated peaches can be stewed so that they're appetizing. And as I had
the good sense to bring out with me no less than three cook-books, from
Brentano's, I am able to attempt more and more elaborate dishes.
Olie has a wire-fenced square where he grew beets and carrots and onions
and turnips, and the biggest potatoes I ever saw. These will be pitted before
the heavy frosts come. We get our butter and lard by the pail, and our flour

by the sack, but getting things in quantities sometimes has its drawbacks.
When I examined the oatmeal box I found it had weavels in it, and
promptly threw all that meal away. Dinky-Dunk, coming in from the corral,
viewed the pile with round-eyed amazement. "It's got worms in it!" I cried
out to him. He took up a handful of it, and stared at it with tragic sorrow.
"Why, I ate weavels all last winter," he reprovingly remarked. Dinky-Dunk,
with his Scotch strain, loves his porridge. So we'll have to get a hundred-
weight, guaranteed strictly uninhabited, when we team into Buckhorn.
Men are funny! A woman never quite knows a man until she has lived with
him and day by day unearthed his little idiosyncrasies. She may seem close
to him, in those earlier days of romance, but she never really knows him,
any more than a sparrow on a telegraph wire knows the Morse Code
thrilling along under its toes! Men have so many little kinks and turns, even
the best of them. I tacked oil-cloth on a shoe-box and draped chintz around
it, and fixed a place for Dinky-Dunk to wash, in the bedroom, when he
comes in at noon. At night I knew it would be impossible, for he's built a
little wash-house with old binder-carrier canvas nailed to four posts, and out
there Olie and he strip every evening and splash each other with horse-pails
full of well-water. Dinky-Dunk is clean, whatever he may be, but I thought
it would look more civilized if he'd perform his limited noonday ablutions
in the bedroom. He did it for one day, in pensive silence, and then sneaked
the wash-things back to the rickety old bench outside the door. He said it
saved time.
Among other vital things, I've found that Dinky-Dunk hates burnt toast.
Yesterday morning, Matilda Anne, I got thinking about Corfu and Ragusa
and you, and it did burn a little around the edges, I suppose. So I kissed his
ear and told him carbon would make his teeth white. But he got up and
went out with a sort of "In-this-way-madness-lies" expression, and I felt
wretched all day. So this morning I was more careful. I did that toast just to
a turn. "Feast, O Kaikobád, on the blondest of toast!" I said as I salaamed
and handed him the plate. He wrinkled up his forehead a little, at the sting
in that speech, but he could not keep from grinning. Then, too, Dinky-Dunk
always soaps the back of his hand, to wash his back, and reach high up. So
do I. And on cold mornings-he says "One, two, three, the bumble bee!"
before he hops out of bed—and I imagined I was the only grownup in all
the wide world who still made use of that foolish rhyme. And the other day

when he was hot and tired I found him drinking a dipperful of cold water
fresh from the well. So I said:

"Many a man has gone to his sarcophagus
Thro' pouring cold water down a warm esophagus!"

When I recited that rhyme to him he swung about as though he'd been shot.
"Where did you ever hear that?" he asked. I told him that was what Lady
Agatha always said to me when she caught me drinking ice-water. "I
thought I was the only man in the world who knew that crazy old couplet,"
he confessed, and he chased me around the shack with the rest of the
dipperful, to keep from chilling his tummy, he explained. Then Dinky-Dunk
and I both like to give pet-names to things. He calls me "Lady Bird" and
"Gee-Gee" and sometimes "Honey," and sometimes "Boca Chica" and
"Tabby." And I call him Dinky-Dunk and The Dour Maun, and Kitten-Cats,
though for some reason or other he hates that last name. I think he feels it's
an affront to his dignity. And no man likes a trace of mockery in a woman.
But Dinky-Dunk's names are born of affection, and I love him for them.
Even the ranch horses have all been tagged with names. There's "Slip-
Along" and "Water Light" and "Bronk" and "Patsy Crocker" and "Pick and
Shovel" and "Tumble Weed," and others that I can't remember at the
moment. And I find I'm picking up certain of Dinky-Dunk's little habits, and
dropping into the trick of looking at things from his standpoint. I wonder if
husbands and wives really do get to be alike? There are times when Dinky-
Dunk seems to know just what I'm thinking, for when he speaks he says
exactly the thing I was going to ask him. And he's inexorable in his belief
that one's right shoe should always be put on first. So am I!

Thursday the Twenty-sixth

Dinky-Dunk is rather pinched for ready money. He is what they call "land
poor" out here. He has big plans, but not much cash. So we shall have to be
frugal. I had decided on vast and sudden changes in this household, but I'll
have to draw in my horns a little. Luckily I have nearly two hundred dollars
of my own money left—and have never mentioned it to Dinky-Dunk. So
almost every night I study the magazine advertisements, and the catalog of
the mail-order house in Winnipeg. Each night I add to my list of "Needs,"
and then go back and cross out some of the earlier ones, as being too
extravagant, for the length of my list almost gives me heart-failure. And as I
sit there thinking of what I have to do without, I envy the women I've
known in other days, the women with all their white linen and their cut
glass and silverware and their prayer-rugs and period rooms and their
white-tiled baths and their machinery for making life so comfortable and so
easy. I envy them. I put away my list, and go to bed envying them. But, oh,
I sleep so soundly, and I wake up so buoyant in heart, so eager to get at the
next day's work, so glad to see I'm slowly getting things more ship-shape. It
doesn't leave room for regret. And there is always the future, the happier to-
morrow to which our thoughts go out. I get to thinking of the city again, of
the hundreds of women I know going like hundreds of crazy squirrels on
their crazy treadmill of amusements, and of the thousands and thousands of
women who are toiling without hope, going on in the same old rut from day
to day, cooped up in little flats and back rooms, with bad air and bad food
and bad circulation, while I have all God's outdoors to wander about in, and
can feel the singing rivers of health in my veins. And here I side-step my
Song-of-Solomon voluntary, for they have one thing I do miss, and that is
music. I wish I had a cottage-piano or a Baby Grand or a Welte Mignon! I
wish I had any kind of an old piano! I wish I had an accordion, or a German
Sweet-Potato, or even a Jew's-Harp!
But what's the use of wishing for luxuries, when we haven't even a can-
opener—Dinky-Dunk says he's used a hatchet for over a year! And our only
toaster is a kitchen-fork wired to the end of a lath. I even saw Dinky-Dunk

spend half an hour straightening out old nails taken from one of our
shipping-boxes. And the only colander we have was made out of a leaky
milk-pan with holes punched in its bottom. And we haven't a double-boiler
or a mixing-bowl or a doughnut-cutter. When I told Dinky-Dunk yesterday
that we were running out of soap, he said he'd build a leach of wood-ashes
and get beef-tallow and make soft soap. I asked him how long he'd want to
kiss a downy cheek that had been washed in soft soap. He said he'd keep on
kissing me if I was a mummy pickled in bitumen. But I prefer not risking
too much of the pickling process.
Which reminds me of the fact that I find my hair a terrible nuisance, with
no Hortense to struggle with it every morning. As you know, it's as thick as
a rope and as long as my arm. I begrudge the time it takes to look after it,
and such a thing as a good shampoo is an event to be approached with
trepidation and prepared for with zeal. "Coises on me beauty!" I think I'll
cut that wool off. But on each occasion when I have my mind about made
up I experience one of "Mr. Polly's" l'il dog moments. The thing that makes
me hesitate is the thought that Dinky-Dunk might hate me for the rest of his
days. And now that our department-store aristocracy seems to have a corner
in Counts and I seem destined to worry along with merely an American
husband, I don't intend to throw away the spoons with the dish-water! But
having to fuss so with that hair is a nuisance, especially at night, when I am
so tired that my pillow seems to bark like a dog for me to come and pat it.
And speaking of that reminds me that I have to order arch-supports for my
feet. I'm on them so much that by bedtime my ankles feel like a chocolat
mousse that's been left out in the sun. Yet this isn't a whimper, Matilda
Anne, for when I turn in I sleep like a child. No more counting and going to
the medicine-chest for coal-tar pills. I abjure them. I, who used to have so
many tricks to bring the starry-eyed goddess bending over my pillow,
hereby announce myself as the noblest sleeper north of the Line! I no longer
need to count the sheep as they come over the wall, or patiently try to
imagine the sound of surf-waves, or laboriously re-design that perennial
dinner-gown which I've kept tucked away in the cedar-chest of the
imagination as long as I can remember, elaborating it over and over again
down to the minutest details through the longest hour of my whitest white
night until it began to merge into the velvety robes of slumber itself!
Nowadays an ogre called Ten-O'Clock steals up behind my chair with a

club in his hand and stuns me into insensibility. Two or three times, in fact,
my dear old clumsy-fingered Dinky-Dunk has helped me get my clothes
off. But he says that the nicest sound he knows is to lie in bed and hear the
tinkle of my hair-pins as I toss them into the little Coalport pin-tray on my
dresser—which reminds me what Chinkie once said about his idea of
Heaven being eating my divinity-fudge to the sound of trumpets!
I brag about being busy, but I'm not the only busy person about this
wickyup. Olie and Dinky-Dunk talk about summer-fallowing and double-
discing and drag-harrowing and fire-guarding, and I'm beginning to
understand what it all means. They are out with their teams all day long,
working like Trojans. We have mid-day dinner, which Olie bolts in silence
and with the rapidity of chain-lightning. He is the most expert of sword-
swallowers, with a table-knife, and Dinky-Dunk says it keeps reminding
him how Burbank could make a fortune inventing a square pea that would
stay on a knife-blade. But Dinky-Dunk stopped me calling him "The Sword
Swallower" and has privately tipped Olie off as to the functions of the table
fork. How the males of this old earth stick together! The world of men is a
secret order, and every man is a member!
Having bolted his dinner Olie always makes for outdoors. Then Dinky-
Dunk comes to my side of the table. We sit side by side, with our arms
around each other. Sometimes I fill his pipe for him and light it. Then we
talk lazily, happily, contentedly and sometimes shockingly. Then he looks at
our nickel-alarm clock, up on the book shelves which I made out of old
biscuit-boxes, and invariably says: "This isn't the spirit that built Rome,"
and kisses me three times, once on each eyelid, tight, and once on the
mouth. I don't even mind the taste of the pipe. Then he's off, and I'm alone
for the afternoon.
But I'm getting things organized now so that I have a little spare time. And
with time on my hands I find myself turning very restless. Yesterday I
wandered off on the prairie and nearly got lost. Dinky-Dunk says I must be
more careful, until I get to know the country better. He put me up on his
shoulder and made me promise. Then he let me down. It made me wonder if
I hadn't married a masterful man. Above all things I've always wanted
freedom.

"I'm a wild woman, Duncan. You'll never tame me," I confessed to him.
He laughed a little.
"So you think you will?" I demanded.
"No, I won't, Gee-Gee, but life will!"
And again I felt some ghostly spirit of revolt stirring in me, away down
deep. I think he saw some shadow of it, caught some echo of it, for his
manner changed and he pushed back the hair from my forehead and kissed
me, almost pityingly.
"There's one thing must not happen!" I told him as he held me in his arms.
He did not let his eyes meet mine.
"Why?" he asked.
"I'm afraid—out here!" I confessed as I clung to him and felt the need of
having him close to me. He was very quiet and thoughtful all evening.
Before I fell asleep he told me that on Monday the two of us would team in
to Buckhorn and get a wagon-load of supplies.

Saturday the Twenty-eighth

I have got my cayuse. Dinky-Dunk meant him for a surprise, but the shyest
and reddest-headed cowboy that ever sat in a saddle came cantering along
the trail, and I saw him first. He was leading the shaggiest, piebaldest,
pottest-tummied, craziest-looking little cayuse that ever wore a bridle. I
gave one look at his tawny-colored forelock, which stood pompadour-style
about his ears, and shouted out "Paderewski!" Dinky-Dunk came and stood
beside me and laughed. He said that cayuse did look like Paderewski, but
the youth of the fiery locks blushingly explained that his present name was
"Jail-Bird," which some fool Scandinavian had used instead of "Grey-Bird,"
his authentic and original appellative. But I stuck to my name, though we
have shortened it into "Paddy." And Paddy must indeed have been a jail-
bird, or deserved to be one, for he is marked and scarred from end to end.
But he is good-tempered, tough as hickory and obligingly omnivorous.
Every one in the West, men and women alike, rides astride, and I have been
practising on Paddy. It seems a very comfortable and sensible way to ride,
but I shall have to toughen up a bit before I hit the trail for any length of
time.
I've been wondering, Matilda Anne, if this all sounds pagan and foolish to
you, uncultured, as Theobald Gustav would put it? I've also been
wondering, since I wrote that last sentence, if people really need culture, or
what we used to call culture, and if it means as much to life as so many
imagine. Here we are out here without any of the refinements of
civilization, and we're as much at peace with our own souls as are the birds
of the air—when there are birds in the air, which isn't in our country!
Culture, it seems to me as I look back on things, tends to make people more
and more mere spectators of life, detaching them from it and lifting them
above it. Or can it be that the mere spectators demand culture, to take the
place of what they miss by not being actual builders and workers?
We are farmers, just rubes and hicks, as they say in my country. But we're
tilling the soil and growing wheat. We're making a great new country out of

what was once a wilderness. To me, that seems almost enough. We're
laboring to feed the world, since the world must have bread, and there's
something satisfying and uplifting in the mere thought that we can answer
to God, in the end, for our lives, no matter how raw and rude they may have
been. And there are mornings when I am Browning's "Saul" in the flesh.
The great wash of air from sky-line to sky-line puts something into my
blood or brain that leaves me almost dizzy. I sizzle! It makes me pulse and
tingle and cry out that life is good—good! I suppose it is nothing more than
altitude and ozone. But in the matter of intoxicants it stands on a par with
anything that was ever poured out of bottles at Martin's or Bustanoby's. And
at sunrise, when the prairie is thinly silvered with dew, when the tiny
hammocks of the spider-webs swing a million sparkling webs strung with
diamonds, when every blade of grass is a singing string of pearls, hymning
to God on High for the birth of a golden day, I can feel my heart swell, and
I'm so abundantly, so inexpressibly alive, alive to every finger-tip! Such
space, such light, such distances! And being Saul is so much better than
reading about him!

Wednesday the First

I was too tired to write any last night, though there seemed so much to talk
about. We teamed into Buckhorn for our supplies, two leisurely, lovely, lazy
days on the trail, which we turned into a sort of gipsy-holiday. We took
blankets and grub and feed for the horses and a frying-pan, and camped out
on the prairie. The night was pretty cool, but we made a good fire, and had
hot coffee. Dinky-Dunk smoked and I sang. Then we rolled up in our
blankets and as I lay there watching the stars I got thinking of the lights of
the Great White Way. Then I nudged my husband and asked him if he knew
what my greatest ambition in life used to be. And of course he didn't. "Well,
Dinky-Dunk," I told him, "it was to be the boy who opens the door at
Malliard's! For two whole years I ate my heart out with envy of that boy,
who always lived in the odor of such heavenly hot chocolate and wore two
rows of shining buttons down his braided coat and was never without white
gloves and morning, noon and night paraded about in the duckiest little
skull-cap cocked very much to one side like a Grenadier's!" And Dinky-
Dunk told me to go to sleep or he'd smother me with a horse-blanket. So I
squirmed back into my blanket and got "nested" and watched the fire die
away while far, far off somewhere a coyote howled. That made me
lonesome, so I got Dinky-Dunk's hand, and fell asleep holding it in mine.
I woke up early. Dinky-Dunk had forgotten about my hand, and it was cold.
In the East there was a low bar of ethereally pale silver, which turned to
amber, and then to ashes of roses, and then to gold. I saw one sublime white
star go out, in the West, and then behind the bars of gold the sky grew rosy
with morning until it was one Burgundian riot of bewildering color. I sat up
and watched it. Then I reached over and shook Dinky-Dunk. It was too
glorious a daybreak to miss. He looked at me with one eye open, like a
sleepy hound.
"You must see it, Dinky-Dunk! It's so resplendent it's positively vulgar!"
He sat up, stared at the pageantry of color for one moment, and then
wriggled down into his blanket again. I tickled his nose with a blade of

sweet-grass. Then I washed my face in the dew, the same as we did in
Christ-Church Meadow that glorious May-Day in Oxford. By the time
Dinky-Dunk woke up I had the coffee boiling and the bacon sizzling in the
pan. It was the most celestial smell that ever assailed human nostrils, and I
blush with shame at the thought of how much I ate at that breakfast, sitting
flat on an empty oat-sack and leaning against a wagon-wheel. By eight
o'clock we were in the metropolis of Buckhorn and busy gathering up our
things there. And they made a very respectable wagon-load.

Thursday the Second

I have been practising like mad learning to play the mouth-organ. I bought
it in Buckhorn, without letting Dinky-Dunk know, and all day long, when I
knew it was safe, I've been at it. So to-night, when I had my supper-table all
ready, I got the ladder that leaned against one of the granaries and mounted
the nearest hay-stack. There, quite out of sight, I waited until Dinky-Dunk
came in with his team. I saw him go into the shack and then step outside
again, staring about in a brown study. Then I struck up Traumerei.
You should have seen that boy's face! He looked up at the sky, as though
my poor little harmonica were the aërial outpourings of archangels. He
stood stock-still, drinking it in. Then he bolted for the stables, thinking it
came from there. It took him some time to corner me up on my stack-top.
Then I slid down into his arms. And I believe he loves that mouth-organ
music. After supper he made me go out and sit on the oat-box and play my
repertory. He says it's wonderful, from a distance. But that mouth-organ's
rather brassy, and it makes my lips sore. Then, too, my mouth isn't big
enough for me to "tongue" it properly. When I told Dinky-Dunk this he
said:
"Of course it isn't! What d'you suppose I've been calling you Boca Chica
for?"
And I've just discovered "Boca Chica" is Spanish for "Little Mouth"—and
me with a trap, Matilda Anne, that you used to call the Cave of the Winds!
Now Dinky-Dunk vows he'll have a Victrola before the winter is over! Ye
gods and little fishes, what a luxury! There was a time, not so long ago,
when I was rather inclined to sniff at the Westbury's electric player-piano
and its cabinet of neatly canned classics! How life humbles us! And how
blind all women are in their ideals and their search for happiness! The sea-
stones that lie so bright on the shores of youth can dry so dull in the hand of
experience! And yet, as Birdalone's Nannie once announced, "If you thuck
'em they thay boo-ful!" And I guess it must be a good deal the same with
marriage. You can't even afford to lay down on your job of loving. The

more we ask, the more we must give. I've just been thinking of those days
of my fiercely careless childhood when my soul used to float out to placid
happiness on one piece of plum-cake—only even then, alas, it floated out
like a polar bear on its iceberg, for as that plum-cake vanished my peace of
mind went with it, madly as I clung to the last crumb. But now that I'm an
old married woman I don't intend to be a Hamlet in petticoats. A good man
loves me, and I love him back. And I intend to keep that love alive.

Friday the Third

I have just issued an ultimatum as to pigs. There shall be no more loose
porkers wandering about my dooryard. It's an advertisement of bad
management. And what's more, when I was hanging out my washing this
morning a shote rooted through my basket of white clothes with his dirty
nose, and while I made after him his big brother actually tried to eat one of
my wet table-napkins. And that meant another hour's hard work before the
damage was repaired.

Saturday the Fourth

Olie is painting the shack, inside and out, and now you'd never know our
poor little Joseph-coat home. I told Dinky-Dunk if we'd ever put a
chameleon on that shack-wall he'd have died of brain-fag trying to make
good on the color-schemes. So Dinky-Dunk made Olie take a day off and
ply the brush. But the smell of paint made me think of Channel passages, so
off I went with Dinky-Dunk, a la team and buckboard, to the Dixon Ranch
to see about some horses, nearly seventy miles there and back. It was a
glorious autumn day, and a glorious ride, with "Bronk" and "Tumble-Weed"
loping along the double-trail and the air like crystal.
Dinky-Dunk and I sang most of the way. The gophers must have thought we
were mad. My lord and master is incontinently proud of his voice,
especially the chest-tones, but he rather tails behind me on the tune, plainly
not always being sure of himself. We had dinner with the Dixons, and about
three million flies. They gave me the blues, that family, and especially Mrs.
Dixon. She seemed to make prairie-life so ugly and empty and hardening.
Poor, dried-up, sad-eyed soul, she looked like a woman of sixty, and yet her
husband said she was just thirty-seven. Their water is strong with alkali, and
this and the prairie wind (combined with a something deep down in her own
make-up) have made her like a vulture, lean and scrawny and dry. I stared at
that hard line of jaw and cheekbone and wondered how long ago the soft
curves were there, and if those overworked hands had ever been pretty, and
if that flat back had ever been rounded and dimpled. Her hair was untidy.
Her apron was unspeakably dirty, and she used it as both a handkerchief
and a hand-towel. Her voice was as hard as nails, and her cooking was
wretched. Not a door or window was screened, and, as I said before, we
were nearly smothered with flies.
Dinky-Dunk did not dare to look at me, all dinner time. And on the way
home Mrs. Dixon's eyes kept haunting me, they seemed so tired and vacant
and accusing, as though they were secretly holding God Himself to account
for cheating her out of her woman's heritage of joy. I asked Dinky-Dunk if

we'd ever get like that. He said, "Not on your life!" and quoted the Latin
phrase about mind controlling matter. The Dixons, he went on to explain,
were of the "slum" type, only they didn't happen to live in a city. But tired
and sleepy as I was that night, I got up to cold-cream my face and arms.
And I'm going to write for almond-meal and glycerin from the mail-order
house to-morrow. And a brassiere—for I saw what looked like the suspicion
of a smile on Dinky-Dunk's unshaven lips as he watched me struggling into
my corsets this morning. It took some writhing, and even then I could
hardly make it. I threw my wet sponge after him when he turned back in the
doorway with the mildly impersonal question: "Who's your fat friend?"
Then he scooted for the corral, and I went back and studied my chin in the
dresser-mirror, to make sure it wasn't getting terraced into a dew-lap like
Uncle Carlton's.
But I can't help thinking of the Dixons, and feeling foolishly and helplessly
sorry for them. It was dusk when we got back from that long drive to their
ranch, and the stars were coming out. I could see our shack from miles off,
a little lonely dot of black against the sky-line. I made Dinky-Dunk stop the
team, and we sat and looked at it. It seemed so tiny there, so lonely, so
strange, in the middle of such miles and miles of emptiness, with a little rift
of smoke going up from its desolate little pipe-end. Then I said, out loud,
"Home! My home!" And out of a clear sky, for no earthly reason, I began to
cry like a baby. Women are such fools, sometimes! I told Dinky-Dunk we
must get books, good books, and spend the long winter evenings reading
together, to keep from going to seed.
He said, "All right, Gee-Gee," and patted my knee. Then we loped on along
the trail toward the lonely little black dot ahead of us. But I hung on to
Dinky-Dunk's arm, all the rest of the way, until we pulled up beside the
shack, and poor old Olie, with a frying-pan in his hand, stood silhouetted
against the light of the open door.

Monday the Sixth

The last few days I've been nothing but a two-footed retriever, scurrying off
and carrying things back home with me. There have been rains, but the
weather is still glorious. And I've discovered such heaps and heaps of
mushrooms over at the old Titchborne Ranch. They're thick all around the
corral and in the pasture there. I am now what your English lord and master
would call "a perfect seat" on Paddy, and every morning I ride over after
my basketful of Agaricus Campestris—that ought to be in the plural, but
I've forgotten how! We have them creamed on toast; we have them fried in
butter; and we have them in soup—and such beauties! I'm going to try and
can some for winter and spring use. But the finest part of the mushroom is
the finding it. To ride into a little white city that has come up overnight and
looks like an encampment of fairy soldiers, to see the milky white domes
against the vivid green of the prairie-grass, to catch sight of another clump
of them, suddenly, like stars against an emerald sky, a hundred yards away,
to inhale the clean morning air, and feel your blood tingle, and hear the
prairie-chickens whir and the wild-duck scolding along the coulee-edges—I
tell you, Matilda Anne, it's worth losing a little of your beauty sleep to go
through it! I'm awake even before Dinky-Dunk, and I brought him out of
his dreams this morning by poking his teeth with my little finger and
saying:

"Twelve white horses
On a red hill—"

and I asked him if he knew what it was, and he gave the right answer, and
said he hadn't heard that conundrum since he was a boy.
All afternoon I've been helping Dinky-Dunk put up a barb-wire fence.
Barb-wire is nearly as hard as a woman to handle. Dinky-Dunk is fencing in
some of the range, for a sort of cattle-run for our two milk-cows. He says
it's only a small field, but there seemed to be miles and miles of that
fencing. We had no stretcher, so Dinky-Dunk made shift with me and a

claw-hammer. He'd catch the wire, lever his hammer about a post, and I'd
drive in the staple, with a hammer of my own. I got so I could hit the staple
almost every whack, though one staple went off like shrapnel and hit
Diddum's ear. So I'm some use, you see, even if I am a chekako! But a wire
slipped, and tore through my skirt and stocking, scratched my leg and made
the blood run. It was only the tiniest cut, really, but I made the most of it,
Dinky-Dunk was so adorably nice about doctoring me up. We came home
tired and happy, singing together, and Olie, as usual, must have thought
we'd both gone mad.
This husband of mine is so elementary. He secretly imagines that he's one
of the most complex of men. But in a good many things he's as simple as a
child. And I love him for it, although I believe I do like to bedevil him a
little. He is dignified, and hates flippancy. So when I greet him with
"Morning, old boy!" I can see that nameless little shadow sweep over his
face. Then I say, "Oh, I beg its little pardon!" He generally grins, in the end,
and I think I'm slowly shaking that monitorial air out of him, though once
or twice I've had to remind him about La Rochefoucauld saying gravity was
a stratagem invented to conceal the poverty of the mind! But Dinky-Dunk
still objects to me putting my finger on his Adam's apple when he's talking.
He wears a flannel shirt, when working outside, and his neck is bare.
Yesterday I buried my face down in the corner next to his shoulder-blade
and made him wriggle. As he shaves only on Sunday mornings now, that is
about the only soft spot, for his face is prickly, and makes my chin sore, the
bearded brute! Then I bit him; not hard—but Satan said bite, and I just had
to do it. He turned quite pale, swung me round so that I lay limp in his
arms, and closed his mouth over mine. I got away, and he chased me. We
upset things. Then I got outside the shack, ran around the horse-corral, and
then around the hay-stacks, with Dinky-Dunk right after me, giving me
goose-flesh at every turn. I felt like a cave-woman. He grabbed me like a
stone-age man and caught me up and carried me over his shoulder to a pile
of prairie sweet-grass that had been left there for Olie's mattress. My hair
was down. I was screaming, half sobbing and half laughing. He dropped me
in the hay, like a bag of wheat. I started to fight him again. But I couldn't
beat him off. Then all my strength seemed to go. He was laughing himself,
but it frightened me a little to see his pupils so big that his eyes looked
black. I felt like a lamb in a lion's jaw, Dinky-Dunk is so much stronger

than I am. I lay there quite still, with my eyes closed. I went flop. I knew I
was conquered.
Then I came back to life. I suddenly realized that it was mid-day, in the
open air between the bald prairie-floor and God's own blue sky, where Olie
could stumble on us at any moment—and possibly die with his boots on!
Dinky-Dunk was kissing my left eyelid. It was a cup his lips just seemed to
fit into. I tried to move. But he held me there. He held me so firmly that it
hurt. Yet I couldn't help hugging him. Poor, big, foolish, baby-hearted
Dinky-Dunk! And poor, weak, crazy, storm-tossed me! But, oh, God, it's
glorious, in some mysterious way, to stir the blood of a strong big man! It's
heaven—and I don't quite know why. But I love to see Dinky-Dunk's eyes
grow black. Yet it makes me a little afraid of him. I can hear his heart
pound, sometimes, quite distinctly. And sometimes there seems something
so pathetic about it all—we are such puny little mites of emotion played on
by nature for her own immitigable ends! But every woman wants to be
loved. Dinky-Dunk asked me why I shut my eyes when he kisses me. I
wonder why? Sometimes, too, he says my kisses are wicked, and that he
likes 'em wicked. He's a funny mixture. He's got the soul of a Scotch
Calvinist tangled up in him somewhere, and after the storm he's very apt to
grow pious and a bit preachy. But he has feelings, only he's ashamed of
them. I think I'm taking a little of the ice-crust off his emotions. He's a stiff
clay that needs to be well stirred up and turned over before it can mellow.
And I must be a sandy loam that wastes all its strength in one short harvest.
That sounds as though I were getting to be a real farmer's wife with a vast
knowledge of soils, doesn't it? At any rate my husband, out of his vast
knowledge of me, says I have the swamp-cedar trick of flaring up into
sudden and explosive attractiveness. Then, he says, I shower sparks. As I've
already told him, I'm a wild woman, and will be hard to tame, for as Victor
Hugo somewhere says, we women are only perfected devils!

Wednesday the Eighth

I've cut off my hair, right bang off. When I got up yesterday morning with
so much work ahead of me, with so much to do and so little time to do it in,
I started doing my hair. I also started thinking about that Frenchman who
committed suicide after counting up the number of buttons he had to button
and unbutton every morning and evening of every day of every year of his
life. I tried to figure up the time I was wasting on that mop of mine. Then
the Great Idea occurred to me.
I got the scissors, and in six snips had it off, a big tangled pile of brownish
gold, rather bleached out by the sun at the ends. And the moment I saw it
there on my dresser, and saw my head in the mirror, I was sorry. I looked
like a plucked crow. I could have ditched a freight-train. And I felt
positively light-headed. But it was too late for tears. I trimmed off the
ragged edges as well as I could, and what didn't get in my eyes got down
my neck and itched so terribly that I had to change my clothes. Then I got a
nail-punch out of Dinky-Dunk's tool-kit, and heated it over the lamp and
gave a little more wave to that two-inch shock of stubble. It didn't look so
bad then, and when I tried on Dinky-Dunk's coat in front of the glass I saw
that I wouldn't make such a bad-looking boy.
But I waited until noon with my heart in my mouth, to see what Dinky-
Dunk would say. What he really did say I can't write here, for there was a
wicked swear-word mixed up in his ejaculation of startled wonder. Then he
saw the tears in my eyes, I suppose, for he came running toward me with
his arms out, and hugged me tight, and said I looked cute, and all he'd have
to do would be to get used to it. But all dinner time he kept looking at me as
though I were a strange woman, and later I saw him standing in front of the
dresser, stooping over that tragic pile of tangled yellow-brown snakes. It
reminded me of a man stooping over a grave. I slipped away without letting
him see me. But this morning I woke him up early and asked him if he still
loved his wife. And when he vowed he did, I tried to make him tell me how
much. But that stumped him. He compromised by saying he couldn't

cheapen his love by defining it in words; it was limitless. I followed him out
after breakfast, with a hunger in my heart which bacon and eggs hadn't
helped a bit, and told him that if he really loved me he could tell me how
much.
He looked right in my eyes, a little pityingly, it seemed to me, and laughed,
and grew solemn again. Then he stooped down and picked up a little blade
of prairie-grass, and held it up in front of me.
"Have you any idea of how far it is from the Rockies across to the Hudson
Bay and from the Line up to the Peace River Valley?"
Of course I hadn't.
"And have you any idea of how many millions of acres of land that is, and
how many millions of blades of grass like this there are in each acre?" he
soberly demanded.
And again of course I hadn't.
"Well, this one blade of grass is the amount of love I am able to express for
you, and all those other blades in all those millions of acres is what love
itself is!"
I thought it over, just as solemnly as he had said it. I think I was satisfied.
For when my Dinky-Dunk was away off on the prairie, working like a
nailer, and I was alone in the shack, I went to his old coat hanging there—
the old coat that had some subtle aroma of Dinky-Dunkiness itself about
every inch of it—and kissed it on the sleeve.
This afternoon as Paddy and I started for home with a pail of mushrooms I
rode face to face with my first coyote. We stood staring at each other. My
heart bounced right up into my throat, and for a moment I wondered if I
was going to be eaten by a starving timber-wolf, with Dinky-Dunk finding
my bones picked as clean as those animal-carcasses we see in an occasional
buffalo-wallow. I kept up my end of the stare, wondering whether to
advance or retreat, and it wasn't until that coyote turned tail and scooted that
my courage came back. Then Paddy and I went after him, like the wind. But
we had to give up. And at supper Dinky-Dunk told me coyotes were too
cowardly to come near a person, and were quite harmless. He said that even

when they showed their teeth, the rest of their face was apologizing for the
threat. And before supper was over that coyote, at least I suppose it was the
same coyote, was howling at the rising full moon. I went out with Dinky-
Dunk's gun, but couldn't get near the brute. Then I came back.
"Sing, you son-of-a-gun, sing!" I called out to him from the shack door. And
that shocked my lord and master so much that he scolded me, for the first
time in his life. And when I poked his Adam's apple with my finger he got
on his dignity. He was tired, poor boy, and I should have remembered it.
And when I requested him not to stand there and stare at me in the hieratic
rigidity of an Egyptian idol I could see a little flush of anger go over his
face. He didn't say anything. But he took one of the lamps and a three-year-
old Pall-Mall Magazine and shut himself up in the bunk-house.
Then I was sorry.
I tiptoed over to the door, and found it was locked. Then I went and got my
mouth-organ and sat meekly down on the doorstep and began to play the
Don't Be Cross waltz. I dragged it out plaintively, with a vox humana
tremolo on the coaxing little refrain. Finally I heard a smothered snort, and
the door suddenly opened and Dinky-Dunk picked me up, mouth-organ and
all. He shook me and said I was a little devil, and I called him a big British
brute. But he was laughing and a wee bit ashamed of his temper and was
very nice to me all the rest of the evening.
I'm getting, I find, to depend a great deal on Dinky-Dunk, and it makes me
afraid, sometimes, for the future. He seems able to slip a hand under my
heart and lift it up, exactly as though it were the chin of a wayward child.
Yet I resent his power, and keep elbowing for more breathing-space, like a
rush-hour passenger in the subway crowd. Sometimes, too, I resent the
over-solemn streak in his mental make-up. He abominates ragtime, and I
have rather a weakness for it. So once or twice in his dour days I've found
an almost Satanic delight in singing The Humming Coon. And the
knowledge that he'd like to forbid me singing rag seems to give a zest to it.
So I go about flashing my saber of independence:

"Ol' Ephr'm Johnson was a deacon of de church in
Tennessee,

An' of course it was ag'inst de rules t' sing ragtime
melodée!"
But I am the one, I notice, who always makes up first. To-night as I was
making cocoa before we went to bed I tried to tell my Diddums there was
something positively doglike in my devotion to him. He nickered like a
pony and said he was the dog in this deal. Then he pulled me over on his
knee and said that men get short-tempered when they were tuckered out
with worry and hard work, and that probably it would be hard for even two
of the seraphim always to get along together in a two-by-four shack, where
you couldn't even have, a deadline for the sake of dignity. It was mostly his
fault, he knew, but he was going to try to fight against it. And I experienced
the unreasonable joy of an unreasonable woman who has succeeded in
putting the man she loves with all her heart and soul in the wrong. So I
could afford to be humble myself, and make a foolish lot of fuss over him.
But I shall always fight for my elbow-room. For there are times when my
Dinky-Dunk, for all his bigness and strength, has to be taken sedately in
tow, the same as a racing automobile has to be hauled through the city
streets by a dinky little low-power hack-car!

Saturday the Tenth

We've had a cold spell, with heavy frosts at night, but the days are still
glorious. The overcast days are so few in the West that I've been wondering
if the optimism of the Westerners isn't really due to the sunshine they get.
Who could be gloomy under such golden skies? Every pore of my body has
a throat and is shouting out a Tarentella Sincera of its own! But it isn't the
weather that has keyed me up this time. It's another wagon-load of supplies
which Olie teamed out from Buckhorn yesterday. I've got wall-paper and a
new iron bed for the annex, and galvanized wash-tubs and a crock-churn
and storm-boots and enough ticking to make ten big pillows, and
unbleached linen for two dozen slips—I love a big pillow—and I've been
saving up wild-duck feathers for weeks, the downiest feathers you ever
sank your ear into, Matilda Anne; and if pillows will do it I'm going to
make this house look like a harem! Can you imagine a household with only
three pillow-slips, which had to be jerked off in the morning, washed, dried
and ironed and put back on their three lonely little pillows before bedtime?
Well, there will be no more of that in this shack.
But the important news is that I've got a duck-gun, the duckiest duck-gun
you ever saw, and waders, and a coon-skin coat and cap and a big leather
school-bag for wearing over my shoulder on Paddy. The coat and cap are
like the ones we used to laugh at when we went up to Montreal for the
tobogganing, in the days when I was young and foolish and willing to
sacrifice comfort on the altar of outward appearances. The coon-skins make
me look like a Laplander, but they'll be mighty comfy when the cold
weather comes, for Dinky-Dunk says it drops to forty and fifty below,
sometimes.
I also got a lot of small stuff I'd written for from the mail-order house, little
feminine things a woman simply has to have. But the big thing was the
duck-gun.
I no longer get heart failure when I hear the whir of a prairie-chicken, but
drop my bird before it's out of range. Poor, plump, wounded, warm-bodied

little feathery things! Some of them keep on flying after they've been shot
clean through the body, going straight on for a couple of hundred feet, or
even more, and then dropping like a stone. How hard-hearted we soon get!
It used to worry me. Now I gather 'em up as though they were so many
chips and toss them into the wagon-box; or into my school-bag, if it's a
private expedition of only Paddy and me. And that's the way life treats us,
too.
I've been practising on the gophers with my new gun, and with Dinky-
Dunk's .22 rifle. A gopher is only a little bigger than a chipmunk, and
usually pokes nothing more than his head out of his hole, so when I got
thirteen out of fifteen shots I began to feel that I was a sharp-shooter. But
don't regard this as wanton cruelty, for the gopher is worse than a rat, and in
this country the government agents supply homesteaders with an annual
allowance of free strychnine to poison them off.

Sunday the Eleventh

I've made my first butter, be it recorded—but in doing so I managed to
splash the ceiling and the walls and my own woolly head, for I didn't have
sense enough to tie a wet cloth about the handle of the churn-dasher until
the damage had been done. I was too intent on getting my butter to pay
attention to details, though it took a disheartening long time and my arms
were tired out before I had finished. And when I saw myself spattered from
head to foot it reminded me of what you once said about me and my
reading, that I had the habit of coming out of a book like a spaniel out of
water, scattering ideas as I came. But there are not many new books in my
life these days. It is mostly hard work, although I reminded Dinky-Dunk
last night that while Omar intimated that love and bread and wine were
enough for any wilderness, we mustn't forget that he also included a book
of verses underneath the bough! My lord says that by next year we can line
our walls with books. But I'm like Moses on Mount Nebo—I can see my
promised land, but it seems a terribly long way off. But this, as Dinky-Dunk
would say, is not the spirit that built Rome, and has carried me away from
my butter, the making of which cold-creamed my face until I looked as
though I had snow on my headlight. Yet there is real joy in finding those
lovely yellow granules in the bottom of your churn and then working it over
and over with a saucer in a cooking-bowl until it is one golden mass.
Several times before I'd shaken up sour cream in a sealer, but this was my
first real butter-making. I have just discovered, however, that I didn't
"wash" it enough, so that all the buttermilk wasn't worked out of my first
dairy-product. Dinky-Dunk, like the scholar and gentleman that he is, swore
that it was worth its weight in Klondike gold. And next time I'll do better.

Monday the Twelfth

Golden weather again, with a clear sky and soft and balmy air! Just before
our mid-day meal Olie arrived with mail for us. We've had letters from
home! Instead of cheering me up they made me blue, for they seemed to
bring word from another world, a world so far, far away!
I decided to have a half-day in the open, so I strapped on my duck-gun and
off I went on Paddy, as soon as dinner was over and the men had gone. We
went like the wind, until both Paddy and I were tired of it. Then I found a
"soft-water" pond hidden behind a fringe of scrub-willow and poplar. The
mid-day sun had warmed it to a tempting temperature. So I hobbled Paddy,
peeled off and had a most glorious bath. I had just soaped down with bank-
mud (which is an astonishingly good solvent) and had taken a header and
was swimming about on my back, blinking up at the blue sky, as happy as a
mud-turtle in a mill-pond, when I heard Paddy nicker. That disturbed me a
little, but I felt sure there could be nobody within miles of me. However, I
swam back to where my clothes were, sunned myself dry, and was just
standing up to shake out the ends of this short-cropped hair of mine when I
saw a man's head Across the pond, staring through the bushes at me. I don't
know how or why it is, but I suddenly saw red. I don't remember picking up
the duck-gun, and I don't remember aiming it.
But I banged away, with both barrels, straight at that leering head—or at
least it ought to have been a leering head, whatever that may mean! The
howl that went up out of the wilderness, the next moment, could have been
heard for a mile!
It was Dinky-Dunk, and he said I might have put his eyes out with bird-
shot, if he hadn't made the quickest drop of his life. And he also said that
he'd seen me, a distinct splash of white against the green of the prairie, three
good miles away, and wasn't I ashamed of myself, and what would I have
done if he'd been Olie or old man Dixon? But he kissed my shoulder where
the gun-stock had bruised it, and helped me dress.

Then we rode off together, four or five miles north, where Dinky-Dunk was
sure we could get a bag of duck. Which we did, thirteen altogether, and
started for home as the sun got low and the evening air grew chilly. It was a
heavenly ride. In the west a little army of thin blue clouds was edged with
blazing gold, and up between them spread great fan-like shafts of amber
light. Then came a riot of orange yellow and ashes of roses and the palest of
gold with little islands of azure in it. Then while the dying radiance seemed
to hold everything in a luminous wash of air, the stars came out, one by one,
and a soft cool wind swept across the prairie, and the light darkened—and I
was glad to have Dinky-Dunk there at my side, or I should have had a little
cry, for the twilight prairie always makes me lonesome in a way that could
never be put into words.
I tried to explain the feeling to Dinky-Dunk. He said he understood. "I'm a
Sour-Dough, Gee-Gee, but it still gets me that way," he solemnly confessed.
He said that when he listened to beautiful music he felt the same. And that
got me thinking of grand opera, and of that Romeo and Juliet night at La
Scala, in Milan, when I first met Theobald Gustav. Then I stopped to tell
Dinky-Dunk that I'd been hopelessly in love with a tenor at thirteen and had
written in my journal: "I shall die and turn to dust still adoring him." Then I
told him about my first opera, Rigoletto, and hummed "La Donna E
Mobile," which of course he remembered himself. It took me back to
Florence, and to a box at the Pagliano, and me all in dimity and cork-screw
curls, weeping deliciously at a lady in white, whose troubles I could not
quite understand. Then I got thinking of New York and the Metropolitan,
and poor old Morris's lines:

And still with listening soul I hear
Strains hushed for many a noisy year:
The passionate chords which wake the tear,
The low-voiced love-tales dear....

Scarce changed, the same musicians play
The selfsame themes to-day;
The silvery swift sonatas ring,
The soaring voices sing!

And I could picture the old Metropolitan on a Caruso night. I could see the
Golden Horse-Shoe and the geranium-red trimmings and the satiny white
backs of the women, and smell that luxurious heavy smell of warm air and
hothouse flowers and Paris perfumery and happy human bodies and hear
the whisper of silk along the crimson stairways. I could see the lights go
down, in a sort of sigh, before the overture began, and the scared-looking
blotches of white on the musicians' scores and the other blotches made by
their dress-shirt fronts, and the violins going up and down, up and down, as
though they were one piece of machinery, and then the heavy curtain
stealing up, and the thrill as that new heaven opened up to me, a gawky girl
in her first low-cut dinner gown!
I told Dinky-Dunk I'd sat in every corner of that old house, up in the sky-
parlor with the Italian barbers, in press-seats in the second gallery with dear
old Fanny-Rain-in-the-Face, and in the Westbury's box with the First Lady
of the Land and a Spanish Princess with extremely dirty nails. It seemed so
far away, another life and another world! And for three hours of "Manon"
I'd be willing to hang like a chimpanzee from the Metropolitan's center
chandelier. I suddenly realized how much I missed it. I could have sung to
the City as poor Charpentier's "Louise" sang to her Paris. And a coyote
howled up near the trail, and the prairie got dark, with a pale green rind of
light along the northwest, and I knew there would be a heavy frost before
morning.
To-night after supper my soul and I sat down and did a bit of bookkeeping.
Dinky-Dunk, who'd been watching me out of the corner of his eye, went to
the window and said it looked like a storm. And I knew he meant that I was
the Medicine Hat it was to come from, for before he'd got up from the table
he'd explained to me that matrimony was like motoring because it was
really traveling by means of a series of explosions. Then he tried to explain
that in a few weeks the fall rush would be over and we'd have more time for
getting what we deserved out of life. But I turned on him with sudden
fierceness and declared I wasn't going to be merely an animal. I intended to
keep my soul alive, that it was every one's duty, no matter where they were,
to ennoble their spirit by keeping in touch with the best that has ever been
felt and thought.

When I grimly got out my mouth-organ and played the Pilgrim's Chorus, as
well as I could remember it, Dinky-Dunk sat listening in silent wonder. He
kept up the fire, and waited until I got through. Then he reached for the
dish-pan and said, quite casually, "I'm going to help you wash up to-night,
Gee-Gee!" And so I put away the mouth-organ and washed up. But before I
went to bed I got out my little vellum edition of Browning's The Ring and
the Book, and read at it industriously, doggedly, determinedly, for a solid
hour. What it's all about I don't know. Instead of ennobling my spirit it only
tired my brain and ended up in making me so mad I flung the book into the
wood-box.... Dinky-Dunk has just pinned a piece of paper on my door; it is
a sentence from Epictetus. And it says: "Better it is that great souls should
live in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great
houses!"

Sunday the Eighteenth

I spent an hour to-day trying to shoot a hen-hawk that's been hovering about
the shack all afternoon. He's after my chickens, and as new-laid eggs are
worth more than Browning to a homesteader, I got out my duck-gun. It
gave me a feeling of impending evil, having that huge bird hanging about. It
reminded me there was wrong and rapine in the world. I hated the brute.
But I hid under one of the wagon-boxes and got him, in the end. I brought
him down, a tumbling flurry of wings, like Satan's fall from Heaven. When
I ran out to possess myself of his Satanic body he was only wounded,
however, and was ready to show fight. Then I saw red again. I clubbed him
with the gun-butt, going at him like fury. I was moist with perspiration
when I got through with him. He was a monster. I nailed him with his wings
out, on the bunk-house wall, and Olie shouted and called Dinky-Dunk when
they came back from rounding up the horses, which had got away on the
range. Dinky-Dunk solemnly warned me not to run risks, as he might have
taken an eye out, or torn my face with his claws. He said he could have
stuffed and mounted my hawk, if I hadn't clubbed the poor thing almost to
pieces. There's a devil in me somewhere, I told Dinky-Dunk. But he only
laughed.

Monday the Nineteenth

To-night Dinky-Dunk and I spent a solid hour trying to decide on a name
for the shack. I wanted to call it "Crucknacoola," which is Gaelic for "A
Little Hill of Sleep," but Dinky-Dunk brought forward the objection that
there was no hill. Then I suggested "Barnavista," since about all we can see
from the door are the stables. Then I said "The Builtmore," in a spirit of
mockery, and then Dinky-Dunk in a spirit of irony suggested "Casa
Grande." And in the end we united on "Casa Grande." It is marvelous how
my hair grows. Olie now watches me studiously as I eat. I can see that he is
patiently patterning his table deportment after mine. There's nothing that
silent rough-mannered man wouldn't do for me. I've got so I never notice
his nose, any more than I used to notice Uncle Carlton's receding chin. But I
don't think Olie is getting enough to eat. All his mind seems taken up with
trying to remember not to drink out of his saucer, as history sayeth George
Washington himself once did!

Tuesday the Twentieth

I knew that old hen-hawk meant trouble for me—and the trouble came, all
right. I'm afraid I can't tell about it very coherently, but this is how it began:
I was alone yesterday afternoon, busy in the shack, when a Mounted
Policeman rode up to the door, and, for a moment, nearly frightened the life
out of me. I just stood and stared at him, for he was the first really, truly live
man, outside Olie and my husband, I'd seen for so long. And he looked very
dashing in his scarlet jacket and yellow facings. But I didn't have long to
meditate on his color scheme, for he calmly announced that a ranchman
named McMein had been murdered by a drunken cowboy in a wage
dispute, and the murderer had been seen heading for the Cochrane Ranch.
He (the M. P.) inquired if I would object to his searching the buildings.
Would I object? I most assuredly did not, for little chills began to play up
and down my spinal column, and I wasn't exactly in love with the idea of
having an escaped murderer crawling out of a hay-stack at midnight and
cutting my throat. The ranchman McMein had been killed on Saturday, and
the cowboy had been kept on the run for two days. As I was being told this I
tried to remember where Dinky-Dunk had stowed away his revolver-holster
and his hammerless ejector and his Colt repeater. But I made that handsome
young man in the scarlet coat come right into the shack and begin his search
by looking under the bed, and then going down the cellar.
I stood holding the trap-door and warned him not to break my pickle-jars.
Then he came up and stood squinting thoughtfully out through the doorway.
"Have you got a gun?" he suddenly asked me.
I showed him my duck-gun with its silver mountings, and he smiled a little.
"Haven't you a rifle?" he demanded.
I explained that my husband had, and he still stood squinting out through
the doorway as I poked about the shack-corners and found Dinky-Dunk's
repeater. He was a very authoritative and self-assured young man. He took

the rifle from me, examined the magazine and made sure it was loaded.
Then he handed it back.
"I've got to search those buildings and stacks," he told me. "And I can only
be in one place at once. If you see a man break from under cover anywhere,
when I'm inside, be so good as to shoot him!"
He started off without another word, with his big army revolver in his hand.
My teeth began to do a little fox-trot all by themselves.
"Wait! Stop!" I shouted after him. "Don't go away!"
He stopped and asked me what was wrong. "I—I don't want to shoot a man!
I don't want to shoot any man!" I tried to explain to him.
"You probably won't have to," was his cool response. "But it's better to do
that than have him shoot you, isn't it?"
Whereupon Mr. Red-Coat made straight for the hay-stacks, and I stood in
the doorway, with Dinky-Dunk's rifle in my hands and my knees shaking a
little.
I watched him as he beat about the hay-stacks. Then I got tired of holding
the heavy weapon and leaned it against the shack-wall. I watched the red
coat go in through the stable door, and felt vaguely dismayed at the thought
that its wearer was now quite out of sight.
Then my heart stopped beating. For out of a pile of straw which Olie had
dumped not a hundred feet away from the house, to line a pit for our winter
vegetables, a man suddenly erupted. He seemed to come up out of the very
earth, like a mushroom.
He was the most repulsive-looking man I ever had the pleasure of casting
eyes on. His clothes were ragged and torn and stained with mud. His face
was covered with stubble and his cheeks were hollow, and his skin was just
about the color of a new saddle.
I could see the whites of his eyes as he ran for the shack, looking over his
shoulder toward the stable door as he came. He had a revolver in his hand. I
noticed that, but it didn't seem to trouble me much. I suppose I'd already

been frightened as much as mortal flesh could be frightened. In fact, I was
thinking quite clearly what to do, and didn't hesitate for a moment.
"Put that silly thing down," I told him, as he ran up to me with his head
lowered and that indescribably desperate look in his big frightened eyes. "If
you're not a fool I can get you hidden," I told him. It reassured me to see
that his knees were shaking much more than mine, as he stood there in the
center of the shack! I stooped over the trap-door and lifted it up. "Get down
there quick! He's searched that cellar and won't go through it again. Stay
there until I say he's gone!"
He slipped over to the trap-door and went slowly down the steps, with his
eyes narrowed and his revolver held up in front of him, as though he still
half expected to find some one there to confront him with a blunderbuss.
Then I promptly shut the trap-door. But there was no way of locking it.
I had my murderer there, trapped, but the question was to keep him there.
Your little Chaddie didn't give up many precious moments to reverie. I
tiptoed into the bedroom and lifted the mattress, bedding and all, off the
bedstead. I tugged it out and put it silently down over the trap-door. Then,
without making a sound, I turned the table over on it. But he could still lift
that table, I knew, even with me sitting on top of it. So I started to pile
things on the overturned table, until it looked like a moving-van ready for a
May-Day migration. Then I sat on top of that pile of household goods,
reached for Dinky-Dunk's repeater, and deliberately fired a shot up through
the open door.
I sat there, studying my pile, feeling sure a revolver bullet couldn't possibly
come up through all that stuff. But before I had much time to think about
this my corporal of the R. N. W. M. P. (which means, Matilda Anne, the
Royal North-West Mounted Police) came through the door on the run. He
looked relieved when he saw me triumphantly astride that overturned table
loaded up with about all my household junk.
"I've got him for you," I calmly announced.
"You've got what?" he said, apparently thinking I'd gone mad.
"I've got your man for you," I repeated. "He's down there in my cellar." And
in one minute I'd explained just what had happened. There was no parley,

no deliberation, no hesitation.
"Hadn't you better go outside," he suggested as he started piling the things
off the trap-door.
"You're not going down there?" I demanded.
"Why not?" he asked.
"But he's got a revolver," I cried out, "and he's sure to shoot!"
"That's why I think it might be better for you to step outside for a moment
or two," was my soldier boy's casual answer.
I walked over and got Dinky-Dunk's repeater. Then I crossed to the far side
of the shack, with the rifle in my hands.
"I'm going to stay," I announced.
"All right," was the officer's unconcerned answer as he tossed the mattress
to one side and with one quick pull threw up the trap-door.
A shot rang out, from below, as the door swung back against the wall. But it
was not repeated, for the man in the red coat jumped bodily, heels first, into
that black hole. He didn't seem to count on the risk, or on what might be
ahead of him. He just jumped, spurs down, on that other man with the
revolver in his hand. I could hear little grunts, and wheezes, and a thud or
two against the cellar steps. Then there was silence, except for one double
"click-click" which I couldn't understand.
Oh, Matilda Anne, how I watched that cellar opening! And I saw a back
with a red coat on it slowly rise out of the hole. He, the man who owned the
back of course, was dragging the other man bodily up the narrow little
stairs. There was a pair of handcuffs already on his wrists and he seemed
dazed and helpless, for that slim-looking soldier boy had pummeled him
unmercifully, knocking out his two front teeth, one of which I found on the
doorstep when I was sweeping up.
"I'm sorry, but I'll have to take one of your horses for a day or two," was all
my R. N. W. M. P. hero condescended to say to me as he poked an arm
through his prisoner's and helped him out through the door.

"What—what will they do with him?" I called out after the corporal.
"Hang him, of course," was the curt answer.
Then I sat down to think things over, and, like an old maid with the vapors,
decided I wouldn't be any the worse for a cup of good strong tea. And by
the time I'd had my tea, and straightened things up, and incidentally
discovered that no less than five of my cans of mushrooms had been broken
to bits below-stairs, I heard the rumble of the wagon and knew that Olie and
Dinky-Dunk were back. And I drew a long breath of relief, for with all their
drawbacks, men are not a bad thing to have about, now and then!

Thursday the Twenty-second

It was early Tuesday morning that Dinky-Dunk firmly announced that he
and I were going off on a three-day shooting-trip. I hadn't slept well, the
night before, for my nerves were still rather upset, and Dinky-Dunk said I
needed a picnic. So we got guns and cartridges and blankets and slickers
and cooking things, and stowed them away in the wagon-box. Then we
made a list of the provisions we'd need, and while Dinky-Dunk bagged up
some oats for the team I was busy packing the grub-box. And I packed it
cram full, and took along the old tin bread-box, as well, with pancake flour
and dried fruit and an extra piece of bacon—and bacon it is now called in
this shack, for I have positively forbidden Dinky-Dunk ever to speak of it as
"sowbelly" or even as a "slice of grunt" again.
Then off we started across the prairie, after duly instructing Olie as to
feeding the chickens and taking care of the cream and finishing up the pit
for the winter vegetables. Still once again Olie thought we were both a little
mad, I believe, for we had no more idea where we were going than the man
in the moon.
But there was something glorious in the thought of gipsying across the
autumn prairie like that, without a thought or worry as to where we must
stop or what trail we must take. It made every day's movement a great
adventure. And the weather was divine.
We slept at night under the wagon-box, with a tarpaulin along one side to
keep out the wind, and a fire flickering in our faces on the other side, and
the horses tethered out, and the stars wheeling overhead, and the peace of
God in our hearts. How good every meal tasted! And how that keen sharp
air made snuggling down under a couple of Hudson Bay five-point blankets
a luxury to be spoken of only in the most reverent of whispers! And there
was a time, as you already know, when I used to take bromide and
sometimes even sulphonal to make me sleep! But here it is so different! To
get leg-weary in the open air, tramping about the sedgy slough-sides after
mallard and canvas-back, to smell coffee and bacon and frying grouse in the

cool of the evening, across a thin veil of camp-fire smoke, to see the tired
world turn over on its shoulder and go to sleep—it's all a sort of
monumental lullaby.
The prairie wind seems to seek you out, and make a bet with the Great
Dipper that he'll have you off in forty winks, and the orchestra of the
spheres whispers through its million strings and sings your soul to rest. For
I tell you here and now, Matilda Anne, I, poor, puny, good-for-nothing,
insignificant I, have heard that music of the spheres as clearly as you ever
heard Funiculi-Funicula on that little Naples steamer that used to take you
to Capri. And when I'd crawl out from under that old wagon-box, like a
gopher out of his hole, in the first delicate rosiness of dawn, I'd feel
unutterably grateful to be alive, to hear the cantatas of health singing deep
in my soul, to know that whatever life may do to me, I'd snatched my share
of happiness from the pantry of the gods! And the endless change of color,
from the tawny fox-glove on the lighter land, the pale yellow of a lion's skin
in the slanting autumn sun, to the quavering, shimmering glories of the
Northern Lights that dance in the north, that fling out their banners of ruby
and gold and green, and tremble and merge and pulse until I feel that I can
hear the clash of invisible cymbals. I wonder if you can understand my
feeling when I pulled the hat-pin out of my old gray Stetson yesterday,
uncovered my head, and looked straight up into the blue firmament above
me. Then I said, "Thank you, God, for such a beautiful day!"
Dinky-Dunk promptly said that I was blasphemous—he's so strict and
solemn! But as I stared up into the depths of that intense opaline light, so
clear, so pure, I realized how air, just air and nothing else, could leave a
scatter-brained lady like me half-seas over. Only it's a champagne that never
leaves you with a headache the next day!

Saturday the Twenty-fourth

Dinky-Dunk, who seems intent on keeping my mind occupied, brought me
home a bundle of old magazines last night. They were so frayed and
thumbed-over that some of the pages reminded me of well-worn bank-
notes. I've been reading some of the stories, and they all seem silly.
Everybody appears to be in love with somebody else's wife. Then the
people are all divided so strictly into two classes, the good and the bad! As
for the other man's wife, prairie-life would soon knock that nonsense out of
people. There isn't much room for the Triangle in a two-by-four shack.
Life's so normal and natural and big out here that a Pierre Loti would be
kicked into a sheep-dip before he could use up his first box of face-rouge!
You want your own wife, and want her so bad you're satisfied. Not that
Dinky-Dunk and I are so goody-goody! We're just healthy and human, that's
all, and we'd never do for fiction. After meals we push away the dishes and
sit side by side, with our arms across each other's shoulders, full of the joy
of life, satisfied, happy, healthy-minded, now and then a little Rabelaisian in
our talk, meandering innocent-eyed through those earthier intimacies which
most married people seem to face without shame, so long as the facing is
done in secret. We don't seem ashamed of that terribly human streak in us.
And neither of us is bad, at heart. But I know we're not like those magazine
characters, who all seem to have Florida-water instead of red blood in their
veins, and are so far, far away from life.
Yet even that dip into politely erotic fiction seemed to canalize my poor
little grass-grown mind into activity, and Diddums and I sat up until the wee
sma' hours discoursing on life and letters. He started me off by somewhat
pensively remarking that all women seem to want to be intellectual and
have a salon.
"No, Dinky-Dunk, I don't want a salon," I promptly announced. "I never did
want one, for I don't believe they were as exciting as we imagine. And I
hate literary people almost as much as I hate actors. I always felt they were
like stage-scenery, not made for close inspection. For after five winters in

New York and a couple in London you can't help bumping into the
Bohemian type, not to mention an occasional collision with 'em up and
down the Continent. When they're female they always seem to wear the
wrong kind of corsets. And when they're male they watch themselves in the
mirrors, or talk so much about themselves that you haven't a chance to talk
about yourself—which is really the completest definition of a bore, isn't it?
I'd much rather know them through their books than through those awful
Sunday evening soirees where poor old leonine M—— used to perspire
reading those Socialist poems of his to the adoring ladies, and Sanguinary
John used to wear the same flannel shirt that shielded him from the Polar
blasts up in Alaska—open at the throat, and all that sort of thing, just like a
movie-actor cowboy, only John had grown a little stout and he kept spoiling
the Strong-Man picture by so everlastingly posing at one end of the grand-
piano! You know the way they do it, one pensive elbow on the piano-end
and the delicately drooping palm holding up the weary brains, the same as
you prop up a King-orange bough when it gets too heavy with fruit! And
then he had a lovely bang and a voice like a maiden-lady from Maine. And
take it from me, O lord and master, that man devoured all his raw beef and
blood on his typewriter-ribbon. I dubbed him the King of the Eye-Socket
school, and instead of getting angry he actually thanked me for it. That was
the sort of advertising he was after."
Dinky-Dunk grinned a little as I rattled on. Then he grew serious again.
"Why is it," he asked, "a writer in Westminster Abbey is always a genius,
but a writer in the next room is rather a joke?"
I tried to explain it for him. "Because writers are like Indians. The only
good ones are the dead ones. And it's the same with those siren affinities of
history. Annie Laurie lived to be eighty, though the ballad doesn't say so.
And Lady Hamilton died poor and ugly and went around with red herrings
in her pocket. And Cleopatra was really a redheaded old political schemer,
and Paris got tired of Helen of Troy. Which means that history, like
literature, is only Le mensonge convenu!"
This made Dinky-Dunk sit up and stare at me. "Look here, Gee-Gee, I don't
mind a bit of book-learning, but I hate to see you tear the whole tree of
knowledge up by the roots and knock me down with it! And it was salons
we were talking about, and not the wicked ladies of the past!"

"Well, the only salon I ever saw in America had the commercial air of a
millinery opening where tea happened to be served," I promptly declared.
"And the only American woman I ever knew who wanted to have a salon
was a girl we used to call Asafetida Anne. And if I explained why you'd
make a much worse face than that, my Diddums. But she had a weakness
for black furs and never used to wash her neck. So the Plimpton Mark was
always there!"
"Don't get bitter, Gee-Gee," announced Dinky-Dunk as he proceeded to
light his pipe. And I could afford to laugh at his solemnity.
"I'm not bitter, Honey Chile; I'm only glad I got away from all that
Bohemian rubbish. You may call me a rattle-box, and accuse me of being
temperamental now and then—which I'm not—but the one thing in life
which I love is sanity. And that, Dinky-Dunk, is why I love you, even
though you are only a big sunburnt farmer fighting and planning and
grinding away for a home for an empty-headed wife who's going to fail at
everything but making you love her!"
Then followed a few moments when I wasn't able to talk,

... The sequel's scarce essential—
Nay, more than this, I hold it still
Profoundly confidential!

Then as we sat there side by side I got thinking of the past and of the
Bohemians before whom I had once burned incense. And remembering a
certain visit to Box Hill with Lady Agatha's mother, years and years ago, I
had to revise my verdict on authors, for one of the warmest memories in all
my life is that of dear old Meredith in his wheelchair, with his bearded face
still flooded with its kindly inner light and his spirit still mellow with its
unquenchable love of life. And once as a child, I went on to tell Dinky-
Dunk, I had met Stevenson. It was at Mentone, and I can still remember
him leaning over and taking my hand. His own hand was cold and lean, like
a claw, and with the quick instinct of childhood I realized, too, that he was
condescending as he spoke to me, for all the laugh that showed the white
teeth under his drooping black mustache. Wrong as it seemed, I didn't like
him any more than I afterward liked the Sargent portrait of him, which was

really an echo of my own first impression, though often and often I've tried
to blot out that first unfair estimate of a real man of genius. There's so much
in the Child's Garden of Verse that I love; there's so much in the man's life
that demands admiration, that it seems wrong not to capitulate to his charm.
But when one's own family are one's biographers it's hard to be kept human.
"Yet there's one thing, Dinky-Dunk, that I do respect him for," I went on.
"He had seen the loveliest parts of this world, and, when he had to, he could
light-heartedly give it all up and rough it in this American West of ours,
even as you and I!" Whereupon Dinky-Dunk argued that we ought to
forgive an invalid his stridulous preaching about bravery and manliness and
his over-emphasis of fortitude, since it was plainly based on an effort to
react against a constitutional weakness for which he himself couldn't be
blamed.
And I confessed that I could forgive him more easily than I could
Sanguinary John with his literary Diabolism and that ostentatious stone-age
blugginess with which he loved to give the ladies goose-flesh, pretending
he was a bull in a china-shop when he's really only a white mouse in an ink-
pot! And after Dinky-Dunk had knocked out his pipe and wound up his
watch he looked over at me with his slow Scotch-Canadian smile. "For a
couple of hay-seeds who have been harpooning the salon idea," he
solemnly announced, "I call this quite a literary evening!" But what's the
use of having an idea or two in your head if you can't air 'em now and then?

Tuesday the Twenty-seventh

To-day I stumbled on the surprise of my life! It was A Man! I took Paddy
and cantered over to the old Titchborne Ranch and was prowling around the
corral, hoping I might find a few belated mushrooms. But nary a one was
there. So I whistled on my four fingers for Paddy (I've been teaching him to
come at that call) and happened to glance in the direction of the abandoned
shack. Then I saw the door open, and out walked a man.
He was a young man, in puttees and knickers and Norfolk jacket, and he
was smoking a cigarette. He stared at me as though I were the Missing
Link. Then he said "Hello!" rather inadequately, it seemed to me.
I answered back "Hello," and wondered whether to take to my heels or not.
But my courage got its second wind, and I stayed. Then we shook hands,
very formally, and explained who we were. And I discovered that his name
was Percival Benson Woodhouse (and the Lord forgive me if they ever call
him Percy for short!) and that his aunt is the Countess of D—— and that he
knows a number of people you and Lady Agatha have often spoken of. He's
got a Japanese servant called Kino, or perhaps it's spelt Keeno, I don't know
which, who's housekeeper, laundress, valet, gardener, groom and chef, all in
one,—so, at least Percival Benson confessed to me. He also confessed that
he'd bought the Titchborne Ranch, from photographs, from "one of those
land chaps" in London. He wanted to rough it a bit, and they told him there
would be jolly good game shooting. So he even brought along an elephant-
gun, which his cousin had used in India. The photographs which the "land
chap" had showed him turned out to be pictures of the Selkirks. And, taking
it all in all, he fancied that he'd been jolly well bunked. But Percival seemed
to accept it with the stoicism of the well-born Britisher. He'd have a try at
the place, although there was no game.
"But there is game," I told him, "slathers of it, oodles of it!"
He mildly inquired where and what? I told him: Wild duck, prairie-chicken,
wild geese, jack-rabbits, now and then a fox, and loads of coyotes. He

explained, then, that he meant big game—and how grandly those two
words, "big game," do roll off the English tongue! He has a sister in the
Bahamas, who may join him next summer if he should decide to stick it out.
He considered that it would be a bit rough for a girl, during the winter
season up here.
Yet before I go any further I must describe Percival Benson Woodhouse to
you, for he's not only "our sort," but a type as well.
In the first place, he's a Magdalen College man, the sort we've seen going
up and down the High many and many a time. He's rather gaunt and rather
tall, and he stoops a little. "At home" they call it the "Oxford stoop," if I'm
not greatly mistaken. His hands are thin and long and bony. His eyes are
nice, and he looks very good form. I mean he's the sort of man you'd never
take for the "outsider" or "rotter." He's the sort who seem to have the royal
privilege of doing even doubtfully polite things and yet doing them in such
a way as to make them seem quite proper. I don't know whether I make that
clear or not, but one thing is clear, and this is that our Percival Benson is an
aristocrat. You see it in his over-sensitive, over-refined, almost womanishly
delicate face, with those idealizing and quite unpractical eyes of his. You
see it in the thin, high-arched, bony nose (almost as fine a beak as the one
belonging to His Grace, the Duke of M——!) and you see it in the sad and
somewhat elongated face, as though he had pored over big books too much,
a sort of air of pathos and aloofness from things. His mouth strikes you as
being rather meager, until he smiles, which is quite often, for, glory be, he
has a good sense of humor. But besides that he has a neatness, a coolness,
an impersonal sort of ease, which would make you think that he might have
stepped out of one of Henry James's earlier novels of about the time of the
Portrait of a Lady. And I like him. I knew that at once. He's effete and old-
worldish and probably useless, out here, but he stands for something I've
been missing, and I'll be greatly mistaken if Percival Benson and Chaddie
McKail are not pretty good friends before the winter's over! He's asked if he
might be permitted to call, and he's coming for dinner to-morrow night, and
I do hope Dinky-Dunk is nice to him—if we're to be neighbors. But Dinky-
Dunk says Westerners don't ask to be permitted to call. They just stick their
cayuse into the corral and walk in, the same as an Indian does. And Dinky-
Dunk says that if he comes in evening dress he'll shoot him, sure pop!

Thursday the Twenty-ninth

Percy (how I hate that name!) was here for dinner last night, and all things
considered, we didn't fare so badly. We had tomato bisque and scalloped
potatoes and prairie-chicken (they need to be well basted) and hot biscuits
and stewed dried peaches with cream. Then we had coffee and the men
smoked their pipes. We talked until a quarter to one in the morning, and my
poor Dinky-Dunk, who has been working so hard and seeing nobody, really
enjoyed that visit and really likes Percival Benson.
Percy got talking about Oxford, and you could see that he loved the old
town and that he felt more at home on the Isis than on the prairie. He said
he once heard Freeman tell a story about Goldwin Smith, who used to be
Regius Professor of History at the University. G. S. seemed astonished that
F. couldn't tell him, at some viva voce exam, whatever that may mean, the
cause of King John's death. Then G. S. explained that poor John died of too
much peaches and fresh ale, "which would give a man considerable belly-
ache," the Regius Professor of History solemnly announced to Freeman.
Percy said his lungs rather troubled him in England, and he has spent over a
year in Florence and Rome and can talk pictures like a Grant Allen guide-
book. And he's sat through many an opera at La Scala, but considered the
Canadian coyote a much better vocalist than most of the minor Italian
tenors. And he knows Capri and Taormina and says he'd like to grow old
and die in Sicily. He got pneumonia at Messina, and nearly died young
there and after five months in Switzerland a specialist told him to try
Canada.
I've noticed that one of the delusions of Americans is that an Englishman is
silent. Now, my personal conviction is that Englishmen are the greatest
talkers in the world, and I have Percy to back me up in it. In fact, we sat
about talking so long that Percy asked if he couldn't stay all night, as he was
a poor rider and wasn't sure of the trails as yet. So we made a shake-down
for him in the living-room. And when Dinky-Dunk came to bed he confided
to me that Percy was calmly reading and smoking himself to sleep, out of

my sadly scorned copy of The Ring and the Book, with the lamp on the
floor, on one side of him, and a saucer on the other, for an ash-tray. But he
was up and out this morning, before either of us was stirring, coming back
to Casa Grande, however, when he saw the smoke at the chimney-top. His
thin cheeks were quite pink and he apologetically explained that he'd been
trying for an hour and a half to catch his cayuse. Olie had come to his
rescue. But our thin-shouldered Oxford exile said that he had never seen
such a glorious sunrise, and that the ozone had made him a bit tipsy.
Speaking of thin-shouldered specimens, Matilda Anne, I was once a thirty-
six; now I am a perfect forty-two.

Friday the Fifth

The weather has been bad all this week, but I've had a great deal of sewing
to do, and for two days Dinky-Dunk stayed in and helped me fix up the
shack. I made more book-shelves out of more old biscuit-boxes and my lord
made a gun-rack for our fire-arms. Percival Benson rode over once, through
the storm, and it took us half an hour to thaw him out. But he brought some
books, and says he has four cases, altogether, and that we're welcome to all
we wish. He stayed until noon the next day, this time sleeping in the annex,
which Dinky-Dunk and I have papered, so that it looks quite presentable.
But as yet there is no way of heating it. Our new neighbor, I imagine, is
very lonesome.

Sunday the Seventh

The weather has cleared: there's a chinook arch in the sky, and a sort of St.
Martin's-Summer haze on all the prairie. But there's news to-day. Kino, our
new neighbor's Jap, has decamped with a good deal of money and about all
of Percival Benson's valuables. The poor boy is almost helpless, but he's not
a quitter. He said he chopped his first kindling to-day, though he had to
stand in a wash-tub, while he did it, to keep from cutting his feet. Dinky-
Dunk's birthday is only three weeks off, and I'm making plans for a
celebration.

Tuesday the Ninth

The days slip by, and scarcely leave me time to write. Dinky-Dunk is a sort
of pendulum, swinging out to work, back to eat, and then out, and then back
again. Olie is teaming in lumber and galvanized iron for a new building of
some sort. My lord, in the evenings, sits with paper and pencil, figuring out
measurements and making plans. I sit on the other side of the table, as a
rule, sewing. Sometimes I go around to his side of the table, and make him
put his plans away for a few minutes. We are very happy. But where the
days fly to I scarcely know. We are always looking toward the future,
talking about the future, "conceiting" for the future, as the Irish say. Next
summer is to be our banner year. Dinky-Dunk is going to risk everything on
wheat. He's like a general plotting out a future plan of campaign—for when
the work comes, he says, it will come in a rush. Help will be hard to get, so
he'll sell his British Columbia timber rights and buy a forty-horse-power
gasoline tractor. He will at least if gasoline gets cheaper, for with "gas" still
at twenty-six cents a gallon horse-power is cheapest. But during the
breaking season in April and May, one of these engines can haul eight gang-
plows behind it. In twenty-four hours it will be able to turn over thirty-five
acres of prairie soil—and the ordinary man and team counts two acres of
plowing a decent day's work.
To-night I asked Dinky-Dunk why he risked everything on wheat and
warned him that we might have to revise the old Kansas trekker's slogan to
—

"In wheat we trusted,
In wheat we busted!

Dinky-Dunk explained that to keep on raising only wheat would be bad for
the land, and even now meant taking a chance, but situated as he was it
brought in the quickest money. And he wanted money in a hurry, for he had
a nest to feather for a lady wild-bird that he'd captured—which meant me.
Later on he intends to go in for flax—for fiber and not for seed—and as our

land should produce two tons of the finest flax-straw to the acre and as the
Belgian and Irish product is now worth over four hundred dollars a ton, he
told me to sit down and figure out what four hundred acres would produce,
with even a two-third crop.
The Canadian farmer of the West, he went on to explain, mostly grew flax
for the seed alone, burning up over a million tons of straw every year, just
to get it out of the way, the same as he does with his wheat-straw. But all
that will soon be changed. Only last week Dinky-Dunk wrote to the
Department of Agriculture for information about courtai fiber—that's the
kind used for point-lace and is worth a dollar a pound—for my lord feels
convinced his soil and climatic conditions are especially suited for certain
of the finer varieties. He even admitted that flax would be better on his land
at the present time, as it would release certain of the natural fertilizers
which sometimes leave the virgin soil too rich for wheat. But what most
impressed me about Dinky-Dunk's talk was his absolute and unshaken faith
in this West of ours, once it wakes up to its opportunities. It's a stored-up
granary of wealth, he declares, and all we've done so far is to nibble along
the leaks in the floor-cracks!

Saturday the Twenty-first

To-day is Dinky-Dunk's birthday. He's always thought, of course, that I'm a
pauper, and never dreamed of my poor little residuary nest-egg. I'd ordered
a box of Okanagan Valley apples, and a gramophone and a dozen opera
records, and a brier-wood pipe and two pounds of English "Honey-Dew,"
and a smoking-jacket, and some new ties and socks and shirts, and a brand
new Stetson, for Dinky-Dunk's old hat is almost a rag-bag. And I ordered
half a dozen of the newer novels and a set of Herbert Spencer which I heard
him say he wanted, and a sepia print of the Mona Lisa (which my lord says
I look like when I'm planning trouble) and a felt mattress and a set of bed-
springs (so good-by, old sway-backed friend whose humps have bruised me
in body and spirit this many a night!) and a dozen big oranges and three
dozen little candles for the birthday cake. And then I was cleaned out—
every blessed cent gone! But Percy (we have, you see, been unable to
escape that name) ordered a box of cigars and a pair of quilted house-
slippers, so it was a pretty formidable array.
I, accordingly, had Olie secretly team this array all the way from Buckhorn
to Percy's house, where it was duly ambushed and entrenched, to await the
fatal day. As luck would have it, or seemed to have it, Dinky-Dunk had to
hit the trail for overnight, to see about the registration of his transfers for his
new half-section, at the town of H——. So as soon as Dinky-Dunk was out
of sight I hurried through my work and had Tumble-Weed and Bronk
headed for the old Titchborne Ranch.
There I arrived about mid-afternoon, and what a time we had, getting those
things unpacked, and looking them over, and planning and talking! But the
whole thing was spoilt.
We forgot to tie the horses. So while we were having tea Bronk and
Tumble-Weed hit the trail, on their own hook. They made for home, harness
and all, but of course I never knew this at the time. We looked and looked,
came back for supper, and then started out again. We searched until it got
dark. My feet were like lead, and I couldn't have walked another mile. I was

so stiff and tired I simply had to give up. Percy worried, of course, for we
had no way of sending word to Dinky-Dunk. Then we sat down and talked
over possibilities, like a couple of castaways on a Robinson Crusoe island.
Percy offered to bunk in the stable, and let me have the shack. But I
wouldn't hear of that. In the first place, I felt pretty sure Percy was what
they call a "lunger" out here, and I didn't relish the idea of sleeping in a
tuberculous bed. I asked for a blanket and told him that I was going to sleep
out under the wagon, as I'd often done with Dinky-Dunk. Percy finally
consented, but this worried him too. He even brought out his "big-game"
gun, so I'd have protection, and felt the grass to see if it was damp, and
declared he couldn't sleep on a mattress when he knew I was out on the hard
ground. I told him that I loved it, and to go to bed, for I wanted to get out of
some of my armor-plate. He went, reluctantly.
It was a beautiful night, and not so cold, with scarcely a breath of wind
stirring. I lay looking out through the wheel-spokes at the Milky Way, and
was just dropping off when Percy came out still again. He was in a quilted
dressing-gown and had a blanket over his shoulders. It made him look for
all the world like Father Time. He wanted to know if I was all right, and had
brought me out a pillow—which I didn't use. Then he sat down on the
prairie-floor, near the wagon, and smoked and talked. He pointed out some
of the constellations to me, and said the only time he'd ever seen the stars
bigger was one still night on the Indian Ocean, when he was on his way
back from Singapore. He would never forget that night, he said, the stars
were so wonderful, so big, so close, so soft and luminous. But the northern
stars were different. They were without the orange tone that belongs to the
South. They seemed remoter and more awe-inspiring, and there was always
a green tone to their whiteness.
Then we got talking about "furrin parts" and Percy asked me if I'd ever seen
Naples at night from San Martino, and I asked him if he'd ever seen
Broadway at night from the top of the Times Building. Then he asked me if
I'd ever watched Paris from Montmartre, or seen the Temple of Neptune at
Pæstum bathed in Lucanian moonlight—which I very promptly told him I
had, for it was on the ride home from Pæstum that a certain person had
proposed to me. We talked about temples and Greek Gods and the age of
the world and Indian legends until I got downright sleepy. Then Percy threw
away his last cigarette and got up. He said "Good night;" I said "Good

night;" and he went into the shack. He said he'd leave the door open, in case
I called. There were just the two of us, between earth and sky, that night,
and not another soul within a radius of seven miles of any side of us. He
was very glad to have some one to talk to. He's probably a year or two older
than I am, but I am quite motherly with him. And he is shockingly
incompetent, as a homesteader, from the look of his shack. But he's a
gentleman, almost too "Gentle," I sometimes feel, a Laodicean, mentally
over-refined until it leaves him unable to cope with real life. He's one of
those men made for being a "spectator," and not an actor, in life. And there's
something so absurd about his being where he is that I feel sorry for him.
I slept like a log. Once I fell asleep, I forgot about the hard ground, and the
smell of the horse-blankets, and the fact that I'd lost my poor Dinky-Dunk's
team. When I woke up it was the first gray of dawn. Two men were
standing side by side, looking at me under the wagon. One was Percy, and
the other was Dinky-Dunk himself.
He'd got home by three o'clock in the morning, by hurrying, for he was
nervous about me being alone. But he found the house empty, the team
standing beside the corral, and me missing. Naturally, it wasn't a very happy
situation. Poor Dinky-Dunk hit the trail at once, and had been riding all
night looking for his lost wife. Then he made for Percy's, woke him up, and
discovered her placidly snoring under a wagon-box. He didn't even smile at
this. He was very tired and very silent. I thought, for a moment, that I saw
distrust on Dinky-Dunk's face, for the first time. But he has said nothing. I
hated to see him go out to work, when we got home, but he refused to take a
nap at noon, as I wanted him to. So to-night, when he came in for his
supper, I had the birthday cake duly decked and the presents all out.
But his enthusiasm was forced, and all during the meal he showed a
tendency to be absent-minded. I had no explanations to make, so I made
none. But I noticed that he put on his old slippers. I thought he had done it
deliberately.
"You don't seem to mellow with age," I announced, with my eyebrows up.
He flushed at that, quite plainly. Then he reached over and took hold of my
hand. But he did it only with an effort, and after some tremendous inward
struggle which was not altogether flattering to me.

"Please take your hand away so I can reach the dish-towel," I told him. And
the hand went away like a shot. After I'd finished my work I got out my
George Meredith and read Modern Love. Dinky-Dunk did not come to bed
until late. I was awake when he came, but I didn't let him know it.

Sunday the Twenty-ninth

I haven't felt much like writing this last week. I scarcely know why. I think
it's because Dinky-Dunk is on his dignity. He's getting thin, by the way. His
cheek-bones show and his Adam's apple sticks out. He's worried about his
land payments, and I tell him he'd be happier with a half-section. But
Dinky-Dunk wants wealth. And I can't help him much. I'm afraid I'm an
encumbrance. And the stars make me lonely, and the prairie wind
sometimes gives me the willies! And winter is coming.
I'm afraid I'm out of my setting, as badly out of it as Percival Benson is. It
wouldn't be so bad, I suppose, if I'd never seen such lovely corners of the
world, before coming out here to be a dot on the wilderness. If I'd never had
that heavenly summer at Fiesole, and those months with you at Corfu, and
that winter in Rome with poor dear dead Katrinka! Sometimes I think of the
nights we used to look out over Paris, from the roof above 'Tite Daneau's
studio. And sometimes I think of the Pincio, with the band playing, and the
carriages flashing, and the officers in uniform, and the milky white statues
among the trees, and the golden mists of the late afternoon over the
Immortal City. And I tell myself that it was all a dream. And then I feel that
I am all a dream, and the prairie is a dream, and Paddy and Olie and Dinky-
Dunk and all this new life is nothing more than a dream. Oh, Matilda Anne,
I've been homesick this week, so unhappy and homesick for something—
for something, and I don't even know what it is!

Monday the Seventh

Glory be! Winter's here with a double-edged saber wind out of the north and
snow on the ground. It gives a zip to things. It makes our snug little shack
seem as cozy as a ship's cabin. And I've got a jumper-sleigh, and with my
coon-skin coat and gauntlets and wedge-cap I can be as warm as toast in
any wind. And there's so much to do. And I'm not going to be a piker. This
is the land where folks make good or go loco. You've only got yourself to
depend on, and yourself to blame, if things go wrong. And I'm going to
make them go right. There's no use wailing out here in the West. A line or
two of Laurence Hope's has been running all day through my head:

"These are my people, and this my land;
I hear the pulse of her secret soul.
This is the life that I understand,
Savage and simple, and sane and whole."

Friday the Eleventh

Dinky-dunk came home with an Indian girl to-day, a young half-breed
about sixteen years old. She's to be both companion and parlor-maid, for
Dinky-Dunk has to hurry off to British Columbia, to try to sell his timber-
rights there to meet his land payments. He's off to-morrow. It makes me feel
wretched, but I'm consuming my own smoke, for I don't want him to think
me an encumbrance. My Indian girl speaks a little English. She also eats
sugar by the handful, whenever she can steal it. I asked her what her name
was and she told me "Queenie MacKenzie." That name almost took my
breath away. How that untutored Northwest aborigine ever took unto herself
this Broadway chorus-girl name, Heaven only knows! But I have my
suspicions of Queenie. She has certain exploratory movements which
convince me she is verminous. She sleeps in the annex, I'm happy to say.
At dinner to-night when I was teaching Dinky-Dunk how to make a rabbit
out of his table-napkin and a sea-sick passenger out of the last of his
oranges, he explained that he might not get back in time for Christmas, and
asked if I'd mind. I knew his trip was important, so I kept a stiff upper lip
and said of course I wouldn't mind. But the thought of a Christmas alone
chilled my heart. I tried to be jolly, and gave my repertory on the mouth-
organ, which promptly stopped all activities on the part of the round-eyed
Queenie MacKenzie. But all that foolery was as forced as the frivolity of
the French Revolution Conciergerie where the merry diners couldn't quite
forget they were going to lose their heads in the morning!

Sunday the Thirteenth

Not only is Duncan gone, but Queenie has also quite unceremoniously
taken her departure. It arose from the fact that I requested her to take a bath.
The only disappointed member of the family is poor old Olie, who was
actually making sheep's eyes at that verminous little baggage. Imagination
falters at what he might have done with a dollar's worth of brown sugar.
When Queenie went, I find, my mouth-organ went with her. I'd like to ling
chih that Indian girl!

Wednesday the Sixteenth

It was a sparkling clear day to-day, with no wind, so I rode over to the old
Titchborne Ranch with my little jumper-sleigh. There I found Percival
Benson in a most pitiable condition. He had been laid up with the grip. His
place was untidy, his dishes were unwashed, and his fuel was running short.
His appearance, in fact, rather frightened me. So I bundled him up and got
him in the jumper and brought him straight home with me. He had a chill
on the way, so as soon as we got to Casa Grande I sent him to bed, gave
him hot whisky, and put my hot water bottle at his feet. He tried to accept
the whole thing as a joke, and vowed I was jolly well cooking him. But to-
night he has a high fever and I'm afraid he's in for a serious siege of illness.
I intend to send Olie over to get some of his things and have his live stock
brought over with ours.

Sunday the Twentieth

Percy has had three very bad nights, but seems a little better to-day. His
lung is congested, and it may be pneumonia, but I think my mustard-plaster
saved the day. He tries so hard to be cheerful, and is so grateful for every
little thing. But I wish Dinky-Dunk was here to tell me what to do.
I could never have survived this last week without Olie. He is as watchful
and ready as a farm-collie. But I want my Dinky-Dunk! I may have spoiled
my Dinky-Dunk a little, but it's only once every century or two that God
makes a man like him. I want to be a good wife. I want to do my share, and
keep a shoulder to the wheel, if the going's got to be heavy for the next year
or two. I won't be the Dixon type. I won't—I won't! My Duncan will need
me during this next year, and it will be a joy to help him. For I love that
man, Matilda Anne,—I love him so much that it hurts!

Sunday the Twenty-seventh

Christmas has come and gone. It was very lonely at Casa Grande. I prefer
not writing about it. Percy is improving, but is still rather weak. I think he
had a narrow squeak.

Wednesday the Thirtieth

My patient is up and about, looking like a different man. He shows the
effects of my forced feeding, though he declares I'm trying to make him
into a Strasburg goose, for the sake of the pâté de foies gras when I cut him
up. But he's decided to go to Santa Barbara for the winter: and I think he's
wise. So this afternoon I togged out in my furs, took the jumper, and went
kiting over to the Titchborne Ranch. Oh, what a shack! What disorder, what
untidiness, what spirit-numbing desolation! I don't blame poor Percival
Benson for clearing out for California. I got what things he needed,
however, and went kiting home again.

Thursday the Thirty-first

I hardly know how to begin. But it must be written or I'll suddenly go mad
and start to bite the shack walls. Last night, after Percy had helped me turn
the bread-mixer (for, whatever happens, we've at least got to eat) I helped
him pack. Among other things, he found a copy of Housman's Shropshire
Lad and after running through it announced that he'd like to read me two or
three little things out of it. So I squatted down in front of the fire, idly
poking at the red coals, and he sat beside the stove with his book, in slippers
and dressing gown. And there he was solemnly reading out loud when the
door opened and in walked Dinky-Dunk.
I say he walked in, but that isn't quite right. He stood in the open door,
staring at us, with an expression that would have done credit to the Tragic
Muse. I imagine Enoch Arden wore much the same look when he piped the
home circle after that prolonged absence of his. Then Dinky-Dunk did a
most unpardonable thing. Instead of saying "Howdy!" like a scholar and a
gentleman, he backed out of the shack and slammed the door. When I'd
caught my breath I went out through that door after him. It was a bitterly
cold night, but I did not stop to put anything on. I was too amazed, too
indignant, too swept off my feet by the absurdity of it all. I could see
Dinky-Dunk in the clear starlight, taking the blankets off his team. He'd
hurried to the shack, without even unharnessing the horses. I could hear the
wheel-tires whine on the crisp snow, for the poor beasts were tired and
restless. I went straight to the buckboard into which Dinky-Dunk was
climbing. He looked like a cinnamon-bear in his big shaggy coat. And I
couldn't see his face. But I remembered how it had looked in the doorway.
It was the color of a tan shoe. It was too weather-beaten and burnt with the
wind and sun-glare ever to turn white, or, I suppose, it would have been the
color of paper.
"Haven't you," I demanded, "haven't you any explanation for acting like
this?" He sat in the buckboard seat, with the reins in his hands.

"I guess I've got the first right to that question," he finally said in a stifled
voice.
"Then why don't you ask it?" was my answer to him. Again he waited a
moment before speaking, as though he felt the need of weighing his words.
"I don't need to—now!" he said, as he tightened the reins.
"Wait," I called out to him. "There are certain things I want you to know!"
I was not going to make explanations. I would not dignify his brute-man
stupidity by such things. I scarcely know what I intended to do. As I looked
up at him there in his rough fur coat, for a moment, he seemed millions and
millions of miles away from me. I stared at him, trying to comprehend his
utter lack of comprehension. I seemed to view him across the same gulf
which separates a meditative zoo visitor from some abysmally hirsute
animal that eons and eons ago must have been its cave-fellow and hearth-
mate. But now we seemed to have nothing in common, not even a language
with which to link up those lost ages. Yet from all that mixture of feelings
only one survived: I didn't want my husband to go.
It was the team, as far as I can remember, that really decided the thing.
They had been restive, backing and jerking and pawing and nickering for
their feed-box. And suddenly they jumped forward. But this time they kept
going. Whether Dinky-Dunk tried to hold them back or not I can't say. But I
came back to the shack, shivering. Percy, thank Heaven, was in his room.
"I think I'll turn in!" he called out, quite casually, through the partition.
I said "All right," and sat down in front of the fire, trying to straighten
things out. My Dinky-Dunk was gone! He had glared at me, with hate in his
eyes, as he sat in that buckboard. It's all over. He has no faith in me, his own
wife!
I went to bed and tried to sleep. But sleep was out of the question. The
whole thing seemed so absurd, so unreasonable, so unjust. I could feel
waves of anger sweep through my body at the mere thought of it. Then a
wave of something else, of something between anxiety and terror, would
take the place of anger. My husband was gone, and he'd never come back.

I'd put all my eggs in one basket, and the basket had gone over, and made a
saffron-tinted omelet of all my life.
And that's the way I watched the New Year in, I couldn't even afford the
luxury of a little bawl, for I was afraid Percy would hear me. It must have
been almost morning when I fell asleep.
When I woke up Percival Benson was gone, bag and baggage. At first I
resented the thought of his going off that way, without a word, but on
thinking it over I decided he'd done the right thing. There's nothing like the
hard cold light of a winter morning to bring you back to hard cold facts.
Olie had driven Percy in to the station. So I was alone in the shack all day. I
did a heap of thinking during those long hours of solitude. And out of all
that straw of self-examination I threshed just one little grain of truth. I could
never live on the prairie alone. And whatever I did, or wherever I went, I
could never be happy without my Dinky-Dunk....
I had just finished supper to-night, as blue as indigo and as spiritless as a
wet hen, when I heard the sound of voices. It took me only ten seconds to
make sure whose they were. Dinky-Dunk had come back with Olie! I made
a high dive for a book from the nearest shelf, swung the armchair about
with a jerk, and sank luxuriously into it, with my feet up on the warm
damper and my eyes leisurely and contentedly perusing George Moore's
Confessions of a Young Man (although I hate the libidinous stuff like
poison!) Then Dinky-Dunk came in. I could see him stare at me a little
awkwardly and contritely (what woman can't read a book and study a man
at the same time?) and I, could see that he was waiting for an opening. But I
gave him none. Naturally, Olie had explained everything to him. But I had
been humiliated, my pride had been walked over, from end to end. My spirit
had been stamped on—and I had decided on my plan of action. I simply
ignored Duncan.
I read for a while, then I took a lamp, went to my room, and deliberately
locked the door. My one regret was that I couldn't see Dinky-Dunk's face
when that key turned. And now I must stop writing, and go to bed, for I am
dog-tired. I know I'll sleep better to-night. It's nice to remember there's a
man near, if he happens to be the man you care a trifle about, even though
you have calmly turned the door-key on him.

Sunday the Third

Dinky-Dunk has at least the sensibilities to respect my privacy of life. He
knows where the deadline is, and doesn't disregard it. But it's terribly hard
to be tragic in a two-by-four shack. You miss the dignifying touches. And
you haven't much leeway for the bulky swings of grandeur.
For one whole day I didn't speak to Dinky-Dunk, didn't even so much as
recognize his existence. I ate by myself, and did my work—when the
monster was around—with all the preoccupation of a sleep-walker. But
something happened, and I forgot myself. Before I knew it I was asking him
a question. He answered it, quite soberly, quite casually. If he had grinned,
or shown one jot of triumph, I would have walked out of the shack and
never spoken to him again. I think he knew he was on terribly perilous
ground. He picked his way with care. He asked me a question back, quite
offhandedly, and for the time being let the matter rest there. But the breach
was in my walls, Matilda Anne, and I was quite defenseless. We were both
very impersonal and very polite, when he came in at supper time, though I
think I turned a visible pink when I sat down at the table, for our eyes met
there, just a moment and no more. I knew he was watching me, covertly, all
the time. And I knew I was making him pretty miserable. But I wasn't the
least bit ashamed of it.
After supper he indifferently announced that he had nothing to do and might
as well help me wash up. I went to hand him a dish-towel. Instead of taking
the towel he took my hand, with the very profane ejaculation, as he did so,
of "Oh, hell, Gee-Gee, what's the use?"
Then before I knew it, he had me in his arms (our butter-dish was broken in
the collision) and I was weak enough to feel sorry for him and his poor
tragic pleading eyes. Then I gave up. If I was silly enough to have a little
cry on his shoulder, I had the satisfaction of feeling him give a gulp or two
himself.

"You're the most wonderful woman in the world!" he solemnly told me, and
then in a much less solemn way he began kissing me again. But the barriers
were down. And how we talked that night! And how different everything
seemed! And how nice it was to feel his arm over my shoulder and his quiet
breathing on the nape of my neck as I fell asleep. It seemed as though Love
were fanning me with its softest wings. I'm happy again. But I've been
wondering if it's environment that makes character, or character that makes
environment. Sometimes I think it's one way, and sometimes I feel it's the
other. But I can't be sure of my answer—yet! It's hard for a spoiled woman
to remember that her life has to be merged into somebody else's life. I've
been wondering if marriage isn't like a two-panel screen, which won't stand
up if both its panels are too much in line. Heaven knows, I want harmony!
But a woman likes to feel that instead of being out of step with her whole
regiment of life it's the regiment that's out of step with her. To-night I
unlaced Dinky-Dunk's shoes, and put on his slippers, and sat on the floor
between his knees with my head against the steady tick-tock of his watch-
pocket. "Dinky-Dunk," I solemnly announced, "that gink called Pope was a
poor guesser. The proper study of man should have been woman!"

Thursday the Seventh

Everything at Casa Grande has settled back into the usual groove. There is a
great deal to do about the shack. The grimmest bug-bear of domestic work
is dish-washing. A pile of greasy plates is the one thing that gets on my
nerves. And it is a little Waterloo that must be faced three times every day,
of every week, of every month, of every year. And I was never properly
"broke" for domesticity and the dish-pan! Why can't some genius invent a
self-washing fry-pan? My hair is growing so long that I can now do it up in
a sort of half-hearted French roll. It has been quite cold, with a wonderful
fall of snow. The sleighing could not be better.

Saturday the Ninth

Dinky-Dunk's Christmas present came to-day, over two weeks late. He had
never mentioned it, and I had not only held my peace, but had given up all
thought of getting a really-truly gift from my lord and master.
They brought it out from Buckhorn, in the bobsleigh, all wrapped up in old
buffalo-robes and blankets and tarpaulins. It's a baby-grand piano, and a
beauty, and it came all the way from Winnipeg. But either the shipping or
the knocking about or the extreme cold has put it terribly out of tune, and it
can't be used until the piano-tuner travels a couple of hundred miles out
here to put it in shape. And it's far too big for the shack, even when pushed
right up into the corner. But Dinky-Dunk says that before next winter
there'll be a different sort of house on this spot where Casa Grande now
stands.
"And that's to keep your soul alive, in the meantime," he announced. I
scolded him for being so extravagant, when he needed every dollar he could
lay his hands on. But he wouldn't listen to me. In fact, it only started an
outburst.
"My God, Gee-Gee," he cried, "haven't you given up enough for me?
Haven't you sacrificed enough in coming out here to the end of nowhere
and leaving behind everything that made life decent?"
"Why, Honey Chile, didn't I get you?" I demanded. But even that didn't stop
him.
"Don't you suppose I ever think what it's meant to you, to a woman like
you? There are certain things we can't have, but there are some things we're
going to have. This next ten or twelve months will be hard, but after that
there's going to be a change—if the Lord's with me, and I have a white
man's luck!"
"And supposing we have bad luck?" I asked him. He was silent for a
moment or two.

"We can always give up, and go back to the city," he finally said.
"Give up!" I said with a whoop. "Give up? Not on your life, Mister Dour
Man! We're not going to be Dixonites! We're going to win out!" And we
were together in a death-clinch, hugging the breath out of each other, when
Olie came in to ask if he hadn't better get the stock stabled, as there was bad
weather coming.

Monday the Eleventh

We are having the first real blizzard of the winter. It began yesterday, as
Olie intimated, and for all the tail-end of the day my Dinky-Dunk was on
the go, in the bitter cold, looking after fuel and feed and getting things ship-
shape, for all the world like a skipper who's read his barometer and seen a
hurricane coming. There had been no wind for a couple of days, only dull
and heavy skies with a disturbing sense of quietness. Even when I heard
Olie and Dinky-Dunk shouting outside, and shoring up the shack-walls with
poles, I could not quite make out what it meant.
Then the blizzard came. It came down out of the northwest, like a
cloudburst. It hummed and sang, and then it whined, and then it screamed,
screamed in a high falsetto that made you think poor old Mother Earth was
in her last throes! The snow was fine and hard, really minute particles of
ice, and not snow at all, as we know it in the East, little sharp-angled
diamond-points that stung the skin like fire. It came in almost horizontal
lines, driving flat across the unbroken prairie and defying anything made of
God or man to stop it. Nothing did stop it. Our shack and the bunk-house
and stables and hay-stacks tore a few pin-feathers off its breast, though; and
those few feathers are drifts higher than my head, heaped up against each
and all of the buildings.
I scratched the frost off a window-pane, where feathery little drifts were
seeping in through the sill-cracks, when it first began. But the wind blew
harder and harder and the shack rocked and shook with the tension. Oh,
such a wind! It made a whining and wailing noise, with each note higher,
and when you felt that it couldn't possibly increase, that it simply must ease
off, or the whole world would go smash, why, that whining note merely
grew tenser and the wind grew stronger. How it lashed things! How it shook
and flailed and trampled this poor old earth of ours! Just before supper Olie
announced that he'd look after my chicks for me. I told him, quite casually,
that I'd attend to them myself. I usually strew a mixture of wheat and oats
on the litter in the hen-house overnight. This had two advantages, one was

that it didn't take me out quite so early in the morning, and the other was
that the chicks themselves started scratching around first thing in the
morning and so got exercise and kept themselves warmer-bodied and in
better health.
It was not essential that I should go to the hen-house myself, but I was
possessed with a sudden desire to face that singing white tornado. So I put
on my things, while Dinky-Dunk was at work in the stables. I put on furs
and leggings and gauntlets and all, as though I were starting for a ninety-
mile drive, and slipped out. Dinky-Dunk had tunneled through the drift in
front of the door, but that tunnel was already beginning to fill again. I
plowed through it, and tried to look about me. Everything was a sort of
streaked misty gray, an all-enveloping muffing leaden maelstrom that hurt
your skin when you lifted your head and tried to look it in the face. Once, in
a lull of the wind when the snow was not so thick, I caught sight of the hay-
stacks. That gave me a line on the hen-house. So I made for it, on the run,
holding my head low as I went.
It was glorious, at first, it made my lungs pump and my blood race and my
legs tingle. Then the storm-devils howled in my eyes and the ice-lashes
snapped in my face. Then the wind went off on a rampage again, and I
couldn't see. I couldn't move forward. I couldn't even breathe. Then I got
frightened.
I leaned there against the wind calling for Dinky-Dunk and Olie, whenever
I could gasp breath enough to make a sound. But I might as well have been
a baby crying in mid-ocean to a Kensington Gardens nurse.
Then I knew I was lost. No one could ever hear me in that roar. And there
was nothing to be seen, just a driving, blinding, stinging gray pall of flying
fury that nettled the naked skin like electric-massage and took the breath
out of your buffeted body. There was no land-mark, no glimpse of any
building, nothing whatever to go by. And I felt so helpless in the face of that
wind! It seemed to take the power of locomotion from my legs. I was not
altogether amazed at the thought that I might die there, within a hundred
yards of my own home, so near those narrow walls within which were
warmth, and shelter, and quietness. I imagined how they'd find my body,
deep under the snow, some morning; how Dinky-Dunk would search,

perhaps for days. I felt so sorry for him I decided not to give up, that I
wouldn't be lost, that I wouldn't die there like a fly on a sheet of tanglefoot!
I had fallen down on my knees, with my back to the wind, and already the
snow had drifted around me. I also found my eye-lashes frozen together,
and I lost several winkers in getting rid of those solidified tears. But I got to
my feet and battled on, calling when I could. I kept on, going round and
round in a circle, I suppose, as people always do when they're lost in a
storm. Then the wind grew worse again. I couldn't make any headway
against it. I had to give up. I simply had to! I wasn't afraid. I wasn't terrified
at the thought of what was happening to me. I was only sorry, with a misty
sort of sorrow I can't explain. And I don't remember that I felt particularly
uncomfortable, except for the fact I found it rather hard to breathe.
It was Olie who found me. He came staggering through the snow with extra
fuel for the bunk-house, and nearly walked over me. As we found out
afterward, I wasn't more than thirty steps away from that bunk-house door.
Olie pulled me up out of the snow the same as you'd pull a skein of darning-
silk out of a work-basket. He half carried me to the bunk-house, got his
bearings, and then steered me for the shack. It was a fight, but we made it.
And Dinky-Dunk was still out looking after his stock and doesn't know how
nearly he lost his Lady Bird. I've made Olie promise not to say a word
about it. But the top of my nose is red and swollen. I think it must have got
a trifle frost-nipped, in the encounter. The weather has cleared now, and the
wind has gone down. But it is very cold, and Dinky-Dunk has just reported
that it's already forty-eight below zero.

Tuesday the Nineteenth

The days slip away and I scarcely know where they go. The weather is
wonderful. Clear and cold, with such heaps of sunshine you'd never dream
it was zero weather. But you have to be careful, and always wear furs when
you're driving, or out for any length of time. Three hours in this open air is
as good as a pint of Chinkie's best champagne. It makes me tingle. We are
living high, with several barrels of frozen game—geese, duck and prairie-
chicken—and also an old tin trunk stuffed full of beef-roasts, cut the right
size. I bring them in and thaw them out overnight, as I need them. The
freezing makes them very tender. But they must be completely thawed
before they go into the oven, or the outside will be overdone and the inside
still raw. I learned that by experience. My appetite is disgraceful, and I'm
still gaining. Chinkie could never again say I reminded him of one of the
lean kine in Pharaoh's dream.
I have been asking Dinky-Dunk if it isn't downright cruelty to leave horses
and cattle out on the range in weather like this. My husband says not, so
long as they have a wind-break in time of storms. The animals paw through
the snow for grass to eat, and when they get thirsty they can eat the snow
itself, which, Dinky-Dunk solemnly assures me, almost never gives them
sore throat! But the open prairie, just at this season, is a most inhospitable
looking pasturage, and the unbroken glare of white makes my eyes ache....
There's one big indoor task I finally have accomplished, and that is tuning
my piano. It made my heart heavy, standing there useless, a gloomy
monument of ironic grandeur.
As a girl I used to watch Katrinka's long-haired Alsatian putting her concert
grand to rights, and I knew that my ear was dependable enough. So the
second day after my baby grand's arrival I went at it with a monkey-wrench.
But that was a failure. Then I made a drawing of a tuning-hammer and had
Olie secretly convey it to the Buckhorn blacksmith, who in turn concocted a
great steel hollow-headed monstrosity which actually fits over the pins to
which the piano wires are strung, even though the aforesaid monstrosity is

heavy enough to stun an ox with. But it did the work, although it took about
two half-days, and now every note is true. So now I have music! And
Dinky-Dunk does enjoy my playing, these long winter evenings. Some
nights we let Olie come in and listen to the concert. He sits rapt, especially
when I play ragtime, which seems the one thing that touches his holy of
holies. Poor Olie! I surely have a good friend in that silent, faithful, uncouth
Swede!
Dinky-Dunk himself is so thin that it worries me. But he eats well and
doesn't anathematize my cooking. He's getting a few gray hairs, at the
temples. I think they make him look rather distingue. But they worry my
poor Dinky-Dunk. "Hully Gee," he said yesterday, studying himself for the
third time in his shaving-glass, "I'm getting old!" He laughed when I started
to whistle "Believe me if all those endearing young charms, which I gaze on
so fondly to-day," but at heart he was really disturbed by the discovery of
those few white hairs. I've been telling him that the ladies won't love him
any more, and that his cut-up days are over. He says I'll have to make up for
the others. So I started for him with my Australian crawl-stroke. It took me
an hour to get the taste of shaving soap out of my mouth. Dinky-Dunk says
I'm so full of life that I sparkle. All I know is that I'm happy, supremely and
ridiculously happy!

Sunday the Thirty-first

The inevitable has happened. I don't know how to write about it! I can't
write about it! My heart goes down like a freight elevator, slowly,
sickeningly, even when I think about it. Dinky-Dunk came in and saw me
studying a little row of dates written on the wall-paper beside the bedroom
window. I pretended to be draping the curtain. "What's the matter, Lady
Bird?" he demanded when he saw my face. I calmly told him that nothing
was the matter. But he wouldn't let me go. I wanted to be alone, to think
things out. But he kept holding me there, with my face to the light. I
suppose I must have been all eyes, and probably shaking a little. And I
didn't want him to suspect.
"Excuse me if I find you unspeakably annoying!" I said in a voice that was
so desperately cold that it even surprised my own ears. He dropped me as
though I had been a hot potato. I could see that I'd hurt him, and hurt him a
lot. My first impulse was to run to him with a shower of repentant kisses, as
one usually does, the same as one sprinkles salt on claret stains. But in him
I beheld the original and entire cause—and I just couldn't do it. He called
me a high-spirited devil with a hair-trigger temper. But he left me alone to
think things out.

Tuesday the Ninth

I've started to say my prayers again. It rather frightened Dinky-Dunk, who
sat up in bed and asked me if I wasn't feeling well. I promptly assured him
that I was in the best of health. He not only agreed with me, but said I was
as plump as a partridge. When I am alone, though, I get frightened and
fidgety. So I kneel down every night and morning now and ask God for help
and guidance. I want to be a good woman and a better wife. But I shall
never let Duncan know—never!

Wednesday the Seventeenth

Do you remember Aunt Harriet who always wept when she read The Isles
of Greece? She didn't even know where they were, and had never been east
of Salem. But all the Woodberrys were like that. Dinky-Dunk came in and
found me crying to-day, for the second time in one week. He made such
valiantly ponderous efforts to cheer me up, poor boy, and shook his head
and said I'd soon be an improvement on the Snider System, which is a
system of irrigation by spraying overnight from pipes! My nerves don't
seem so good as they were. The winter's so long. I'm already counting the
days to spring.

Thursday the Twenty-fifth

Dinky-Dunk has concluded that I'm too much alone; he's been worrying
over it. I can tell that. I try not to be moody, but sometimes I simply can't
help it. Yesterday afternoon he drove up to Casa Grande, proud as Punch,
with a little black and white kitten in the crook of his arm. He'd covered
twenty-eight miles of trail for that kitten! It's to be my companion. But the
kitten's as lonesome as I am, and has been crying, and nearly driving me
crazy.

Tuesday the Second

The weather has been bad, but winter is slipping away. Dinky-Dunk has
been staying in from his work, these mornings, helping me about the house.
He is clumsy and slow, and has broken two or three of the dishes. But I hate
to say anything; his eyes get so tragic. He declares that as soon as the trails
are passable he's going to have a woman to help me, that this sort of thing
can't go on any longer. He imagines it's merely the monotony of housework
that is making my nerves so bad.
Yesterday morning I was drying the dishes and Dinky-Dunk was washing. I
found the second spoon with egg on it. I don't know why it was, but that
trivial streak of yellow along the edge of a spoon suddenly seemed to
enrage me. It became monumental, an emblem of vague incapabilities
which I would have to face until the end of my days. I flung that spoon back
in the dish-pan. Then I turned on my husband and called out to him, in a
voice that didn't quite seem like my own, "O God, can't you wash 'em
clean? Can't you wash 'em clean?" I even think I ran up and down the room
and pretty well made what Percival Benson would call "a bally ass" of
myself. Dinky-Dunk didn't even answer me. But he dried his hands and got
his things and went outdoors, to the stables, I suppose. His face was as
colorless as it could possibly get. I felt sorry; but it was too late. And my
sniffling didn't do any good. And it startled me, as I sat thinking things over,
to realize that I'd lost my sense of humor.

Thursday the Fourth

Dinky-Dunk thinks I'm mad. I'm quite sure he does. He came in at noon to-
day and found me on the floor with the kitten. I'd tied a piece of fur to the
end of a string. Oh, how that kitten scrambled after that fur, round and
round in a circle until he'd tumble over on his own ears! I was squeaking
and weak with laughing when Dinky-Dunk stood in the door. Poor boy, he
takes things so solemnly! But I know he thinks I'm quite mad. Perhaps I am.
I cried myself to sleep last night. And for several days now I've had a
longing for caviare.

Wednesday the Seventeenth

Spring is surely coming. It promises to be an early one. I feel better at the
thought of it, and of getting out again. But the roads are quite impassable.
Such mud! Such oceans of glue-pot dirt! They have a saying out here that
soil is as rich as it is sticky. If this is true Dinky-Dunk has a second Garden
of Eden. This mud sticks to everything, to feet, to clothes, to wagon-wheels.
But there's getting to be real warmth in the sun that shines through my
window.

Saturday the Twenty-seventh

A warm Chinook has licked up the last of the snow. Even Dinky-Dunk
admits that spring is coming. For three solid hours an awakened blue-bottle
has been buzzing against the pane of my bedroom window. I wonder if
most of us aren't like that fly, mystified by the illusion of light that fails to
lead to liberty? This morning I caught sight of Dinky-Dunk in his fur coat,
climbing into the buckboard. I shall always hate to see him in that rig. It
makes me think of a certain night. And we hate to have memory put a finger
on our mental scars. When I was a girl Aunt Charlotte's second fiend of a
husband locked me up in that lonely Derby house of theirs because I threw
pebbles at the swans. Then off they drove to dinner somewhere and left me
a prisoner there, where I sat listening to the bells of All Saints as the house
gradually grew dark. And ever since then bells at evening have made me
feel lonely and left me unhappy.
But the renaissance of the buckboard means that spring is here again. And
for my Dinky-Dunk that means harder work. He's what they call a "rustler"
out here. He believes in speed. He doesn't even wait until the frost is out of
the ground before he starts to seed—just puts a drill over a two-inch batter
of thawed-out mud, he's so mad about getting early on the land. He says he
wants early wheat or no wheat. But he has to have help, and men are almost
impossible to get. He had hoped for a gasoline tractor, but it can't be
financed this spring, he has confessed to me. And I know, in my secret heart
of hearts, that the tractor would have been here if it hadn't been for my
piano!
There are still hundreds and hundreds of acres of prairie sod to "break" for
spring wheat. Dinky-Dunk declares that he's going to risk everything on
wheat this year. He says that by working two outfits of horses he himself
can sow forty acres a day, but that means keeping the horses on the trot part
of the time. He is thinking so much about his crop that I accused him of
neglecting me.

"Is the varnish starting to wear off?" I inquired with a secret gulp of
womanish self-pity. He saved the day by declaring I was just as crazy and
just as adorable as I ever was. Then he asked me, rather sadly, if I was
bored. "Bored?" I said, "how could I be bored with all these discomforts?
No one is ever bored until they are comfortable!" But the moment after I'd
said it I was sorry.

Tuesday the Sixth

Spring is here, with a warm Chinook creeping in from the Rockies and a
sky of robin-egg blue. The gophers have come out of their winter quarters
and are chattering and racing about. We saw a phalanx of wild geese going
northward, and Dinky-Dunk says he's seen any number of ducks. They go
in drifting V's, and I love to watch them melt in the sky-line. The prairie
floor is turning to the loveliest of greens, and it is a joy just to be alive. I
have been out all afternoon. The gophers aren't going to get ahead of me!

Monday the Twelfth

What would you say if you saw Brunhild drive up to your back door? What
would you do if you discovered a Norse goddess placidly surveying you
from a green wagon-seat? How would you act if you beheld a big blonde
Valkyr suddenly introducing herself into your little earthly affairs?
Well, can you wonder that I stared, all eyes, when Dinky-Dunk brought
home a figure like this, in the shape of a Finn girl named Olga Sarristo?
Olga is to work in the fields, and to help me when she has time. But I'll
never get used to having a Norse Legend standing at my elbow, for Olga is
the most wonderful creature I have ever clapped eyes on. I say that without
doubt, and without exaggeration. And what made the picture complete, she
came driving a yoke of oxen—for Dinky-Dunk will have need of every
horse and hauling animal he can lay his hands on. I simply held my breath
as I stared up at her, high on her wagon-seat, blocked out in silhouette
against the pale sky-line, a Brunhild with cowhide boots on. She wore a
pale blue petticoat and a Swedish looking black shawl with bright-colored
flowers worked along the hem. She had no hat. But she had two great ropes
of pale gold hair, almost as thick as my arm, and hanging almost as low as
her knees. She looked colossal up on the wagon-seat, but when she got
down on the ground she was not so immense. She is, however, a strapping
big woman, and I don't think I ever saw such shoulders! She is Olympian,
Titanic! She makes me think of the Venus de Milo; there's such a largeness
and calmness and smoothness of surface about her. I suppose a Saint-
Gaudens might say that her mouth was too big and a Gibson might add that
her nose hadn't the narrow rectitude of a Greek statue's, but she's a
beautiful, a beautiful—"woman" was the word I was going to write, but the
word "animal" just bunts and shoves itself in, like a stabled cow insisting on
its own stall. But if you regard her as only animal, you must at least accept
her as a perfect one. Her mouth is large, but I never saw such red lips, full
and red and dewy. Her forehead is low and square, but milky smooth, and I
know she could crack a chicken-bone between those white teeth of hers.
Even her tongue, I noticed, is a watermelon red. She must be healthy.

Dinky-Dunk says she's a find, that she can drive a double-seeder as well as
any man in the West, and that by taking her for the season he gets the use of
the ox-team as well. He warned me not to ask her about her family, as only
a few weeks ago her father and younger brother were burned to death in
their shack, a hundred miles or so north of us.

Tuesday the Twentieth

Olga has been with us a week, and she still fascinates me. She is installed in
the annex, and seems calmly satisfied with her surroundings. She brought
everything she owns tied up in an oat-sack. I have given her a few of my
things, for which she seems dumbly grateful. She seldom talks, and never
laughs. But I am teaching her to say "yes" instead of "yaw." She studies me
with her limpid blue eyes, and if she is silent she is never sullen. She hasn't
the heavy forehead and jaw of the Galician women and she hasn't the
Asiatic cast of face that belongs to the Russian peasant. And she has the
finest mouthful of teeth I ever saw in a human head—and she never used a
toothbrush in her life! She is only nineteen, but such a bosom, such limbs,
such strength!
This is a great deal of talk about Olga, I'm afraid, but you must remember
that Olga is an event. I expected Olie would be keeled over by her arrival,
but they seem to regard each other with silent contempt. I suppose that is
because racially and physically they are of the same type. I'm anxious to see
what Percival Benson thinks of Olga when he gets back—they would be
such opposites. Olga is working with her ox-team on the land. Two days
ago I rode out on Paddy and watched her. There was something Homeric
about it, something Sorolla would have jumped at. She seemed so like her
oxen. She moved like them, and her eyes were like theirs. She has the same
strength and solemnity when she walks. She's so primitive and natural and
instinctive in her actions. Yesterday, after dinner, she curled up on a pile of
hay at one end of the corral and fell asleep for a few minutes, flat in the
strong noonday light. I saw Dinky-Dunk stop on his way to the stable and
stand and look down at her. I slipped out beside him. "God, what a
woman!" he said under his breath. A vague stab of jealousy went through
me as I heard him say that. Then I looked at her hand, large, relaxed,
roughened with all kinds of weather and calloused with heavy work. And
this time it was an equally vague stab of pity that went through me.

Monday the Twenty-sixth

The rush is on, and Dinky-Dunk is always out before six. If it's true, as
some one once said, that the pleasures of life depended on its anxieties, then
we ought to be a hilarious household. Every one is busy, and I do what I can
to help. I don't know why it is, but I find an odd comfort in the thought of
having another woman near me, even Olga. She also helps me a great deal
with the housework. Those huge hands of hers have a dexterity you'd never
dream of. She thinks the piano a sort of miracle, and me a second miracle
for being able to play it. In the evening she sits back in a corner, the darkest
corner she can find, and listens. She never speaks, never moves, never
expresses one iota of emotion. But in the gloom I can often catch the
animal-like glow of her eyes. They seem almost phosphorescent. Dinky-
Dunk had a long letter from Percival Benson to-day. It was interesting and
offhandedly jolly and just the right sort. And Percy says he'll be back on the
Titchborne place in a few weeks.

Wednesday the Twenty-eighth

Olga went through the boards of her wagon-box and got a bad scrape on her
leg. She showed me the extent of her injuries, without the slightest
hesitation, and I gave her first-aid treatment with my carbolated vaseline.
And still again I had to think of the Venus de Milo, for it was a knee like a
statue's, milky white and round and smooth, with a skin like a baby's, and
so different to her sunburnt forearms. It was Olympian more than Fifth-
Avenuey. It was a leg that made me think, not of Rubens, but of Titian, and
my thoughts at once went out to the right-hand lady of the "Sacred and
Profane Love," in the Borghese, there was such softness and roundness
combined with its strength. And Dinky-Dunk walked in and stood staring at
it, himself, with never so much as a word of apology. Olga looked up at him
without a flicker of her ox-like eyes. It wasn't until I made an angry motion
for her to drop her skirt that she realized any necessity for covering the
Titian knee. But again I felt that odd pang of jealousy needle through me as
I saw his face. At least I suppose it was jealousy, the jealousy of an artful
little Mona-Lisa minx who didn't even class in with the demigods. When
Olga was gone, however, I said to Dinky-Dunk: "Isn't that a limb for your
life?"
He merely said: "We don't grow limbs up here, Tabby. They're legs, just
plain legs!"
"Anything but plain!" I corrected him. Then he acknowledged that he'd seen
those knees before. He'd stumbled on Olga and her brother knee-deep in
mud and cow manure, treading a mixture to plaster their shack with, the
same as the Doukhobors do. It left me less envious of those Junoesque
knees.

Monday the Second

Keeping chickens is a much more complicated thing than the outsider
imagines. For example, several of my best hens, quite untouched by the
modern spirit of feminine unrest, have been developing "broodiness" and I
have been trying to "break them up," as the poulterers put it. But they are
determined to set. This mothering instinct is a fine enough thing in its way,
but it's been spoiling too many good eggs. So I've been trying to emancipate
these ruffled females. I lift them off the nest by the tail feathers, ten times a
day. I fling cold water in their solemn maternal faces. I put little rings of
barb-wire under their sentimental old bosoms. But still they set. And one,
having pecked me on the wrist until the blood came, got her ears promptly
boxed—in face of the fact that all poultry keepers acknowledge that
kindness to a hen improves her laying qualities.

Thursday the Fifth

Casa Grande is a beehive of industry. Every one has a part to play. I am no
longer expected to sit by the fire and purr. At nights I sew. Dinky-Dunk is
so hard on his clothes! When it's not putting on patches it's sewing on
buttons. Then we go to bed at half-past nine. At half-past nine, think of it!
Little me, who more than once went humming up Fifth Avenue when
morning was showing gray over the East River, and often left Sherry's (oh,
those dear old dancing days!) when the milk wagons were rumbling through
Forty-fourth Street, and once triumphantly announced, on coming out of
Dorlon's and studying the old Oyster-Letter clock, that I'd stuck it out to Y
minutes past O! But it's no hardship to get up at five, these glorious
mornings. The days get longer, and the weather is perfect. And the prairie
looks as though a vacuum cleaner had been at work on it overnight.
Positively, there's a charwoman who does this old world over, while we
sleep! By morning it's as bright as a new pin. And out here every one is
thinking of the day ahead; Dinky-Dunk, of his crop; Olga, of the pair of
sky-blue corsets I've written to the Winnipeg mail-order house for; Olie, of
the final waterproofing of the granaries so the wheat won't get spoilt any
more; Gee-Gee, herself, of—of something which she's almost afraid to
think about.
Dinky-Dunk, in his deviling moods, says I'm an old married woman now,
that I'm settled, that I've eaten my pie! Perhaps I have. I'm not imaginative,
so I must depend on others for my joy of living. I know now that I can
never create, never really express myself in any way worth while, either on
paper or canvas or keyboard. And people without imagination, I suppose,
simply have to drop back to racial simplicities—which means I'll have to
have a family, and feed hungry mouths, and keep a home going. And I'll
have to get all my art at second-hand, from magazines and gramophone
records and plaster-of-Paris casts. Just a housewife! And I so wanted to be
something more, once! Yet I wonder if, after all, the one is so much better
than the other? I wonder? And here comes my Dinky-Dunk, and in three
minutes he'll be kissing me on the tip of the chin and asking me what there's

going to be good for supper! And that is better than fame! For all afternoon
those twelve little lines of Dobson's have been running through my head:

Fame is a food that dead men eat—
I have no stomach for such meat.
In little light and narrow rooms,
They eat it in the silent tombs,
With no kind voice of comrade near
To bid the banquet be of cheer.

But Friendship is a noble thing—
Of Friendship it is good to sing,
For truly when a man shall end,
He lives in memory of his friend
Who doth his better part recall
And of his faults make funeral!

But when you put the word "love" there instead of "friendship" you make it
even better.... Olga, by the way, is not so stupid as you might imagine. She's
discovered something which I didn't intend her to find out.... And Olie, also
by the way, has solved the problem of "breaking up" my setting hens. He
has made a swinging coop with a wire netting bottom, for all the world like
the hanging gardens of Babylon, and into this all the ruffled mothers-to-be
have been thrust and the coop hung up on the hen-house wall. Open wire is
a very uncomfortable thing to set on, and these hens have at last discovered
that fact. I have been out looking at them. I never saw such a parliament of
solemn indignation. But their pride has been broken, and they are beginning
to show a healthier interest in their meals.

Tuesday the Tenth

I've been wondering if Dinky-Dunk is going to fall in love with Olga.
Yesterday I saw him staring at her neck. She's the type of woman that
would really make the right sort of wilderness wife. She seems an integral
part of the prairie, broad-bosomed, fecund, opulent. And she's so placid and
large and soft-spoken and easy to live with. She has none of my moods and
tantrums.
Her corsets came to-day, and I showed her how to put them on. She is
incontinently proud of them, but in my judgment they only make her
ridiculous. It's as foolish as putting a French toque on one of her oxen. The
skin of Olga's great shoulders is as smooth and creamy as a baby's. I have
been watching her eyes. They are not a dark blue, but in a strong side-light
they seem deep wells of light, layer on layer of azure. And she is mysterious
to me, calmly and magnificently inscrutable. And I once thought her an
uncouth animal. But she is a great help. She has planted rows and rows of
sweet peas all about Casa Grande and is starting to make a kitchen garden,
which she's going to fence off and look after with her own hands. It will be
twice the size of Olie's. But I do hope she doesn't ever grow into something
mysterious to my Dinky-Dunk. This morning she said I ought to work in the
garden, that the more I kept on my feet the better it would be for me later
on.
As for Dinky-Dunk, the poor boy is working himself gaunt. Yet tired as he
is, he tries to read a few pages of something worth while every night.
Sometimes we take turns in reading. Last night he handed me over his
volume of Spencer with a pencil mark along one passage. This passage
said: "Intellectual activity in women is liable to be diminished after
marriage by that antagonism between individuation and reproduction
everywhere operative throughout the organic world." I don't know why, but
that passage made me as hot as a hornet. In the background of my brain I
carried some vague memory of George Eliot once catching this same
philosophizing Spencer fishing with a composite fly, and, remarking on his

passion for generalizations, declaring that he even fished with a
generalization. So I could afford to laugh. "Spencer's idea of a tragedy," I
told Dinky-Dunk, "is a deduction killed by a fact!" And again I smiled my
Mona-Lisa smile. "And I'm going to be one of the facts!" I proudly
proclaimed.
Dinky-Dunk, after thinking this over, broke into a laugh. "You know, Gee-
Gee," he solemnly announced, "there are times when you seem almost
clever!" But I wasn't clever in this case, for it was hours later before I saw
the trap which Dinky-Dunk had laid for me!

Monday the Sixteenth

All day Saturday Olga and Dinky-Dunk were off in the chuck-wagon,
working too far away to come home for dinner. The thought of them being
out there, side by side, hung over me like a cloud. I remembered how he
had absently stared at the white column of her neck. And I pictured him
stopping in his work and studying her faded blue cotton waist pulled tight
across the line of that opulent bust. What man wouldn't be impressed by
such bodily magnificence, such lavish and undulating youth and strength?
And there's something so soft and diffused about those ox-like eyes of hers!
You do not think, then, of her eyes being such a pale blue, any more than
you could stop to accuse summer moonlight of not being ruddy. And those
unruffled blue eyes never seem to see you; they rather seem to bathe you in
a gaze as soft and impersonal as moonlight itself.
I simply couldn't stand it any more. I got on Paddy and galloped out for my
Dinky-Dunk, as though it were my sudden and solemn duty to save him
from some imminent and awful catastrophe.
I stopped on the way, to watch a couple of prairie-chickens minuetting
through the turns of their vernal courtships. The pompous little beggars with
puffed-out wattles and neck ruffs were positively doing cancans and two-
steps along the prairie floor. Love was in the air, that perfect spring
afternoon, even for the animal world. So instead of riding openly and
honestly up to Dinky-Dunk and Olga, I kept under cover as much as I could
and stalked them, as though I had been a timber wolf.
Then I felt thoroughly and unspeakably ashamed of myself, for I caught
sight of Olga high on her wagon, like a Valkyr on a cloud, and Dinky-Dunk
hard at work a good two miles away.
He was a little startled to see me come cantering up on Paddy. I don't know
whether it was silly or not, but I told him straight out what had brought me.
He hugged me like a bear and then sat down on the prairie and laughed.
"With that cow?" he cried. And I'm sure no man could ever call the woman

he loves a cow.... I believe Dinky-Dunk suspects something. He's just asked
me to be more careful about riding Paddy. And he's been more solemnly
kind, lately. But I'll never tell him—never—never!

Tuesday the Twenty-fourth

Percy will be back to-morrow. It will be a different looking country to what
it was when he left. I've been staring up at a cobalt sky, and begin to
understand why people used to think Heaven was somewhere up in the
midst of such celestial blue. And on the prairie the sky is your first and last
friend. Wasn't it Emerson who somewhere said that the firmament was the
daily bread for one's eyes? And oh, the lovely, greening floor of the wheat
country now! Such a soft yellow-green glory stretching so far in every
direction, growing so much deeper day by day! And the sun and space and
clear light on the sky-line and the pillars of smoke miles away and the
wonderful, mysterious promise that is hanging over this teeming, steaming,
shimmering, abundant broad bosom of earth! It thrills me in a way I can't
explain. By night and day, before breakfast and after supper, the talk is of
wheat, wheat, wheat, until I nearly go crazy. I complained to Dinky-Dunk
that he was dreaming wheat, living wheat, breathing wheat, that he and all
the rest of the world seemed mad about wheat.
"And there's just one other thing you must remember, Lady Bird," was his
answer. "All the rest of the world is eating wheat. It can't live without
wheat. And I'd rather be growing the bread that feeds the hungry than
getting rich making cordite and Krupp guns!" So he's risking everything on
this crop of his, and is eternally figuring and planning and getting ready for
the grande débâcle. He says it will be like a battle. And no general goes into
a battle without being prepared for it. But when we read about the doings of
the outside world, it seems like reading of happenings that have taken place
on the planet Mars. We're our own little world just now, self-contained,
rounded-out, complete.

Friday the Third

Two things of vast importance have happened. Dinky-Dunk has packed up
and made off to Edmonton to interview some railway officials, and Percy is
back. Dinky-Dunk is so mysteriously silent as to the matter of his trip that
I'm afraid he is worried about money matters. And he asked me if I'd mind
keeping the household expenses down as low as I could, without actual
hardship, for the next few months.
As for Percy, he seemed a little constrained, but looked ever so much better.
He is quite sunburned, likes California and says we ought to have a winter
bungalow there (and Dinky-Dunk just warning me to save on the pantry
pennies!) He's brought a fastidious little old English woman back with him
as a housekeeper, a Mrs. Watson, and she looks both capable and practical.
Notwithstanding the fact that she seems to have stepped right out of
Dickens, and carries a huge Manx cat about with her, Percy said he thought
they'd muddle along in some way. Thoughtful boy that he was, he brought
me a portmanteau packed full of the newer novels and magazines, and a
two-pound jar of smoking tobacco for Dinky-Dunk.

Thursday the Ninth

A Belasco couldn't have more carefully stage-managed the first meeting
between Percy and Olga. I felt that she was my discovery, and I wanted to
spring her on him, at the right moment, and in the right way. I wanted to get
the Valkyr on a cloud effect. So I kept Percy in the house on the pretext of
giving him a cup of tea, until I should hear the rumble of the wagon and
know that Olga was swinging home with her team. It so happened, when I
heard the first faint far thunder of that homing wagon, that Percy was sitting
in my easy chair, with a cup of my thinnest china in one hand and a copy of
Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean in the other. We had been speaking of
climate, and he wanted to look up the passage where Pater said, "one
always dies of the cold"—which I consider a slur on the Northwest!
I couldn't help realizing, as I sat staring at Percy, at the thin, over-sensitive
face, and the high-arched, over-refined nose, and the narrow, stooping,
over-delicate shoulders, what a direct opposite he was to Olga, in every
way. Instead of thin china and Pater in her hand at that very moment, I
remembered she'd probably have a four-tined fork or a mud-stained fence
stretcher.
I went to the door and looked out. At the proper moment I called Percy.
Olga was standing up in the wagon-box, swinging about one corner of the
corral. She stood with her shoulders well back, for her weight was already
on the lines, to pull the team up. Her loose blue skirt edge was fluttering in
the wind, but at the front was held tight against her legs, like the drapery of
the Peace figure in the Sherman statue in the Plaza. Across that Artemis-like
bosom her thin waist was stretched tight. She had no hat on, and her pale
gold hair, which had been braided and twisted up into a heavy crown, had
the sheen of metal on it, in the later afternoon sun. And in that clear glow of
light, which so often plays mirage-like tricks with vision, she loomed up
like a demi-god, or a she-Mercury who ought to have had little bicycle
wheels attached to her heels.

Percy is never demonstrative. But I could see that he was more than
impressed. He was amazed.
"My word!" he said very quietly.
"What does she make you think of?" I demanded.
Percy put down his teacup.
"Don't go away," I commanded, "but tell me what she makes you think of."
He still stood staring at her with puckered up eyes.
"She's like band-music going by!" he proclaimed. "No, she's more than that;
she's Wagner on wheels," he finally said. "No, not that! A Norse myth in
dimity!"
I told him it wasn't dimity, but he was too interested in Olga to listen to me.
Half an hour later, when she met him, she was very shy. She turned an
adorable pink, and then calmly rebuttoned the two top buttons of her waist,
which had been hanging loose. And I noticed that Percy did precisely what I
saw Dinky-Dunk once doing. He sat staring absently yet studiously at the
milky white column of Olga's neck! And I had to speak to him twice, before
he even woke up to the fact that he was being addressed by his hostess.

Wednesday the Fifteenth

Dinky-Dunk is back, and very busy again. During the day I scarcely get a
glimpse of him, except at meal-times. I have a steadily growing sense of
being neglected, but I know how a worried man hates petulance. The really
important thing is that Percy is giving Olga lessons in reading and writing.
For, although a Finn, she is a Canadian Finn from almost the shadow of the
sub-Arctics, and has had little chance for education. But her mind is not
obtuse.
Yesterday I asked Olga what she thought of Percival Benson. "Ah lak
heem," she calmly admitted in her majestic, monosyllabic way. "He is a
fonny leetle man." And the "fonny leetle man" who isn't really little, seems
to like Olga, odd as it may sound. They are such opposites, such
contradictions! Percy says she's Homeric. He says he never saw eyes that
were so limpid, or such pools of peace and calm. He insists on the fact that
she's essentially maternal, as maternal as the soil over which she walks, as
Percy put it. I told him what Dinky-Dunk had once told me, about Olga
killing a bull. The bull was a vicious brute that had attacked her father and
knocked him down. He was striking at the fallen man with his fore-paws
when Olga heard his cries. She promptly came for that bull with a pitchfork.
And speaking of Homer, it must have been a pretty epical battle, for she
killed the bull and left the fork-tines eight inches in his body while she
picked up her father and carried him back to the house. And I won't even
kill my own hens, but have always appointed Olie as the executioner.

Friday the Seventeenth

It is funny to see Percy teaching Olga. She watches him as though he were a
miracle man. Her dewy red lips form the words slowly, and the full white
throat utters them largely, laboriously, instruments on them, and in some
perhaps uncouth way makes them lovely. I sit with my sewing, listening.
Sometimes I open the piano and play. But I feel out of it. I seem to be on
the fringe of things that are momentous only to other people. Last night,
when Percy said he thought he'd sell his ranch, Dinky-Dunk looked up from
his paper-littered desk and told him to hang on to that land like a leech. But
he didn't explain why.

Saturday the Nineteenth

I can't even remember the date. But I know that midsummer is here, that the
men folks are so busy I have to shift for myself, and that the talk is still of
wheat, and how it's heading, and how the dry weather of the last few weeks
will affect the length of the straw. Dinky-Dunk is making desperate efforts
to get men to cut wild-hay. He's bought the hay rights of a large stretch
between some sloughs about seven miles east of our place. He says men are
scarcer than hen's teeth, but has the promise of a couple of cutthroats who
were thrown off a freight-train near Buckhorn. Percy volunteered to help,
and was convinced of the fact that he could drive a mower. Olie, who
nurses a vast contempt for Percy, and, I secretly believe, rather resents his
attentions to Olga, put the new team of colts on the mower. They promptly
ran away with Percy, who came within an ace of being thrown in front of
the mower-knife, which would have chopped him up into very unscholarly
mincemeat. Olga got on a horse, bareback, and rounded up the colts. Then
she cooed about poor bruised Percy and tried to coax him to come to the
house. But Percy said he was going to drive that team, even if he had to be
strapped to the mower-seat. And, oddly enough, he did "gat them beat," as
Olga expressed it, but it tired him out and wilted his collar and the sweat
was running down his face when he came in at noon. Olga is very proud of
him. But she announced that she'd drive that mower herself, and sailed into
Olie for giving a tenderfoot a team like that to drive. It was her first
outburst. I couldn't understand a word she said, but I know that she was
magnificent. She looked like a statue of Justice that had suddenly jumped
off its pedestal and was doing its best to put a Daniel Webster out of
business!

Friday the Twenty-eighth

The weather is still very dry. But Dinky-Dunk feels sure it will not affect
his crop. He says the filaments of a wheat-plant will go almost two feet
deep in search for moisture. Yesterday Percy appeared in a flannel shirt, and
without his glasses. I think he is secretly practising calisthenics. He said he
was going to cut out this afternoon tea, because it doesn't seem to fit in with
prairie life. I fancy I see the re-barbarianizing influence of Olga at work on
Percival Benson Woodhouse. Either Dinky-Dunk or Olie, I find, has hidden
my saddle!

Saturday the Twenty-ninth

To-day has been one of the hottest days of the year. It may be good for the
wheat, but I can't say that it seems good for me. All day long I've been
fretting for far-away things, for foolish and impossible things. I tried
reading Keats, but that only made me worse than ever. I've been longing for
a glimpse of the Luxembourg Gardens in spring, with all the horse-
chestnuts in bloom. I've been wondering how lovely it would be to drift into
the Blue Grotto at Capri and see the azure sea-water drip from the trailing
boat-oars. I've been burning with a hunger to see a New England orchard in
the slanting afternoon sunlight of an early June afternoon. The hot white
light of this open country makes my eyes ache and seems to dry my soul up.
I can't help thinking of cool green shadows, and musky little valleys of
gloom with a brook purling over mossy stones. I long for the solemn
greenery of great elms, aisles and aisles of cathedral-like gloom and leaf-
filtered sunlight. I'd love to hear an English cuckoo again, and feel the soft
mild sea-air that blows up through Louis's dear little Devonshire garden.
But what's the use!
I went to the piano and pounded out Kennst Du Das Land with all my soul,
and I imagine it did me good. It at least bombarded the silence out of Casa
Grande. The noise of life is so far away from you on the prairie! It is not
utterly silent, just that dreamy and disembodied sigh of wind and grass
against which a human call targets like a leaden bullet against metal. It is
almost worse than silence.

Sunday the Thirtieth

My mood is over. Early, early this morning I slipped out of bed and
watched day break. I saw the first faint orange rim along the limitless sky-
line, and then the pearly pink above it, and all the sweet dimness and
softness and mystery of God's hand pulling the curtains of morning apart.
And then the rioting orchestras of color struck up, and I leaned out of the
window bathed in glory as the golden disk of the sun showed over the dewy
prairie-edge. Oh, the grandeur of it! And oh, the God-given freshness of that
pellucid air! I love my land! I love it!

Tuesday the First

I have married a man! My Dinky-Dunk is not a softy. I had that proved to
me yesterday, when I put Paddy in the buckboard and drove out to where
the men were working in the hay. I was taking their dinner out to them,
neatly packed in the chuck-box. One of the new men, who'd been hired for
the rush, had been overworking his team. The brute had been prodding them
with a pitchfork, instead of using a whip. Dinky-Dunk saw the marks, and
noticed one of the horses bleeding. But he didn't interfere until he caught
the man in the act of jabbing the tines into Maid Marian's flank. Then he
jumped for him, just as I drove up. He cursed that man, cursed and damned
him most dreadfully and pulled him down off the hay-rack. Then they
fought.
They fought like two wildcats. Dinky-Dunk's nose bled and his lip was cut.
But he knocked the other man flat, and when he tried to get up he knocked
him again. It seemed cruel; it was revolting. But something in me rejoiced
and exulted as I saw that hulk of an animal thresh and stagger about the
hay-stubble. I tried to wipe the blood away from Dinky-Dunk's nose. But he
pushed me back and said this was no place for a woman. I had no place in
his universe, at that particular time. But Dinky-Dunk can fight, if he has to.
He's sa magerful a mon! He's afraid of nothing.
But that was nearly a costly victory. Both the new men of course threw up
their jobs, then and there. Dinky-Dunk paid them off, on the spot, and they
started off across the open prairie, without even waiting for their meal.
Dinky-Dunk, as we sat down on the dry grass and ate together, said it was a
good riddance, and he was just saying I could only have the left-hand side
of his mouth to kiss for the next week when he suddenly dropped his piece
of custard-pie, stood up and stared toward the east. I did the same,
wondering what had happened.
I could see a long thin slanting column of smoke driving across the hot
noonday air. Then my heart stopped beating. It was the prairie on fire.

I had heard a great deal about fire-guards and fire-guarding, three rows
about crops and ten about buildings; and I knew that Olie hadn't yet finished
turning all those essential furrows. And if that column of smoke, which was
swinging up through the silvery haze where the indigo vault of heaven
melted into the dusty whiteness of the parched grasslands, had come from
the mouth of a siege-gun which was cannonading us where we stood, it
couldn't have more completely chilled my blood. For I knew that east wind
would carry the line of fire crackling across the prairie floor to Dinky-
Dunk's wheat, to the stables and out-buildings, to Casa Grande itself, and all
our scheming and planning and toiling and moiling would go up in one
yellow puff of smoke. And once under way, nothing could stop that
widening river of flame.
It was Dinky-Dunk who jumped to life as though he had indeed been
cannonaded. In one bound he was at the buckboard and was snatching out
the horse-blanket that lay folded up under the seat. Then he unsnapped the
reins from Paddy's bridle, snapping them on the blanket, one to the buckle
and the other to the strap-end. In another minute he had the hobble off
Paddy and had swung me up on that astonished pinto's back. The next
minute he himself was on Maid Marian, poking one end of the long rein
into my hand and telling me to keep up with him.
We rode like mad. I scarcely understood what it meant, at the time, but I at
least kept up with him. We went floundering through one end of a slough
until the blanket was wet and heavy and I could hardly hold it. But I hung
on for dear life. Then we swung off across the dry grass toward that
advancing semicircle of fire, as far apart as the taut reins would let us ride.
Dinky-Dunk took the windward side. Then on we rushed, along that
wavering frontier of flame, neck to neck, dragging the wet blanket along its
orange-tinted crest, flattening it down and wiping it out as we went. We
made the full circle, panting; saw where the flames had broken out again,
and swung back with our dragging blanket. But when one side was
conquered another side would revive, and off we'd have to go again, until
my arm felt as though it were going to be pulled out of its socket.
But we won that fight, in the end. I slipped down off Paddy's back and lay
full length on the sod, weak, shaking, wondering why the solid ground was

rocking slowly from side to side like a boat. But Dinky-Dunk didn't even
observe me. He was fighting out the last patch of fire, on foot.
When he came over to where I was waiting for him he was as sooty and
black as a boiler-maker. He dropped down beside me, breathing hard. We
sat there holding each other's hand, for several minutes, in utter silence.
Then he said, rather thickly: "Are you all right?" And I told him that of
course I was all right. Then he said, without looking at me, "I forgot!" Then
he got Paddy and patched up the harness and took me home in the
buckboard.
But all the rest of the day he hung about the shack, as solemn as an owl.
And once in the night he got up and lighted the lamp and came over and
studied my face. I blinked up at him sleepily, for I was dog-tired and had
been dreaming that we were back in Paris at the Bal des Quatz Arts and
were about to finish up with an early breakfast at the Madrid. He looked so
funny with his rumpled up hair and his faded pajamas that I couldn't help
laughing a little as he blew out the light and got back into bed.
"Dinky-Dunk," I said, as I turned over my pillow and got comfy again,
"wouldn't it have been hell if all our wheat had been burned up?" I forget
what Duncan said, for in two minutes I was asleep again.

Monday the Seventh

The dry spell has been broken, and broken with a vengeance. One gets
pretty well used to high winds, in the West. There used to be days at a time
when that unending high wind would make me think something was going
to happen, filling me with a vague sense of impending calamity and making
me imagine a big storm was going to blow up and wipe Casa Grande and its
little coterie off the map. But we've had a real wind-storm, this time, with
rain and hail. Dinky-Dunk's wheat looks sadly draggled out and beaten
down, but he says there wasn't enough hail to hurt anything; that the straw
will straighten up again, and that this downpour was just what he wanted.
Early in the afternoon, on looking out the shack door, I saw a tangle of
clouds on the sky-line. They seemed twisted up like a skein of wool a kitten
had been playing with. Then they seemed to marshal themselves into one
solid line and sweep up over the sky, getting blacker and blacker as they
came. Olga ran in with her yellow hair flying, slamming and bolting the
stable-doors, locking the chicken-coop, and calling out for me to get my
clothes off the line or they'd be blown to pieces. Even then I could feel the
wind. It whipped my own hair loose, and flattened my skirt against my
body, and I had to lean forward to make any advance against it.
By this time the black army of the heavens had rolled up overhead and a
few big frog-like drops of rain began to fall, throwing up little clouds of
dust, as a rifle bullet might. I trundled out a couple of tubs, in the hope of
catching a little soft water. It wasn't until later that I realized the meaning of
Olga's mild stare of reproof. For the next moment the downpour came, and
with it the wind. And such wind! There had been nothing to stop its sweep,
of course, for hundreds and hundreds of miles, and it hit us the same as a
hurricane at sea hits a liner. The shack shook with the force of it. My two
wash-tubs went bounding and careening off across the landscape, the
chicken-coop went over like a nine-pin, and the air was filled with bits of
flying timber. Olga's wagon, with the hay-rack on top of it, moved solemnly
and ponderously across the barnyard and crashed into the corral, propelled
by no power but that of the wind. My sweet-pea hedges were torn from

their wires, and an armful of hay came smack against the shack-window
and was held there by the wind, darkening the room more than ever.
Then the storm blew itself out, though it poured for two or three hours
afterward. And all the while, although I exulted in that play of elemental
force, I was worrying about my Dinky-Dunk, who was away for the day,
doing what he could to arrange for some harvest hands, when the time for
cutting came. For the wheat, it seems, ripens all at once, and then the grand
rush begins. If it isn't cut the moment it's ripe, the grain shells out, and that
means loss. Olga has been saying that the wheat on the Cummins section
will easily run forty bushels to the acre and over. It will also grade high,
whatever that means. There are six hundred and forty acres of it in that
section, and I've just figured out that this means a little over twenty-five
thousand bushels of grain. Our other piece on the home ranch is a larger
tract, but a little lighter in crop. That wheat is just beginning to turn from
green to the palest of yellow. And it has a good show, Olga says, if frost will
only keep off and no hail comes. Our one occupation, for the next few
weeks, will be watching the weather.

Sunday the Thirteenth

Percy and Mrs. Watson drove over to see how we'd all weathered the storm.
They found the chicken-coop once more right side up, and everything ship-
shape. Percy promptly asked where Olga was. I pointed her out to him,
breast-high in the growing wheat. She looked like Ceres, in her big, new,
loose-fitting blue waist, with the noonday sun on her yellow-gold head and
her mild ruminative eyes with their misted sky-line effect. She always
seems to fit into the landscape here. I suppose it's because she's a born
daughter of the soil. And a sea of wheat makes a perfect frame for that
massive, benignant figure of hers.
I looked at Percy, at thin-nosed, unpractical Percy, with all his finicky
sensibilities, with his high fastidious reticences, with his effete, inbred
meagerness of bone and sinew, with his distinguished pride of distinguished
race rather running to seed. And I stood marveling at the wisdom of old
Mother Nature, who was so plainly propelling him toward this revitalizing,
revivifying, reanimalizing, redeeming type which his pale austerities of
spirit could never quite neutralize. Even Dinky-Dunk has noticed what is
taking place. He saw them standing side by side in the grain. When he came
in he pointed them out to me, and merely said, "Hermann und Dorothea!"
But I remembered my Goethe well enough to understand.

Monday the Twenty-eighth

I woke Dinky-Dunk up last night crying beside him in bed. I just got to
thinking about things again, how far away we were from everything, how
hard it would be to get help if we needed it, and how much I'd give if I only
had you, Matilda Anne, for the next few weeks.... I got up and went to the
window and looked out. The moon was big and yellow, like a cheese. And
the midnight prairie itself seemed so big and wide and lonely, and I seemed
such a tiny speck on its face, so far away from every one, from God
himself, that the courage went out of my body like the air out of a tire.
Dinky-Dunk was right; it is life that is taming me.
I stood at the window praying, and then I slipped back into bed. Dinky-
Dunk works so hard and gets so tired that it would take a Chinese devil-
gong to waken him, once he's asleep. He did not stir when I crept back into
bed. And that, as I lay there wide awake, made me feel that even my own
husband had betrayed me. And I bawled. I must have shaken the bed, for
Dinky-Dunk finally did wake up. I couldn't tell him what was the matter. I
blubbered out that I only wanted him to hold me. He took me in his arms
and kissed my wet eyelids, hugging me up close to him, until I got quieter.
Then I fell asleep. But poor Dinky-Dunk was awake when I opened my
eyes about four, and had been that way for hours. He was afraid of
disturbing me by taking his arm from under my head. To-day he looks tired
and dark around the eyes. But he was up and off early. There is so much to
be done these days! He is putting up a grub-tent and a rough sleeping-shack
for the harvest "hands," so that I won't be bothered with a lot of rough men
about the house here. I'm afraid I'm an encumbrance, when I should be
helping. But they seem to be taking everything out of my hands.

Saturday the Second

I love to watch the wheat, now that it's really turning. It waves like a sea
and stretches off into the distance as far as the eye can follow it. It's as high
as my waist, and sometimes it moves up and down like a slowly breathing
breast. When the sun is low it turns a pure Roman gold, and makes my eyes
ache. But I love it. It strikes me as being glorious, and at the same time
pathetic—I scarcely know why. I can't analyze my feelings. But the prairie
brings a great peace to my soul. It is so rich, so maternal, so generous. It
seems to brood under a passion to give, to yield up, to surrender all that is
asked of it. And it is so tranquil. It seems like a bosom breathed on by the
breath of God.

Wednesday the Sixth

It is nearly a year, now, since I first came to Casa Grande. I can scarcely
believe it. The nights are getting very cool again and any time now there
might be a heavy frost. If it should freeze this next week or two I think my
Dinky-Dunk would just curl up and die. Poor boy, he's working so hard! I
pray for that crop every night. I worry about it. Last night I dreamt it was
burnt up in a prairie-fire and woke up screaming for wet blankets. Dinky-
Dunk had to hold me until I got quiet again. I asked him if he loved me,
now that I was getting old and ugly. He said I was the most beautiful thing
God ever made and that he loved me in a deeper and nobler way than he did
a year ago. Then I asked him if he'd ever get married again, if I should die.
He called me silly and said I was going to live to be eighty, and that a
gasoline-tractor couldn't kill me. But he promised I'd be the only one,
whatever happened. And I believe him. I know Dinky-Dunk would go in
black for a solid year, if I should die, and he'd never, never marry again, for
he's the sort of Old Sobersides who can only love one woman in one
lifetime. And I'm the woman, glory be!

Tuesday the Twelfth

Harvest time is here. The stage is cleared, and the last and great act of the
drama now begins. It's a drama with a stage a thousand miles wide. I can
hear through the open windows the rattle of the self-binders. Olga is driving
one, like a tawny Boadicea up on her chariot. She said she never saw such
heads of wheat. This is the first day's cutting, but those flapping canvas
belts and those tireless arms of wood and iron won't have one-tenth of
Dinky-Dunk's crop tied up by midnight. It is very cold, and Olie has
lugubriously announced that it's sure going to freeze. So three times I've
gone out to look at the thermometer and three times I've said my solemn
little prayer: "Dear God, please don't freeze poor Dinky-Dunk's wheat!"
And the Lord heard that prayer, for a Chinook came about two o'clock in
the morning and the mercury slowly but steadily rose.

Thursday the Fourteenth

I had a great deal to talk about to-day. But I can't write much.... I'm afraid. I
dread being alone. I wish I'd been a better wife to my poor old gold-bricked
Dinky-Dunk! But we are what we are, character-kinks and all. So when he
understands, perhaps he'll forgive me. I'm like a cottontail in the middle of a
wheat-patch with the binders going round and round and every swathe
cutting away a little more of my covering. And there can't be much more
hiding away with my secret. But I shall never openly speak of it. The binder
can cut off my feet first, the same as Olie's did with that mother-rabbit
which stood trembling over her nest of young. Why must life sometimes be
so ruthlessly tragic? And why, oh, why, are women sometimes so absurd?
And why should I be afraid of what every woman who would justify her
womanhood must face? Still, I'm afraid!

Wednesday the Fifth

Three long weeks since those last words were written. And what shall I say,
or how shall I begin?
In the first place, everything seemed gray. The bed was gray, my own arms
were gray, the walls looked gray, the window-glass was gray, and even
Dinky-Dunk's face was gray. I didn't want to move, for a long time. Then I
got the strength to tell Mrs. Watson that I wanted to speak to my husband.
She was wrapping something up in soft flannel and purring over it quite
proudly and calling it a blessed little lamb. When poor pale-faced Dinky-
Dunk bent over the bed I asked him if it had a receding chin, or if it had a
nose like Olie's. And he said it had neither, that it was a king of a boy and
could holler like a good one.
Then I told Dinky-Dunk what had been in my secret soul, for so many
months. Uncle Carlton had a receding chin, a boneless, dew-lappy sort of
chin I'd always hated, and I'd been afraid it might kind of skip-and-carry
one and fasten itself on my innocent offspring. Then, later on, I'd been
afraid of Olie's frozen nose, with the split down the center. And all the while
I kept remembering what the Morleys' old colored nurse had said to me
when I was a schoolgirl, a girl of only seventeen, spending that first
vacation of mine in Virginia: "Lawdy, chile, yuh ain't no bigger'n a minit!
Don't yuh nebber hab no baby, chile!"
Isn't it funny how those foolish old things stick in a woman's memory? For
I've had my baby and I'm still alive, and although I sometimes wanted a
girl, Dinky-Dunk is so ridiculously proud and happy seeing it's a boy that I
don't much care. But I'm going to get well and strong in a few more days,
and here against my breast I'm holding the God-love-itest little lump of
pulsing manhood, the darlingest, solemnest, placidest, pinkest hope of the
white race that ever made life full and perfect for a foolish mother.
The doctor who finally got here—when both Olga and Mrs. Dixon agreed
that he couldn't possibly do a bit of good—announced that I had come

through it all like the true Prairie Woman that I was. Then he somewhat
pompously and redundantly explained that I was a highly organized
individual, "a bit high-strung," as Mrs. Dixon put it. I smiled into the pillow
when he turned to my anxious-eyed Dinky-Dunk and condoningly enlarged
on the fact that there was nothing abnormal about a woman like me being—
well, rather abnormal as to temper and nerves during the last few months.
But Dinky-Dunk cut him short.
"On the contrary, sir; she's been wonderful, simply wonderful!" Dinky-
Dunk stoutly declared. Then he reached for my hand under the coverlet.
"She's been an angel!"
I squeezed the hand that held mine. Then I looked at the doctor, who had
turned away to give some orders to Olga.
"Doctor," I quite as stoutly declared, "I've been a perfect devil, and this dear
old liar knows it!" But our doctor was too busy to pay much attention to
what I was saying. He merely murmured that it was all normal, quite
normal, under the circumstances. So, after all, I'm just an ordinary,
everyday woman! But the man of medicine has ordered me to stay in bed
for twelve days—which Olga regards as unspeakably preposterous, since
one day, she proudly announced, was all her mother ever asked for. Which
shows the disadvantages of being too civilized!

Sunday the Ninth

I'm day by day getting stronger, though I'm a lady of luxury and lie in bed
until ten every morning. To-day when I was sitting up to eat breakfast, with
my hair braided in two tails and a pink and white hug-me-tight over my
nightie, Dinky-Dunk came in and sat by the bed. He tried to soft-soap me
by saying he'd be mighty glad when I was running things again so he could
get something fit to eat. Olga, he admitted, was all right, but she hadn't the
touch of his Gee-Gee. He confessed that for nearly a month now the house
had been a damned gynocracy and he was getting tired of being bossed
around by a couple of women. Mio piccino no longer looks like a littered
whelp of the animal world, as he did at first. His wrinkled little face and his
close-shut eyes used to make me think of a little old man, with all the
wisdom of the ages shut up in his tiny body. And it is such a knowing little
body, with all its stored-up instincts and guardian appetites! My little tenor
robusto, how he can sing when he's hungry! Last night I sat up in bed,
listening for my son's—Dinky-Dink's—breathing. At first I thought he
might be dead, he was so quiet. Then I heard his lips move in the rhapsodic
deglutition of babyland dreams. "Dinky-Dunk," I demanded, "what would
we do if Babe should die?" And I shook him to make him answer. He stared
up at me with a sleepy eye. "That whale?" he commented as he blinked
contentedly down at his offspring and then turned over and went to sleep.
But I slipped a hand in under little Dinky-Dink's body, and found it as warm
as a nesting bird.

Monday the Tenth

I noticed that Dinky-Dunk had not been smoking lately, so I asked him
what had become of the rest of his cigars. He admitted that he had given
them to Olie. "When?" I asked. And Dinky-Dunk colored up as he
answered, rather casually, "Oh, the day Buddy Boy was born!" How men
merge down into the conventional in their more epochal moments!
The second day after my baby's birth Olga rather took my breath away by
carrying in as neat a little wooden cradle as any prince of the royal blood
would care to lie in. Olie had made it. He had worked on it during his spare
hours in the evening, and even Dinky-Dunk hadn't known. I made Olga
hold it up at the foot of the bed so I could see it better. It had been scroll-
sawed and sand-papered and polished like any factory-made baby-bed, and
my faithful old Olie had even attempted some hand-carving along the
rockers and the head-board. But as I looked at it I realized that it must have
taken weeks and weeks to make. And that gave me an odd little earthquaky
feeling in the neighborhood of the midriff, for I knew then that my secret
had been no secret at all. Dinky-Dunk, by the way, has just announced that
we're to have a touring-car. He says I've earned it!

Tuesday the Eleventh

Yesterday was so warm that I sat out in the sun and took an ozone-bath. I
sat there, staring down at my boy, realizing that I was a mother. My boy—
bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh! It's so hard to believe! And now I
am one of the mystic chain, and no longer the idle link. I am a mother. And
I'd give an arm if you and Chinkie and Scheming-Jack could see my boy, at
this moment. He's like a rose-leaf and he's got six dimples, not counting his
hands and feet—for I've found and kissed 'em all—on different parts of his
blessed little body. Dinky-Dunk came back from Buckhorn yesterday with a
lot of the foolishest things you ever clapped eyes on—a big cloth elephant
that grunts when you pull its tail, a musical spinning-top, a high-chair, and a
projecting lantern. They're for Dinky-Dink, of course. But it will be a week
or two before he can manipulate the lantern!

Wednesday the Thirteenth

Dinky-Dunk has taken Mrs. Dixon home and come back with a brand-new
"hand," which, of course, is prairie-land synecdoche for a new hired man.
His name is Terry Dillon, and as the name might lead you to imagine, he's
about as Irish as Paddy's pig. He is blessed with a potato-lip, a buttermilk
brogue, and a nose which, if he follows it faithfully, will some day lead him
straight to Heaven. But Terry, Dinky-Dunk tells me, is a steady worker and
a good man with horses, and that of course rounds him out as a paragon in
the eyes of my slave-driving lord and master. I asked where Terry came
from. Dinky-Dunk, with rather a grim smile, acknowledged that he'd been
working for Percy.
Terry, it seems, has no particular love for an Englishman. And Percy had
affronted his haughty Irish spirit with certain ideas of caste which can't be
imported into the Canadian West, where the hired man is every whit as
good as his master—as that master will tragically soon find out if he tries to
make his help eat at second table! At any rate, Percy and potato-lipped
Terry developed friction which ended up in every promise of a fight, only
Dinky-Dunk arrived in the nick of time and took Terry off his harassed
neighbor's hands. I told him he had rather the habit of catching people on
the bounce. But I am reserving my opinion of Terry Dillon. We are a happy
family here, and I want no trouble-makers in my neighborhood.
I have been studying some of the New York magazines, going rather
hungrily through their advertisements where such lovely layettes are
described. My poor little Dinky-Dink's things are so plain and rough and
meager. I envy those city mothers with all those beautiful linens and laces.
But my little Spartan man-child has never known a single day's sickness.
And some day he'll show 'em!

Thursday the Fourteenth

When Olie came in after dinner yesterday I asked him where my husband
was. Olie, after some hesitation, admitted that he was out in the stable. I
asked just what Dinky-Dunk was doing there, for I'd noticed that after each
meal he slipped silently away. Again Olie hesitated. Then he finally
admitted that he thought maybe my lord was out there smoking. So I went
out, and there I found my poor old Dinky-Dunk sitting on a grain-box
puffing gloomily away at his old pipe. For a minute or two he didn't see me,
so I went right over to him. "What does this mean?" I demanded.
"Why?" he rather guiltily equivocated.
"Why are you smoking out here?"
"I—er—I rather thought you might think it wouldn't be good for the Boy!"
He looked pathetic as he said that, I don't know why, though I loved him for
it. He made me think of a king who'd been dethroned, an outsider, a man
without a home. It brought a lump into my throat.
I wormed my way up close to him on the grain-box, so that he had to hold
me to keep from falling off the end. "Listen to me," I commanded. "You are
my True Love and my Kaikobád and my Man-God and my Soul-Mate! And
no baby is ever going to come between me and you!"
"You shouldn't say those awful things," he declared, but he did it only half-
heartedly.
"But I want you to sit and smoke with me, beloved, the same as you always
did," I told him. "We can leave the windows open a little and it won't hurt
Dinky-Dink, for that boy gets more ozone than any city child that was ever
wheeled out in the Mall! It can't possibly hurt him. What hurts me is being
away from you so much. And now give me a hug, a tight one, and tell me
that you still love your Lady Bird!" He gave me two, and then two more,
until Tumble-Weed turned round in his stall and whinnied for us to behave.

Friday the Fifteenth

I've been keeping Terry under my eye, and I don't believe he's a trouble-
maker. His first move was to lift Babe out of the cradle, hold him up and
publicly announce that he was a darlin'. Then he pointed out to me what a
wonderful head the child had, feeling his frontal bone and declaring he was
sure to make a great scholar in his time. Dinky-Dunk, grinning at the sober
way in which I was swallowing this, pointedly inquired of Terry whether it
was Milton or Archimedes that Babe most resembled as to skull formation.
But it isn't Terry's blarney that has made me capitulate; it's the fact that he
has proved so companionable and has slipped so quietly into his place in
our little lonely circle of lives on this ragged edge of nowhere.
And he's as clean as a cat, shaving every blessed morning with a little old
broken-handled razor which he strops on a strip of oiled bootleg. He
declares that razor to be the finest bit of steel in all the Americas, and
showed off before Olie and Olga yesterday morning by shaving without a
looking-glass, which trick he said he learned in the army. He also gave Olie
a hair-cut, which was badly needed, and on Sunday has promised to rig up a
soldering-iron and mend all my pans for me. He looks little over twenty, but
is really thirty and more, and has been in India and Mexico and Alaska.
I caught him neatly darning his own woolen socks. Instead of betraying
shame at being detected in that effeminate pastime he proudly explained
that he'd learned to do a bit of stitching in the army. He hasn't many
possessions, but he's very neat in his arrangement of them. A good soldier,
he solemnly told me, always had to be a bit of an old maid. "And you were
a grand soldier, Terry, I know," I frankly told him. "I've done a bit av killing
in me time!" he proudly acknowledged. But as he sat there darning his
sock-heel he looked as though he couldn't kill a field mouse. And in his idle
hours he reads Nick Carter, a series of paper-bound detective stories, almost
worn to tatters, which he is going through for the second or third time.
These adventures, I find, he later recounts to Olie, who is slowly but surely
succumbing to the poison of the penny-dreadful and the virus of the

shilling-shocker! I even caught Dinky-Dunk sitting up over one of these
blood-curdling romances the other night, though he laughed a little as I
dragged him off to bed, at the absurdity of the situations. Terry's eyes
lighted up when he saw my books and magazines. When I told him he could
take anything he wanted, he beamed and said it would sure be a glorious
winter he'd be having, with all that book-reading when the long nights
came. But before those long nights are over I'm going to try to pilot Terry
into the channels of respectable literature.

Saturday the Sixteenth

I love the milky smell of my Dinky-Dink better than the perfume of any
flower that ever grew. He's so strong now that he can almost lift himself up
by his two little hands. At least he can really and actually give a little pull.
Two days ago our touring-car arrived. It is a beauty. It skims over these
smooth prairie trails like a yacht. From now on we can run into Buckhorn,
do our shopping, and run out again inside of two or three hours. We can also
reach the larger towns without trouble and it will be so much easier to
gather up what we need for Casa Grande. Dinky-Dink seems to love the car.
Ten minutes after we have started out he is always fast asleep. Olga, who
holds him in the back seat when I get tired, sits in rapt and silent bliss as we
rock along at thirty miles an hour. And no wonder, for it's the next best
thing to sailing out on the briny deep!
I can't help thinking of Terry's attitude toward Olga. He doesn't actively
dislike her, but he quietly ignores her, even more so than Olie does. I've
been wondering why neither of them has succumbed to such physical
grandeur. Perhaps it's because they're physical themselves. And then I think
her largeness oppresses Terry, for no man, whether he's been a soldier or
not, likes to be overtopped by a woman.
The one exception, of course, is Percy. But Percy is a man of imagination.
He can realize that Olga is more than a mere type. He agrees with me that
she's a sort of miracle. To Terry she's only a mute and muscular Finnish
servant-girl with an arm like a grenadier's. To Percy she is a goddess made
manifest, a superhuman body of superhuman vigor and beauty and at the
same time a body crowned with majesty and robed in mystery. And I still
incline to Percy's opinion. Olga is always wonderful to me. Her lips are
such a soft and melting red, the red of perfect animal health. The very
milkiness of her skin is an advertisement of that queenly and all-conquering
vitality which lifts her so above the ordinary ruck of humanity. And her
great ruminative eyes are as clear and limpid as any woodland pool.

She blushes rose color sometimes when Percy comes in. I think he finds a
secret joy in sensing that reaction in anything so colossal. But he defends
himself behind that mask of cool impersonality which is the last attribute of
the mental aristocrat, no matter what his feelings may be. His attitude
toward Terry, by the way, is a remarkably companionable one in view of the
fact of their earlier contentions. They can let by-gones be by-gones and talk
and smoke and laugh together. It is Terry, if any one, who is just a wee bit
condescending. And I imagine that it is the aura of Olga which has brought
about this oddly democratizing condition of affairs. She seems to give a
new relationship to things, softening a point here and illuminating a point
there as quietly as moonlight itself can do.

Monday the Seventeenth

Yesterday Olga carried home a whole pailful of mushrooms, for an Indian
summer seems to have brought on a second crop of them. They were lovely.
But she refused to eat any. I asked her why. She heaved her huge shoulders
and said she didn't know. But she does, I feel sure, and I've been wondering
why she's afraid of anything that can taste so good, once they are creamed
and heaped on a square of toast. As for me

I love 'em, I love 'em, and who shall dare
To chide me for loving that mushroom fare?

Wednesday the Nineteenth

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 Œdipus. 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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Transcriber's Notes

1. Punctuation has been normalized to contemporary standards.
2. Added Table of Contents not present in original text.

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