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.