Her corsets came to-day, and I showed her how to put them on. She is

incontinently proud of them, but in my judgment they only make her

ridiculous. It's as foolish as putting a French _toque_ on one of her

oxen. The skin of Olga's great shoulders is as smooth and creamy as a

baby's. I have been watching her eyes. They are not a dark blue, but in

a strong side-light they seem deep wells of light, layer on layer of

azure. And she is mysterious to me, calmly and magnificently

inscrutable. And I once thought her an uncouth animal. But she is a

great help. She has planted rows and rows of sweet peas all about Casa

Grande and is starting to make a kitchen garden, which she's going to

fence off and look after with her own hands. It will be twice the size

of Olie's. But I do hope she doesn't ever grow into something mysterious

to my Dinky-Dunk. This morning she said I ought to work in the garden,

that the more I kept on my feet the better it would be for me later on.

As for Dinky-Dunk, the poor boy is working himself gaunt. Yet tired as

he is, he tries to read a few pages of something worth while every

night. Sometimes we take turns in reading. Last night he handed me over

his volume of Spencer with a pencil mark along one passage. This passage

said: "Intellectual activity in women is liable to be diminished after

marriage by that antagonism between individuation and reproduction

everywhere operative throughout the organic world." I don't know why,

but that passage made me as hot as a hornet. In the background of my

brain I carried some vague memory of George Eliot once catching this

same philosophizing Spencer fishing with a composite fly, and, remarking

on his passion for generalizations, declaring that he even fished with a

generalization. So I could afford to laugh. "Spencer's idea of a

tragedy," I told Dinky-Dunk, "is a deduction killed by a fact!" And

again I smiled my Mona-Lisa smile. "And I'm going to be one of the

facts!" I proudly proclaimed.

Dinky-Dunk, after thinking this over, broke into a laugh. "You know,

Gee-Gee," he solemnly announced, "there are times when you seem almost

clever!" But I wasn't clever in this case, for it was hours later before

I saw the trap which Dinky-Dunk had laid for me!

_Monday the Sixteenth_

All day Saturday Olga and Dinky-Dunk were off in the chuck-wagon,

working too far away to come home for dinner. The thought of them being

out there, side by side, hung over me like a cloud. I remembered how he

had absently stared at the white column of her neck. And I pictured him

stopping in his work and studying her faded blue cotton waist pulled

tight across the line of that opulent bust. What man wouldn't be

impressed by such bodily magnificence, such lavish and undulating youth

and strength? And there's something so soft and diffused about those

ox-like eyes of hers! You do not think, then, of her eyes being such a

pale blue, any more than you could stop to accuse summer moonlight of

not being ruddy. And those unruffled blue eyes never seem to see you;

they rather seem to bathe you in a gaze as soft and impersonal as

moonlight itself.

I simply couldn't stand it any more. I got on Paddy and galloped out for

my Dinky-Dunk, as though it were my sudden and solemn duty to save him

from some imminent and awful catastrophe.

I stopped on the way, to watch a couple of prairie-chickens minuetting

through the turns of their vernal courtships. The pompous little beggars

with puffed-out wattles and neck ruffs were positively doing cancans and

two-steps along the prairie floor. Love was in the air, that perfect

spring afternoon, even for the animal world. So instead of riding openly

and honestly up to Dinky-Dunk and Olga, I kept under cover as much as I

could and stalked them, as though I had been a timber wolf.

Then I felt thoroughly and unspeakably ashamed of myself, for I caught

sight of Olga high on her wagon, like a Valkyr on a cloud, and

Dinky-Dunk hard at work a good two miles away.

He was a little startled to see me come cantering up on Paddy. I don't

know whether it was silly or not, but I told him straight out what had

brought me. He hugged me like a bear and then sat down on the prairie

and laughed. "With that cow?" he cried. And I'm sure no man could ever

call the woman he loves a cow.... I believe Dinky-Dunk suspects

something. He's just asked me to be more careful about riding Paddy. And

he's been more solemnly kind, lately. But I'll never tell

him--never--never!

_Tuesday the Twenty-fourth_

Percy will be back to-morrow. It will be a different looking country to

what it was when he left. I've been staring up at a cobalt sky, and

begin to understand why people used to think Heaven was somewhere up in

the midst of such celestial blue. And on the prairie the sky is your

first and last friend. Wasn't it Emerson who somewhere said that the

firmament was the daily bread for one's eyes? And oh, the lovely,

greening floor of the wheat country now! Such a soft yellow-green glory

stretching so far in every direction, growing so much deeper day by day!

And the sun and space and clear light on the sky-line and the pillars of

smoke miles away and the wonderful, mysterious promise that is hanging

over this teeming, steaming, shimmering, abundant broad bosom of earth!

It thrills me in a way I can't explain. By night and day, before

breakfast and after supper, the talk is of wheat, wheat, wheat, until I

nearly go crazy. I complained to Dinky-Dunk that he was dreaming wheat,

living wheat, breathing wheat, that he and all the rest of the world

seemed mad about wheat.

"And there's just one other thing you must remember, Lady Bird," was his

answer. "All the rest of the world is _eating_ wheat. It can't live

without wheat. And I'd rather be growing the bread that feeds the hungry

than getting rich making cordite and Krupp guns!" So he's risking

everything on this crop of his, and is eternally figuring and planning

and getting ready for the _grande débâcle_. He says it will be like a

battle. And no general goes into a battle without being prepared for it.

But when we read about the doings of the outside world, it seems like

reading of happenings that have taken place on the planet Mars. We're

our own little world just now, self-contained, rounded-out, complete.

_Friday the Third_

Two things of vast importance have happened. Dinky-Dunk has packed up

and made off to Edmonton to interview some railway officials, and Percy

is back. Dinky-Dunk is so mysteriously silent as to the matter of his

trip that I'm afraid he is worried about money matters. And he asked me

if I'd mind keeping the household expenses down as low as I could,

without actual hardship, for the next few months.

As for Percy, he seemed a little constrained, but looked ever so much

better. He is quite sunburned, likes California and says we ought to

have a winter bungalow there (and Dinky-Dunk just warning me to save on

the pantry pennies!) He's brought a fastidious little old English woman

back with him as a housekeeper, a Mrs. Watson, and she looks both

capable and practical. Notwithstanding the fact that she seems to have

stepped right out of Dickens, and carries a huge Manx cat about with

her, Percy said he thought they'd muddle along in some way. Thoughtful

boy that he was, he brought me a portmanteau packed full of the newer

novels and magazines, and a two-pound jar of smoking tobacco for

Dinky-Dunk.

_Thursday the Ninth_

A Belasco couldn't have more carefully stage-managed the first meeting

between Percy and Olga. I felt that she was my discovery, and I wanted

to spring her on him, at the right moment, and in the right way. I

wanted to get the Valkyr on a cloud effect. So I kept Percy in the house

on the pretext of giving him a cup of tea, until I should hear the

rumble of the wagon and know that Olga was swinging home with her team.

It so happened, when I heard the first faint far thunder of that homing

wagon, that Percy was sitting in my easy chair, with a cup of my

thinnest china in one hand and a copy of Walter Pater's _Marius the

Epicurean_ in the other. We had been speaking of climate, and he wanted

to look up the passage where Pater said, "one always dies of the

cold"--which I consider a slur on the Northwest!

I couldn't help realizing, as I sat staring at Percy, at the thin,

over-sensitive face, and the high-arched, over-refined nose, and the

narrow, stooping, over-delicate shoulders, what a direct opposite he was

to Olga, in every way. Instead of thin china and Pater in her hand at

that very moment, I remembered she'd probably have a four-tined fork or

a mud-stained fence stretcher.

I went to the door and looked out. At the proper moment I called Percy.

Olga was standing up in the wagon-box, swinging about one corner of the

corral. She stood with her shoulders well back, for her weight was

already on the lines, to pull the team up. Her loose blue skirt edge was

fluttering in the wind, but at the front was held tight against her

legs, like the drapery of the Peace figure in the Sherman statue in the

Plaza. Across that Artemis-like bosom her thin waist was stretched

tight. She had no hat on, and her pale gold hair, which had been braided

and twisted up into a heavy crown, had the sheen of metal on it, in the

later afternoon sun. And in that clear glow of light, which so often

plays mirage-like tricks with vision, she loomed up like a demi-god, or

a she-Mercury who ought to have had little bicycle wheels attached to

her heels.

Percy is never demonstrative. But I could see that he was more than

impressed. He was amazed.

"My word!" he said very quietly.

"What does she make you think of?" I demanded.

Percy put down his teacup.

"Don't go away," I commanded, "but tell me what she makes you think of."

He still stood staring at her with puckered up eyes.

"She's like band-music going by!" he proclaimed. "No, she's more than

that; she's Wagner on wheels," he finally said. "No, not that! A Norse

myth in dimity!"

I told him it wasn't dimity, but he was too interested in Olga to listen

to me.

Half an hour later, when she met him, she was very shy. She turned an

adorable pink, and then calmly rebuttoned the two top buttons of her

waist, which had been hanging loose. And I noticed that Percy did

precisely what I saw Dinky-Dunk once doing. He sat staring absently yet

studiously at the milky white column of Olga's neck! And I had to speak

to him twice, before he even woke up to the fact that he was being

addressed by his hostess.

_Wednesday the Fifteenth_

Dinky-Dunk is back, and very busy again. During the day I scarcely get a

glimpse of him, except at meal-times. I have a steadily growing sense of

being neglected, but I know how a worried man hates petulance. The

really important thing is that Percy is giving Olga lessons in reading

and writing. For, although a Finn, she is a Canadian Finn from almost

the shadow of the sub-Arctics, and has had little chance for education.

But her mind is not obtuse.

Yesterday I asked Olga what she thought of Percival Benson. "Ah lak

heem," she calmly admitted in her majestic, monosyllabic way. "He is a

fonny leetle man." And the "fonny leetle man" who isn't really little,

seems to like Olga, odd as it may sound. They are such opposites, such

contradictions! Percy says she's Homeric. He says he never saw eyes that

were so limpid, or such pools of peace and calm. He insists on the fact

that she's essentially maternal, as maternal as the soil over which she

walks, as Percy put it. I told him what Dinky-Dunk had once told me,

about Olga killing a bull. The bull was a vicious brute that had

attacked her father and knocked him down. He was striking at the fallen

man with his fore-paws when Olga heard his cries. She promptly came for

that bull with a pitchfork. And speaking of Homer, it must have been a

pretty epical battle, for she killed the bull and left the fork-tines

eight inches in his body while she picked up her father and carried him

back to the house. And I won't even kill my own hens, but have always

appointed Olie as the executioner.

_Friday the Seventeenth_

It is funny to see Percy teaching Olga. She watches him as though he

were a miracle man. Her dewy red lips form the words slowly, and the

full white throat utters them largely, laboriously, instruments on them,

and in some perhaps uncouth way makes them lovely. I sit with my sewing,

listening. Sometimes I open the piano and play. But I feel out of it. I

seem to be on the fringe of things that are momentous only to other

people. Last night, when Percy said he thought he'd sell his ranch,

Dinky-Dunk looked up from his paper-littered desk and told him to hang

on to that land like a leech. But he didn't explain why.

_Saturday the Nineteenth_

I can't even remember the date. But I know that midsummer is here, that

the men folks are so busy I have to shift for myself, and that the talk

is still of wheat, and how it's heading, and how the dry weather of the

last few weeks will affect the length of the straw. Dinky-Dunk is making

desperate efforts to get men to cut wild-hay. He's bought the hay rights

of a large stretch between some sloughs about seven miles east of our

place. He says men are scarcer than hen's teeth, but has the promise of

a couple of cutthroats who were thrown off a freight-train near

Buckhorn. Percy volunteered to help, and was convinced of the fact that

he could drive a mower. Olie, who nurses a vast contempt for Percy, and,

I secretly believe, rather resents his attentions to Olga, put the new

team of colts on the mower. They promptly ran away with Percy, who came

within an ace of being thrown in front of the mower-knife, which would

have chopped him up into very unscholarly mincemeat. Olga got on a

horse, bareback, and rounded up the colts. Then she cooed about poor

bruised Percy and tried to coax him to come to the house. But Percy said

he was going to drive that team, even if he had to be strapped to the

mower-seat. And, oddly enough, he did "gat them beat," as Olga expressed

it, but it tired him out and wilted his collar and the sweat was running

down his face when he came in at noon. Olga is very proud of him. But

she announced that she'd drive that mower herself, and sailed into Olie

for giving a tenderfoot a team like that to drive. It was her first

outburst. I couldn't understand a word she said, but I know that she was

magnificent. She looked like a statue of Justice that had suddenly

jumped off its pedestal and was doing its best to put a Daniel Webster

out of business!

_Friday the Twenty-eighth_

The weather is still very dry. But Dinky-Dunk feels sure it will not

affect his crop. He says the filaments of a wheat-plant will go almost

two feet deep in search for moisture. Yesterday Percy appeared in a

flannel shirt, and without his glasses. I think he is secretly

practising calisthenics. He said he was going to cut out this afternoon

tea, because it doesn't seem to fit in with prairie life. I fancy I see

the re-barbarianizing influence of Olga at work on Percival Benson

Woodhouse. Either Dinky-Dunk or Olie, I find, has hidden my saddle!

_Saturday the Twenty-ninth_

To-day has been one of the hottest days of the year. It may be good for

the wheat, but I can't say that it seems good for me. All day long I've

been fretting for far-away things, for foolish and impossible things. I

tried reading Keats, but that only made me worse than ever. I've been

longing for a glimpse of the Luxembourg Gardens in spring, with all the

horse-chestnuts in bloom. I've been wondering how lovely it would be to

drift into the Blue Grotto at Capri and see the azure sea-water drip

from the trailing boat-oars. I've been burning with a hunger to see a

New England orchard in the slanting afternoon sunlight of an early June

afternoon. The hot white light of this open country makes my eyes ache

and seems to dry my soul up. I can't help thinking of cool green

shadows, and musky little valleys of gloom with a brook purling over

mossy stones. I long for the solemn greenery of great elms, aisles and

aisles of cathedral-like gloom and leaf-filtered sunlight. I'd love to

hear an English cuckoo again, and feel the soft mild sea-air that blows

up through Louis's dear little Devonshire garden. But what's the use!

I went to the piano and pounded out _Kennst Du Das Land_ with all my

soul, and I imagine it did me good. It at least bombarded the silence

out of Casa Grande. The noise of life is so far away from you on the

prairie! It is not utterly silent, just that dreamy and disembodied sigh

of wind and grass against which a human call targets like a leaden

bullet against metal. It is almost worse than silence.

_Sunday the Thirtieth_

My mood is over. Early, early this morning I slipped out of bed and

watched day break. I saw the first faint orange rim along the limitless

sky-line, and then the pearly pink above it, and all the sweet dimness

and softness and mystery of God's hand pulling the curtains of morning

apart. And then the rioting orchestras of color struck up, and I leaned

out of the window bathed in glory as the golden disk of the sun showed

over the dewy prairie-edge. Oh, the grandeur of it! And oh, the

God-given freshness of that pellucid air! I love my land! I love it!

_Tuesday the First_

I have married a _man_! My Dinky-Dunk is not a softy. I had that proved

to me yesterday, when I put Paddy in the buckboard and drove out to

where the men were working in the hay. I was taking their dinner out to

them, neatly packed in the chuck-box. One of the new men, who'd been

hired for the rush, had been overworking his team. The brute had been

prodding them with a pitchfork, instead of using a whip. Dinky-Dunk saw

the marks, and noticed one of the horses bleeding. But he didn't

interfere until he caught the man in the act of jabbing the tines into

Maid Marian's flank. Then he jumped for him, just as I drove up. He

cursed that man, cursed and damned him most dreadfully and pulled him

down off the hay-rack. Then they fought.

They fought like two wildcats. Dinky-Dunk's nose bled and his lip was

cut. But he knocked the other man flat, and when he tried to get up he

knocked him again. It seemed cruel; it was revolting. But something in

me rejoiced and exulted as I saw that hulk of an animal thresh and

stagger about the hay-stubble. I tried to wipe the blood away from

Dinky-Dunk's nose. But he pushed me back and said this was no place for

a woman. I had no place in his universe, at that particular time. But

Dinky-Dunk can fight, if he has to. He's sa magerful a mon! He's afraid

of nothing.

But that was nearly a costly victory. Both the new men of course threw

up their jobs, then and there. Dinky-Dunk paid them off, on the spot,

and they started off across the open prairie, without even waiting for

their meal. Dinky-Dunk, as we sat down on the dry grass and ate

together, said it was a good riddance, and he was just saying I could

only have the left-hand side of his mouth to kiss for the next week when

he suddenly dropped his piece of custard-pie, stood up and stared toward

the east. I did the same, wondering what had happened.

I could see a long thin slanting column of smoke driving across the hot

noonday air. Then my heart stopped beating. _It was the prairie on

fire._

I had heard a great deal about fire-guards and fire-guarding, three rows

about crops and ten about buildings; and I knew that Olie hadn't yet

finished turning all those essential furrows. And if that column of

smoke, which was swinging up through the silvery haze where the indigo

vault of heaven melted into the dusty whiteness of the parched

grasslands, had come from the mouth of a siege-gun which was cannonading

us where we stood, it couldn't have more completely chilled my blood.

For I knew that east wind would carry the line of fire crackling across

the prairie floor to Dinky-Dunk's wheat, to the stables and

out-buildings, to Casa Grande itself, and all our scheming and planning

and toiling and moiling would go up in one yellow puff of smoke. And

once under way, nothing could stop that widening river of flame.

It was Dinky-Dunk who jumped to life as though he had indeed been

cannonaded. In one bound he was at the buckboard and was snatching out

the horse-blanket that lay folded up under the seat. Then he unsnapped

the reins from Paddy's bridle, snapping them on the blanket, one to the

buckle and the other to the strap-end. In another minute he had the

hobble off Paddy and had swung me up on that astonished pinto's back.

The next minute he himself was on Maid Marian, poking one end of the

long rein into my hand and telling me to keep up with him.

We rode like mad. I scarcely understood what it meant, at the time, but

I at least kept up with him. We went floundering through one end of a

slough until the blanket was wet and heavy and I could hardly hold it.

But I hung on for dear life. Then we swung off across the dry grass

toward that advancing semicircle of fire, as far apart as the taut reins

would let us ride. Dinky-Dunk took the windward side. Then on we rushed,

along that wavering frontier of flame, neck to neck, dragging the wet

blanket along its orange-tinted crest, flattening it down and wiping it

out as we went. We made the full circle, panting; saw where the flames

had broken out again, and swung back with our dragging blanket. But when

one side was conquered another side would revive, and off we'd have to

go again, until my arm felt as though it were going to be pulled out of

its socket.

But we won that fight, in the end. I slipped down off Paddy's back and

lay full length on the sod, weak, shaking, wondering why the solid

ground was rocking slowly from side to side like a boat. But Dinky-Dunk

didn't even observe me. He was fighting out the last patch of fire, on

foot.

When he came over to where I was waiting for him he was as sooty and

black as a boiler-maker. He dropped down beside me, breathing hard. We

sat there holding each other's hand, for several minutes, in utter

silence. Then he said, rather thickly: "Are you all right?" And I told

him that of course I was all right. Then he said, without looking at me,

"I forgot!" Then he got Paddy and patched up the harness and took me

home in the buckboard.

But all the rest of the day he hung about the shack, as solemn as an

owl. And once in the night he got up and lighted the lamp and came over

and studied my face. I blinked up at him sleepily, for I was dog-tired

and had been dreaming that we were back in Paris at the Bal des Quatz

Arts and were about to finish up with an early breakfast at the Madrid.

He looked so funny with his rumpled up hair and his faded pajamas that I

couldn't help laughing a little as he blew out the light and got back

into bed.

"Dinky-Dunk," I said, as I turned over my pillow and got comfy again,

"wouldn't it have been hell if all our wheat had been burned up?" I

forget what Duncan said, for in two minutes I was asleep again.

_Monday the Seventh_

The dry spell has been broken, and broken with a vengeance. One gets

pretty well used to high winds, in the West. There used to be days at a

time when that unending high wind would make me think something was

going to happen, filling me with a vague sense of impending calamity and

making me imagine a big storm was going to blow up and wipe Casa Grande

and its little coterie off the map. But we've had a real wind-storm,

this time, with rain and hail. Dinky-Dunk's wheat looks sadly draggled

out and beaten down, but he says there wasn't enough hail to hurt

anything; that the straw will straighten up again, and that this

downpour was just what he wanted. Early in the afternoon, on looking out

the shack door, I saw a tangle of clouds on the sky-line. They seemed

twisted up like a skein of wool a kitten had been playing with. Then

they seemed to marshal themselves into one solid line and sweep up over

the sky, getting blacker and blacker as they came. Olga ran in with her

yellow hair flying, slamming and bolting the stable-doors, locking the

chicken-coop, and calling out for me to get my clothes off the line or

they'd be blown to pieces. Even then I could feel the wind. It whipped

my own hair loose, and flattened my skirt against my body, and I had to

lean forward to make any advance against it.

By this time the black army of the heavens had rolled up overhead and a

few big frog-like drops of rain began to fall, throwing up little clouds

of dust, as a rifle bullet might. I trundled out a couple of tubs, in

the hope of catching a little soft water. It wasn't until later that I

realized the meaning of Olga's mild stare of reproof. For the next

moment the downpour came, and with it the wind. And such wind! There had

been nothing to stop its sweep, of course, for hundreds and hundreds of

miles, and it hit us the same as a hurricane at sea hits a liner. The

shack shook with the force of it. My two wash-tubs went bounding and

careening off across the landscape, the chicken-coop went over like a

nine-pin, and the air was filled with bits of flying timber. Olga's

wagon, with the hay-rack on top of it, moved solemnly and ponderously

across the barnyard and crashed into the corral, propelled by no power

but that of the wind. My sweet-pea hedges were torn from their wires,

and an armful of hay came smack against the shack-window and was held

there by the wind, darkening the room more than ever.

Then the storm blew itself out, though it poured for two or three hours

afterward. And all the while, although I exulted in that play of

elemental force, I was worrying about my Dinky-Dunk, who was away for

the day, doing what he could to arrange for some harvest hands, when the

time for cutting came. For the wheat, it seems, ripens all at once, and

then the grand rush begins. If it isn't cut the moment it's ripe, the

grain shells out, and that means loss. Olga has been saying that the

wheat on the Cummins section will easily run forty bushels to the acre

and over. It will also grade high, whatever that means. There are six

hundred and forty acres of it in that section, and I've just figured out

that this means a little over twenty-five thousand bushels of grain. Our

other piece on the home ranch is a larger tract, but a little lighter in

crop. That wheat is just beginning to turn from green to the palest of

yellow. And it has a good show, Olga says, if frost will only keep off

and no hail comes. Our one occupation, for the next few weeks, will be

watching the weather.

_Sunday the Thirteenth_

Percy and Mrs. Watson drove over to see how we'd all weathered the

storm. They found the chicken-coop once more right side up, and

everything ship-shape. Percy promptly asked where Olga was. I pointed

her out to him, breast-high in the growing wheat. She looked like Ceres,

in her big, new, loose-fitting blue waist, with the noonday sun on her

yellow-gold head and her mild ruminative eyes with their misted sky-line

effect. She always seems to fit into the landscape here. I suppose it's

because she's a born daughter of the soil. And a sea of wheat makes a

perfect frame for that massive, benignant figure of hers.

I looked at Percy, at thin-nosed, unpractical Percy, with all his

finicky sensibilities, with his high fastidious reticences, with his

effete, inbred meagerness of bone and sinew, with his distinguished

pride of distinguished race rather running to seed. And I stood

marveling at the wisdom of old Mother Nature, who was so plainly

propelling him toward this revitalizing, revivifying, reanimalizing,

redeeming type which his pale austerities of spirit could never quite

neutralize. Even Dinky-Dunk has noticed what is taking place. He saw

them standing side by side in the grain. When he came in he pointed them

out to me, and merely said, "_Hermann und Dorothea_!" But I remembered

my Goethe well enough to understand.

_Monday the Twenty-eighth_

I woke Dinky-Dunk up last night crying beside him in bed. I just got to

thinking about things again, how far away we were from everything, how

hard it would be to get help if we needed it, and how much I'd give if I

only had you, Matilda Anne, for the next few weeks.... I got up and went

to the window and looked out. The moon was big and yellow, like a

cheese. And the midnight prairie itself seemed so big and wide and

lonely, and I seemed such a tiny speck on its face, so far away from

every one, from God himself, that the courage went out of my body like

the air out of a tire. Dinky-Dunk was right; it is life that is taming

me.

I stood at the window praying, and then I slipped back into bed.

Dinky-Dunk works so hard and gets so tired that it would take a Chinese

devil-gong to waken him, once he's asleep. He did not stir when I crept

back into bed. And that, as I lay there wide awake, made me feel that

even my own husband had betrayed me. And I _bawled_. I must have shaken

the bed, for Dinky-Dunk finally did wake up. I couldn't tell him what

was the matter. I blubbered out that I only wanted him to hold me. He

took me in his arms and kissed my wet eyelids, hugging me up close to

him, until I got quieter. Then I fell asleep. But poor Dinky-Dunk was

awake when I opened my eyes about four, and had been that way for hours.

He was afraid of disturbing me by taking his arm from under my head.

To-day he looks tired and dark around the eyes. But he was up and off

early. There is so much to be done these days! He is putting up a

grub-tent and a rough sleeping-shack for the harvest "hands," so that I

won't be bothered with a lot of rough men about the house here. I'm

afraid I'm an encumbrance, when I should be helping. But they seem to be

taking everything out of my hands.

_Saturday the Second_

I love to watch the wheat, now that it's really turning. It waves like a

sea and stretches off into the distance as far as the eye can follow it.

It's as high as my waist, and sometimes it moves up and down like a

slowly breathing breast. When the sun is low it turns a pure Roman gold,

and makes my eyes ache. But I love it. It strikes me as being glorious,

and at the same time pathetic--I scarcely know why. I can't analyze my

feelings. But the prairie brings a great peace to my soul. It is so

rich, so maternal, so generous. It seems to brood under a passion to

give, to yield up, to surrender all that is asked of it. And it is so

tranquil. It seems like a bosom breathed on by the breath of God.

_Wednesday the Sixth_

It is nearly a year, now, since I first came to Casa Grande. I can

scarcely believe it. The nights are getting very cool again and any time

now there might be a heavy frost. If it should freeze this next week or

two I think my Dinky-Dunk would just curl up and die. Poor boy, he's

working so hard! I pray for that crop every night. I worry about it.

Last night I dreamt it was burnt up in a prairie-fire and woke up

screaming for wet blankets. Dinky-Dunk had to hold me until I got quiet

again. I asked him if he loved me, now that I was getting old and ugly.

He said I was the most beautiful thing God ever made and that he loved

me in a deeper and nobler way than he did a year ago. Then I asked him

if he'd ever get married again, if I should die. He called me silly and

said I was going to live to be eighty, and that a gasoline-tractor

couldn't kill me. But he promised I'd be the only one, whatever

happened. And I believe him. I know Dinky-Dunk would go in black for a

solid year, if I _should_ die, and he'd never, never marry again, for

he's the sort of Old Sobersides who can only love one woman in one

lifetime. And I'm the woman, glory be!

_Tuesday the Twelfth_

Harvest time is here. The stage is cleared, and the last and great act

of the drama now begins. It's a drama with a stage a thousand miles

wide. I can hear through the open windows the rattle of the

self-binders. Olga is driving one, like a tawny Boadicea up on her

chariot. She said she never saw such heads of wheat. This is the first

day's cutting, but those flapping canvas belts and those tireless arms

of wood and iron won't have one-tenth of Dinky-Dunk's crop tied up by

midnight. It is very cold, and Olie has lugubriously announced that it's

sure going to freeze. So three times I've gone out to look at the

thermometer and three times I've said my solemn little prayer: "Dear

God, please don't freeze poor Dinky-Dunk's wheat!" And the Lord heard

that prayer, for a Chinook came about two o'clock in the morning and the

mercury slowly but steadily rose.

_Thursday the Fourteenth_

I had a great deal to talk about to-day. But I can't write much.... I'm

afraid. I dread being alone. I wish I'd been a better wife to my poor

old gold-bricked Dinky-Dunk! But we are what we are, character-kinks and

all. So when he understands, perhaps he'll forgive me. I'm like a

cottontail in the middle of a wheat-patch with the binders going round

and round and every swathe cutting away a little more of my covering.

And there can't be much more hiding away with my secret. But I shall

never openly speak of it. The binder can cut off my feet first, the same

as Olie's did with that mother-rabbit which stood trembling over her

nest of young. Why must life sometimes be so ruthlessly tragic? And why,

oh, why, are women sometimes so absurd? And why should I be afraid of

what every woman who would justify her womanhood must face? Still, I'm

afraid!

_Wednesday the Fifth_

Three long weeks since those last words were written. And what shall I

say, or how shall I begin?

In the first place, everything seemed gray. The bed was gray, my own

arms were gray, the walls looked gray, the window-glass was gray, and

even Dinky-Dunk's face was gray. I didn't want to move, for a long time.

Then I got the strength to tell Mrs. Watson that I wanted to speak to my

husband. She was wrapping something up in soft flannel and purring over

it quite proudly and calling it a blessed little lamb. When poor

pale-faced Dinky-Dunk bent over the bed I asked him if it had a receding

chin, or if it had a nose like Olie's. And he said it had neither, that

it was a king of a boy and could holler like a good one.

Then I told Dinky-Dunk what had been in my secret soul, for so many

months. Uncle Carlton had a receding chin, a boneless, dew-lappy sort

of chin I'd always hated, and I'd been afraid it might kind of

skip-and-carry one and fasten itself on my innocent offspring. Then,

later on, I'd been afraid of Olie's frozen nose, with the split down the

center. And all the while I kept remembering what the Morleys' old

colored nurse had said to me when I was a schoolgirl, a girl of only

seventeen, spending that first vacation of mine in Virginia: "Lawdy,

chile, yuh ain't no bigger'n a minit! Don't yuh nebber hab no baby,

chile!"

Isn't it funny how those foolish old things stick in a woman's memory?

For I've had my baby and I'm still alive, and although I sometimes

wanted a girl, Dinky-Dunk is so ridiculously proud and happy seeing it's

a boy that I don't much care. But I'm going to get well and strong in a

few more days, and here against my breast I'm holding the God-love-itest

little lump of pulsing manhood, the darlingest, solemnest, placidest,

pinkest hope of the white race that ever made life full and perfect for

a foolish mother.

The doctor who finally got here--when both Olga and Mrs. Dixon agreed

that he couldn't possibly do a bit of good--announced that I had come

through it all like the true Prairie Woman that I was. Then he somewhat

pompously and redundantly explained that I was a highly organized

individual, "a bit high-strung," as Mrs. Dixon put it. I smiled into the

pillow when he turned to my anxious-eyed Dinky-Dunk and condoningly

enlarged on the fact that there was nothing abnormal about a woman like

me being--well, rather abnormal as to temper and nerves during the last

few months. But Dinky-Dunk cut him short.

"On the contrary, sir; she's been wonderful, simply wonderful!"

Dinky-Dunk stoutly declared. Then he reached for my hand under the

coverlet. "She's been an angel!"

I squeezed the hand that held mine. Then I looked at the doctor, who had

turned away to give some orders to Olga.

"Doctor," I quite as stoutly declared, "I've been a perfect devil, and

this dear old liar knows it!" But our doctor was too busy to pay much

attention to what I was saying. He merely murmured that it was all

normal, quite normal, under the circumstances. So, after all, I'm just

an ordinary, everyday woman! But the man of medicine has ordered me to

stay in bed for twelve days--which Olga regards as unspeakably

preposterous, since one day, she proudly announced, was all her mother

ever asked for. Which shows the disadvantages of being too civilized!

_Sunday the Ninth_

I'm day by day getting stronger, though I'm a lady of luxury and lie in

bed until ten every morning. To-day when I was sitting up to eat

breakfast, with my hair braided in two tails and a pink and white

hug-me-tight over my nightie, Dinky-Dunk came in and sat by the bed. He

tried to soft-soap me by saying he'd be mighty glad when I was running

things again so he could get something fit to eat. Olga, he admitted,

was all right, but she hadn't the touch of his Gee-Gee. He confessed

that for nearly a month now the house had been a damned gynocracy and he

was getting tired of being bossed around by a couple of women. _Mio

piccino_ no longer looks like a littered whelp of the animal world, as

he did at first. His wrinkled little face and his close-shut eyes used

to make me think of a little old man, with all the wisdom of the ages

shut up in his tiny body. And it is such a knowing little body, with

all its stored-up instincts and guardian appetites! My little _tenor

robusto_, how he can sing when he's hungry! Last night I sat up in bed,

listening for my son's--Dinky-Dink's--breathing. At first I thought he

might be dead, he was so quiet. Then I heard his lips move in the

rhapsodic deglutition of babyland dreams. "Dinky-Dunk," I demanded,

"what would we do if Babe should die?" And I shook him to make him

answer. He stared up at me with a sleepy eye. "That whale?" he commented

as he blinked contentedly down at his offspring and then turned over and

went to sleep. But I slipped a hand in under little Dinky-Dink's body,

and found it as warm as a nesting bird.

_Monday the Tenth_

I noticed that Dinky-Dunk had not been smoking lately, so I asked him

what had become of the rest of his cigars. He admitted that he had given

them to Olie. "When?" I asked. And Dinky-Dunk colored up as he answered,

rather casually, "Oh, the day Buddy Boy was born!" How men merge down

into the conventional in their more epochal moments!

The second day after my baby's birth Olga rather took my breath away by

carrying in as neat a little wooden cradle as any prince of the royal

blood would care to lie in. _Olie had made it_. He had worked on it

during his spare hours in the evening, and even Dinky-Dunk hadn't known.

I made Olga hold it up at the foot of the bed so I could see it better.

It had been scroll-sawed and sand-papered and polished like any

factory-made baby-bed, and my faithful old Olie had even attempted some

hand-carving along the rockers and the head-board. But as I looked at it

I realized that it must have taken weeks and weeks to make. And that

gave me an odd little earthquaky feeling in the neighborhood of the

midriff, for I knew then that my secret had been no secret at all.

Dinky-Dunk, by the way, has just announced that we're to have a

touring-car. He says I've earned it!

_Tuesday the Eleventh_

Yesterday was so warm that I sat out in the sun and took an ozone-bath.

I sat there, staring down at my boy, realizing that I was a mother. My

boy--bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh! It's so hard to believe! And

now I am one of the mystic chain, and no longer the idle link. I am a

mother. And I'd give an arm if you and Chinkie and Scheming-Jack could

see my boy, at this moment. He's like a rose-leaf and he's got six

dimples, not counting his hands and feet--for I've found and kissed 'em

all--on different parts of his blessed little body. Dinky-Dunk came back

from Buckhorn yesterday with a lot of the foolishest things you ever

clapped eyes on--a big cloth elephant that grunts when you pull its

tail, a musical spinning-top, a high-chair, and a projecting lantern.

They're for Dinky-Dink, of course. But it will be a week or two before

he can manipulate the lantern!

_Wednesday the Thirteenth_

Dinky-Dunk has taken Mrs. Dixon home and come back with a brand-new

"hand," which, of course, is prairie-land synecdoche for a new hired

man. His name is Terry Dillon, and as the name might lead you to

imagine, he's about as Irish as Paddy's pig. He is blessed with a

potato-lip, a buttermilk brogue, and a nose which, if he follows it

faithfully, will some day lead him straight to Heaven. But Terry,

Dinky-Dunk tells me, is a steady worker and a good man with horses, and

that of course rounds him out as a paragon in the eyes of my

slave-driving lord and master. I asked where Terry came from.

Dinky-Dunk, with rather a grim smile, acknowledged that he'd been

working for Percy.

Terry, it seems, has no particular love for an Englishman. And Percy had

affronted his haughty Irish spirit with certain ideas of caste which

can't be imported into the Canadian West, where the hired man is every

whit as good as his master--as that master will tragically soon find out

if he tries to make his help eat at second table! At any rate, Percy and

potato-lipped Terry developed friction which ended up in every promise

of a fight, only Dinky-Dunk arrived in the nick of time and took Terry

off his harassed neighbor's hands. I told him he had rather the habit of

catching people on the bounce. But I am reserving my opinion of Terry

Dillon. We are a happy family here, and I want no trouble-makers in my

neighborhood.

I have been studying some of the New York magazines, going rather

hungrily through their advertisements where such lovely layettes are

described. My poor little Dinky-Dink's things are so plain and rough and

meager. I envy those city mothers with all those beautiful linens and

laces. But my little Spartan man-child has never known a single day's

sickness. And some day he'll show 'em!

_Thursday the Fourteenth_

When Olie came in after dinner yesterday I asked him where my husband

was. Olie, after some hesitation, admitted that he was out in the

stable. I asked just what Dinky-Dunk was doing there, for I'd noticed

that after each meal he slipped silently away. Again Olie hesitated.

Then he finally admitted that he thought maybe my lord was out there

smoking. So I went out, and there I found my poor old Dinky-Dunk sitting

on a grain-box puffing gloomily away at his old pipe. For a minute or

two he didn't see me, so I went right over to him. "What does this

mean?" I demanded.

"Why?" he rather guiltily equivocated.

"Why are you smoking out here?"

"I--er--I rather thought you might think it wouldn't be good for the

Boy!" He looked pathetic as he said that, I don't know why, though I

loved him for it. He made me think of a king who'd been dethroned, an

outsider, a man without a home. It brought a lump into my throat.

I wormed my way up close to him on the grain-box, so that he had to hold

me to keep from falling off the end. "Listen to me," I commanded. "You

are my True Love and my Kaikobád and my Man-God and my Soul-Mate! And no

baby is ever going to come between me and you!"

"You shouldn't say those awful things," he declared, but he did it only

half-heartedly.

"But I want you to sit and smoke with me, beloved, the same as you

always did," I told him. "We can leave the windows open a little and it

won't hurt Dinky-Dink, for that boy gets more ozone than any city child

that was ever wheeled out in the Mall! It can't possibly hurt him. What

hurts me is being away from you so much. And now give me a hug, a tight

one, and tell me that you still love your Lady Bird!" He gave me two,

and then two more, until Tumble-Weed turned round in his stall and

whinnied for us to behave.

_Friday the Fifteenth_

I've been keeping Terry under my eye, and I don't believe he's a

trouble-maker. His first move was to lift Babe out of the cradle, hold

him up and publicly announce that he was a darlin'. Then he pointed out

to me what a wonderful head the child had, feeling his frontal bone and

declaring he was sure to make a great scholar in his time. Dinky-Dunk,

grinning at the sober way in which I was swallowing this, pointedly

inquired of Terry whether it was Milton or Archimedes that Babe most

resembled as to skull formation. But it isn't Terry's blarney that has

made me capitulate; it's the fact that he has proved so companionable

and has slipped so quietly into his place in our little lonely circle of

lives on this ragged edge of nowhere.

And he's as clean as a cat, shaving every blessed morning with a little

old broken-handled razor which he strops on a strip of oiled bootleg.

He declares that razor to be the finest bit of steel in all the

Americas, and showed off before Olie and Olga yesterday morning by

shaving without a looking-glass, which trick he said he learned in the

army. He also gave Olie a hair-cut, which was badly needed, and on

Sunday has promised to rig up a soldering-iron and mend all my pans for

me. He looks little over twenty, but is really thirty and more, and has

been in India and Mexico and Alaska.

I caught him neatly darning his own woolen socks. Instead of betraying

shame at being detected in that effeminate pastime he proudly explained

that he'd learned to do a bit of stitching in the army. He hasn't many

possessions, but he's very neat in his arrangement of them. A good

soldier, he solemnly told me, always had to be a bit of an old maid.

"And you were a grand soldier, Terry, I know," I frankly told him. "I've

done a bit av killing in me time!" he proudly acknowledged. But as he

sat there darning his sock-heel he looked as though he couldn't kill a

field mouse. And in his idle hours he reads _Nick Carter_, a series of

paper-bound detective stories, almost worn to tatters, which he is going

through for the second or third time. These adventures, I find, he later

recounts to Olie, who is slowly but surely succumbing to the poison of

the penny-dreadful and the virus of the shilling-shocker! I even caught

Dinky-Dunk sitting up over one of these blood-curdling romances the

other night, though he laughed a little as I dragged him off to bed, at

the absurdity of the situations. Terry's eyes lighted up when he saw my

books and magazines. When I told him he could take anything he wanted,

he beamed and said it would sure be a glorious winter he'd be having,

with all that book-reading when the long nights came. But before those

long nights are over I'm going to try to pilot Terry into the channels

of respectable literature.

_Saturday the Sixteenth_

I love the milky smell of my Dinky-Dink better than the perfume of any

flower that ever grew. He's so strong now that he can almost lift

himself up by his two little hands. At least he can really and actually

give a little _pull_. Two days ago our touring-car arrived. It is a

beauty. It skims over these smooth prairie trails like a yacht. From now

on we can run into Buckhorn, do our shopping, and run out again inside

of two or three hours. We can also reach the larger towns without

trouble and it will be so much easier to gather up what we need for Casa

Grande. Dinky-Dink seems to love the car. Ten minutes after we have

started out he is always fast asleep. Olga, who holds him in the back

seat when I get tired, sits in rapt and silent bliss as we rock along at

thirty miles an hour. And no wonder, for it's the next best thing to

sailing out on the briny deep!

I can't help thinking of Terry's attitude toward Olga. He doesn't

actively dislike her, but he quietly ignores her, even more so than Olie

does. I've been wondering why neither of them has succumbed to such

physical grandeur. Perhaps it's because they're physical themselves. And

then I think her largeness oppresses Terry, for no man, whether he's

been a soldier or not, likes to be overtopped by a woman.

The one exception, of course, is Percy. But Percy is a man of

imagination. He can realize that Olga is more than a mere type. He

agrees with me that she's a sort of miracle. To Terry she's only a mute

and muscular Finnish servant-girl with an arm like a grenadier's. To

Percy she is a goddess made manifest, a superhuman body of superhuman

vigor and beauty and at the same time a body crowned with majesty and

robed in mystery. And I still incline to Percy's opinion. Olga is always

wonderful to me. Her lips are such a soft and melting red, the red of

perfect animal health. The very milkiness of her skin is an

advertisement of that queenly and all-conquering vitality which lifts

her so above the ordinary ruck of humanity. And her great ruminative

eyes are as clear and limpid as any woodland pool.

She blushes rose color sometimes when Percy comes in. I think he finds a

secret joy in sensing that reaction in anything so colossal. But he

defends himself behind that mask of cool impersonality which is the last

attribute of the mental aristocrat, no matter what his feelings may be.

His attitude toward Terry, by the way, is a remarkably companionable one

in view of the fact of their earlier contentions. They can let by-gones

be by-gones and talk and smoke and laugh together. It is Terry, if any

one, who is just a wee bit condescending. And I imagine that it is the

aura of Olga which has brought about this oddly democratizing condition

of affairs. She seems to give a new relationship to things, softening a

point here and illuminating a point there as quietly as moonlight itself

can do.

_Monday the Seventeenth_

Yesterday Olga carried home a whole pailful of mushrooms, for an Indian

summer seems to have brought on a second crop of them. They were lovely.

But she refused to eat any. I asked her why. She heaved her huge

shoulders and said she didn't know. But she does, I feel sure, and I've

been wondering why she's afraid of anything that can taste so good, once

they are creamed and heaped on a square of toast. As for me

I love 'em, I love 'em, and who shall dare

To chide me for loving that mushroom fare?

_Wednesday the Nineteenth_

I found myself singing for all I was worth as I did my work this

morning. Dinky-Dunk came and stood in the door and said it sounded like

old times. I feel strong again and have ventured to ask my lord and

master if I couldn't have the weentiest gallop on Paddy once more. But

he's made me promise to wait for a week or two. The last two or three

nights have been quite cold, and away off, miles and miles across the

prairie, we can see the glow of fires where different ranchers are

burning their straw, after the wind-stackers have blown it from the

threshing machines. Sometimes it burns all night long.

_Friday the Twenty-first_

I have this morning found out why Olga won't eat mushrooms. It was very

cold again last night, for this time of year. Percy came over, and we

had a ripping fire and popped Ontario pop-corn with Ontario maple sirup

poured over it. Olga and Olie and Terry all came in and sat about the

stove. And being absolutely happy and contented and satisfied with life

in general, we promptly fell to talking horrors, the same as a cook

stirs lemon juice into her pudding-sauce, I suppose, to keep its

sweetness from being too cloying. That revel in the by-paths of the

Poesque began with Dinky-Dunk's casual reference to the McKinnon ranch

and Percy's inquiry as to why its earlier owner had given it up. So

Dinky-Dunk recounted the story of Andrew Cochrane's death. And it was

noticeable that poor old Olie betrayed visible signs of distress at this

tale of a young ranchman being frozen to death alone in his shack in

mid-winter. So Dinky-Dunk, apparently with malice prepense, enlarged on

his theme, describing how all young Cochrane's stock had starved in

their stalls and how his collie dog which had been chained to a

kennel-box outside the shack had first drawn attention to the tragedy. A

government inspector, in riding past, had noticed the shut-up shack, had

pounded on the door, and had promptly discovered the skeleton of the dog

with a chain and collar still attached to the clean-picked neckbones.

And inside the shack he had found the dead man himself, as life-like,

because of the intense cold, as though he had fallen asleep the night

before.

It was not a pleasant story, and my efforts to picture the scene gave me

rather a bristly feeling along the pin-feather area of my anatomy. And

again undoubted signs of distress were manifest in poor Olie. The face

of that simple-souled Swede took on such a look of wondering trouble

that Dinky-Dunk deliberately and at great detail told of a ghost that

had been repeatedly seen in an abandoned wickyup a little farther west

in the province.

And that, of course, fired the Celtic soul of Terry, who told of the

sister of his Ould Counthry master who had once been taken to a

hospital. And just at dusk on the third day after that his young master

was walking down the dark hall. As he passed his sister's door, there

she stood all in white, quietly brushing her hair, as plain as day to

his eyes. And with that the master rushed down-stairs to his mother

asking how Sheila had got back from the hospital. And his old mother,

being slow of movement, started for Sheila's room. But before she so

much as reached the foot of the stairs a neighbor woman came running in,

wiping her eyes with her shawl-end and saying, "Poor Sheila died this

minute over t' the hospital!" I can't tell it as Terry told it, and I

don't know whether he himself believed in it or not, but the huge bulk

of Olie Larson sat there bathed in a fine sweat, with his eyes fixed on

the stove front. He was by no means happy, and yet he seemed unable to

tear himself away, just as Gimlets and I used to sit chained to the spot

while Grandfather Heppelwhite continued to intone the dolorous history

of the "Babes in the Woods" until our ultimate and inevitable collapse

into tears!

So Percy, who is not without his spirit of ragging, told several

whoppers, which he later confessed came from the Society of Psychical

Research records. And I huskily recounted Uncle Carlton's story of the

neurasthenic lady patient who went into a doctor's office and there

beheld a skull standing on his polished rosewood desk. Then, as she sat

staring at it, this skull started to move slowly toward her. It later

turned out to be only a plaster-of-Paris paper weight, and a mouse had

got inside it and found a piece of cracker there--and a cracker, I had

to explain to Percy, was the name under which a biscuit usually

masqueraded in America. That mouse, in its efforts to get the last of

that cracker, had, of course, shifted the skull along the polished wood.

This reminded Dinky-Dunk of the three medical students who had tried to

frighten their landlady's daughter by smuggling an arm from the

dissecting room and hiding it under the girl's pillow. Dinky-Dunk even

solemnly avowed that the three men were college chums of his. They

waited to hear the girl's scream, but as there was nothing but silence

they finally stole into the room. And there they saw the girl sitting on

the floor, holding the arm in her hands. As she sat there she was

mumbling to herself and eating one end of it! Of course the poor thing

had gone stark staring mad.

Olie groaned audibly at this and wiped his forehead with his

coat-sleeve. But before he could get away Terry started to tell of the

four-bottle Irish sea captain who was sober only when at sea and one

night in port stumbled up to bed three sheets in the wind. When he had

navigated into what he thought was his own room he was astounded to find

a man already in bed there, and even drunker than he was himself, too

drunk, in fact, to move. And even the candles had been left burning.

But the old captain climbed over next to the wall, clothes and all, and

would have been fast asleep in two minutes if two stout old ladies

hadn't come in and started to cry and say a prayer or two at the side of

the bed. Thereupon the old captain, muddled as he was, quietly but

inquisitively reached over and touched the man beside him. _And that man

was cold as ice!_ The captain gave one howl and made for the door. But

the old ladies went first, and they all rolled down the stairs one after

the other and the three of them up and ran like the wind. "And niver

wanst did they stop," declared the brogue-mouthing Terry, "till they

lept flat against the sea-wall!"

Olie, who had moved away to the far end of the table, got up at this

point and went to the door and looked out. He sighed lugubriously as he

stared into the darkness of the night. The outer gloom, apparently, was

too much for him, as he came slowly and reluctantly back to his chair at

the far end of the table and it was plain to see that he was as

frightened as a five-year-old child. The men, I suppose, would have

badgered him until midnight, for Terry had begun a story of a negro

who'd been sent to rob a grave and found the dead man not quite dead.

But I declared that we'd had enough of horrors and declined to hear

anything more about either ghosts or deaders. I was, in fact, getting

just a wee bit creepy along the nerve-ends myself. And Babe whimpered a

little in his cradle and brought us all suddenly back from the Wendigo

Age to the time of the kerosene lamp. "Fra' witches and warlocks," I

solemnly intoned, "fra' wurricoos and evil speerits, and fra' a' ferly

things that wheep and gang bump in the nicht, Guid Lord deliver us!" And

that incantation, I feel sure, cleared the air for both my own

sprite-threatened offspring and for the simple-minded Olie himself,

although Dinky-Dunk explained that my Scotch was rather worse than the

stories.

But it was this morning after breakfast that I learned from Olga why she

never cared to eat mushrooms. And all day long her story has been

hanging between me and the sun, like a cloud. Not that there is

anything so wonderful about the story itself, outside of its naked

tragedy. But I think it was more the way that huge placid-eyed girl told

it, with her broken English and her occasional pauses to grope after the

right word. Or perhaps it was because it came as such a grim reality

after the trifling grotesqueries of the night before. At any rate, as I

heard it this morning it seemed as terrible as anything in Tolstoi's

_Heart of Darkness_, and more than once sent my thoughts back to the

sorrows of the house of OEdipus. It startled me a little, too, for I

never thought to catch an echo of Greek tragedy out of the full soft

lips of a Finnish girl who was helping me wash my breakfast dishes.

It began as I was deciding on my dinner menu, and looked to see if all

our mushrooms had been used up. That prompted me to ask the girl why she

never ate them. I could see a barricaded look come into her eyes but she

merely shrugged and said that sometimes they were poison and killed

people. I told her that this was absurd and that any one with ordinary

intelligence soon got to know a meadow mushroom when he saw one. But

sometimes, Olga insisted, they were death cups. If you ate a death cup

you died, and nothing could save you. I tried to convince her that this

was just a peasant superstition, but she announced that she had seen

death cups, many of them, and had seen people who had been killed by

them. And then brokenly, and with many heavy gestures of hesitation, she

told me the story.

Nearly seventy miles northwest of us, up near her old home, so she said,

a Pole named Andrei Przenikowski and his wife used to live. They had one

son, whose name was Jozef. They were poor, always poor, and could never

succeed. So when Jozef was fifteen years old he went to the coast to

make his fortune. And the old father and mother had a hard time of it,

for old Andrei found it no easy thing to get about, having had his feet

frozen years before. He stumped around like a hen with frost-bitten

claws, Olga said, and his wife, old as she was, had to help him in the

fields. One whole winter, he told Olga's father, they had lived on

turnips. But season after season dragged on, and still they existed, God

knows how. Of Jozef they never heard again. But with Jozef himself it

was a different story. The boy went up to Alaska, before the days of the

Klondike strike. There he worked in the fisheries, and in the lumber

camps, and still later he joined a mining outfit. Then he went in to the

Yukon.

That was twelve years after he had first left home. He was a strong man

by this time and spoke English very well. And the next year he struck

luck, and washed up a great deal of gold, thousands of dollars' worth of

gold. But he saved it all, for he had never forgotten the old folks on

their little farm. So he gathered up his money and went down to Seattle,

and then crossed to Vancouver. From there he made his way back to his

old home, dressed like a man of the world and wearing a big gold watch

and chain and a gold ring. And when he walked in on the old folks they

failed to recognize him--and that Jozef thought the finest of jokes. He

filled the little sod-covered shack with his laughter, for he was happy.

He knew that for the rest of their days their troubles had all ended. So

he walked about and made plans, but still he did not tell them who he

was. It was so good a joke that he intended to make the most of it. But

he said that he had news of their Jozef, who was not so badly off for a

ne'er-do-well. Before he left the next day, he promised, they should be

told about their boy. And he laughed again and slapped his pocketful of

gold and the two old folks sat blinking at him in awe, until he

announced that he was hungry and confided to them that his friend Jozef

had once told him there were wonderful mushrooms round-about at that

season of the year.

Andrei and his wife talked together in the cow-shed, before the old man

hobbled out to gather the mushrooms. Poverty and suffering had made them

hard and the sight of this stranger with so much gold was too much for

them. So it was a plate full of death cups which Andrei's wife cooked

for the brown-faced stranger with the loud laugh. And they stood about

and watched him eat them. Then he died, as Andrei knew he must die. But

the old woman hid in the cow-shed until it was over, for it took some

time. Together then the old couple searched the dead man's bags and his

pockets. They found papers and certain marks on his body. They knew then

that they had murdered their own son. The old man hobbled all the way to

the nearest village, where he sent a letter to Olga's father and bought

a clothes-line to take home. The journey took him an entire day. With

that clothes-line Andrei Przenikowski and his wife hanged themselves,

from one of the rafters in the cow-shed.

Olga said that she was only five years old then, but she remembered

driving over with the others, after the letter had come to her father's

place. She can still remember seeing the two old bodies hanging side by

side and twisting slowly about in the wind. And she saw what was left of

the mushrooms. She says she can never forget it and dreams of it quite

often. And Olga is not what you would call emotional. She told me, as

she dried her hands and hung up the dish-pan, that she can still see her

people staring down at what was left of that plate of poisoned death

cups, which had turned quite black, almost as black as the dead man she

saw them lift up on the dirty bed.

_Monday the Twelfth_

Yesterday was Sunday and Olga in her best bib and tucker sat out in the

sun with Dinky-Dink. She seemed perfectly happy merely to hold him. I

looked out, to make sure he was all right, for a few days before Olga

had nearly given me heart failure by balancing my boy on one huge hand,

as though he were a mutton-chop, so that the adoring Olie might see him

kick. As I stood watching Olga crooning above Buddy Boy, Percy rode up.

Then he came over and joined Olga, who carefully lifted up the veil

covering Dinky-Dink's face, and showed him off to the somewhat

intimidated Percy. Percy poked a finger at him, and made absurd noises,

and felt his legs as Olga directed and then sat down in front of Olga.

They talked there for a long time, quite oblivious of everything about

them. At least Percy talked, for Olga's replies seemed mostly

monosyllabic. But she kept bathing him in that mystic moonlight stare

of hers and sometimes she showed her teeth in a slow and wistful sort of

smile. Percy clattered on, quite unconscious that I was standing in the

doorway staring at him. They seemed to be great pals. And I've been

wondering what they talked about.

_Wednesday the Fourteenth_

To-day after dinner Dinky-Dunk took the Boy and held him up on Paddy's

back, where he looked like a bump on a log. And that started me thinking

that it wouldn't be so long before my little Snoozerette had a pony of

his own and would be cantering off across the prairie like a monkey on a

circus horse. For I want my boy to ride, and ride well. And then a

little later he would be cantering off to school. And then it wouldn't

be such a great while before he'd be hitting the trail side by side with

some clear-eyed prairie girl on a dappled pinto, and I'd be a

silvery-haired old lady wondering if that clear-eyed girl was good

enough for my son! And there I was, as usual, dreaming of the future!

All day long the fact that Dinky-Dunk is getting extravagant has been

hitting me just under the fifth rib. So I asked him if we could really

afford a six-cylinder car with tan slip-covers and electric lights.

"Afford it?" he echoed, "of course we can afford it. We can afford

anything. Hang it all, our lean days are over and we haven't had the

imagination to wake up to the fact. And d'you know what I'm going to do

if certain things come my way? I'm going to send you and the Babe down

to New York for the winter!"

"And where will you be?" I promptly inquired. The look of mingled pride

and determination went out of his face.

"Oh, I'll have to hang around the Polar regions up here to look after

things. But you and the Boy have got to have your chance. And I'll come

down for two weeks at Easter and bring you home with me!"

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

"Of course I won't," acknowledged Dinky-Dunk. "But think what it will

mean to you, Gee-Gee, to have a few months in the city again! And think

what you've been missing!"

"Goosey-goosey-gander!" I said as I got his foolish old head in

Chancery. "I want you to listen to me. There's nothing I've been

missing. And you are plum locoed, Honey Chile, if you think I could ever

be happy away from you, in New York or any other city. And I wouldn't go

there for the winter if you gave me the Plaza and all the Park for a

back yard!"

That declaration of mine seemed to puzzle him. "But think what it would

mean to the Boy!" he contended.

"Well, what?" I demanded.

"Oh, good--er--good pictures and music and all that sort of thing!" he

vaguely explained. I couldn't help laughing at him.

"But, Dinky-Dunk, don't you think Babe's a month or so too young to take

up Debussy and the Post-Impressionists, you big, foolish, adorable old

muddle-headed captor of helpless ladies' hearts!" And I firmly announced

that he could never, never get rid of me.

_Thursday the Fifteenth_

Now that Olga is working altogether inside with me she is losing quite a

little of her sunburn. Her skin is softer and she has acquired a little

more of the Leonardo di Vinci look. She almost seems to be getting

spiritualized--but it may be simply because she's lengthened her skirts.

She loves Babe, and, I'm afraid, is rather spoiling him. I find her a

better and better companion, not only because she talks more, but

because she seems in some way to be climbing up to a newer level.

Between whiles, I'm teaching her to cook. She learns readily, and is

proud of her progress. But the thing of which she is proudest is her

corsets. And they _do_ make a difference. Even Dinky-Dunk has noticed

this. Yesterday he stood and stared after her.

"By gum," he sagely remarked, "that girl is getting a figure!" Men are

so absurd. When this same Olga was going about half uncovered he never

even noticed her. Now that she's mystified her nether limbs with a

little drapery he stands staring after her as though she were a Venus de

Milo come to life. And Olga is slowly but surely losing a little of her

Arcadian simplicity. Yesterday I caught her burning up her cowhide

boots. She is ashamed of them. And she is spending most of her money on

clothes, asking me many strange questions as to apparel and carrying off

my fashion magazines to her bedroom for secret perusal. For the first

time in her life she is using cold cream. And the end seems to justify

the means, for her skin is now like apple blossoms. Rodin, I feel sure,

would have carried that woman across America on his back, once to have

got her into his atelier!

Last week I persuaded Terry to take a try at Meredith and lent him my

green cloth copy of _Harry Richmond_. Three days ago I found the seventh

page turned down at the corner, and suspecting that this marked the

final frontier of his advance, I tied a strand of green silk thread

about the volume. It was still there this morning, though Terry daily

and stoutly maintains that he's getting on grand with that fine green

book of mine! But at noon to-day when Dinky-Dunk got back from Buckhorn

he handed Terry a parcel, and I noticed the latter glanced rather

uneasily about as he unwrapped it. This afternoon I discovered that it

held two new books in paper covers. One was _The Hidden Hand_ and the

other was called _The Terror of Tamaraska Gulch_. Terry, of late, has

been doing his reading in his own room. And Nick Carter, apparently, is

not to be so easily displaced. But a man who can make you read his books

for the third time must be a genius. If I were an author, that's the

sort of man I'd envy. And I think I'll try Percival Benson with _The

Terror of Tamaraska Gulch_ when Terry is through with it!

_Friday the Sixteenth_

We were just finishing dinner to-day, and an uncommonly good one it

seemed to me, and I was looking contentedly about my little family

circle, wondering what more life could hold for a big healthy hulk of a

woman like me, when the drone and purr of an approaching motor-car broke

through the sound of our talk. Dinky-Dunk, in fact, was laying down the

law about the farmer of the West, maintaining that he was a

broader-spirited and bigger-minded man than his brother of the East, and

pointing out that the westerner's wife was a queen who if she had little

ease at least had great honor. And I was just thinking that one glorious

thing about this same queen was that she at least escaped from all the

twentieth-century strain and dislocation in the relationship between

city men and women, when the hum of that car brought me back to earth

and reminded me that I might have a tableful of guests to feed. The car

itself drew up, with a flutter of its engine, half-way between the shack

and the corral, and at that sound I imagine we all rather felt like

Robinson Crusoes listening to the rattle of an anchor cable in Juan

Fernandez's quietest bay. And through the open window I could make out a

huge touring-car pretty well powdered with dust and with no less than

six men in it.

Terry, all eyes, dove for the window, and Olie, all mouth, for the door.

Olga leaned half-way across the table to look out, and I did a little

staring myself. The only person who remained quiet was Dinky-Dunk. He

knocked out his pipe, stuck it in his pocket, put on his hat and caught

up a package of papers from his work table. Then he stalked out, with

his gray fighting look about the eyes. He went out just as one of the

bigger men was about to step down from the car, so that the bigger man

changed his mind and climbed back in his seat, like a king reascending

his throne. And they all sat there so sedate and non-committal and

dignified, rather like dusty pallbearers in an undertaker's wagonette,

that I promptly decided they had come to foreclose a mortgage and take

my Dinky-Dunk's land away from him, at one fell swoop!

I could see my lord walk right up to the running-board, with curt little

nods to his visitors, and I knew by the trim of his shoulders that there

was trouble ahead. Yet they started talking quietly enough. But inside

of two minutes my Dinky-Dunk was shaking his fist in the face of one of

the younger and bigger men and calling him a liar and somewhat

tautologically accusing him of knowing that he was a liar and that he

always had been one. This altogether ungentlemanly language naturally

brought forth language quite as ungentlemanly from the accused, who

stood up in the car and took his turn at dancing about and shaking his

own fist. And then the others seemed to take sides, and voices rose to a

shout, and I saw that there was going to be another fight at Casa

Grande--and I promptly decided to be in it. So off went my apron and

out I went.

It was funny. For, oddly enough, the effect of my entrance on the scene

was like that on a noisy class-room at the teacher's return. The tumult

stopped, rather sheepishly, and that earful of men instinctively slipped

on their armor plate of over-obsequious sex gallantry. They knew I

wasn't a low-brow. I went right up to them, though something about their

funereal discomfiture made me smile. So Dinky-Dunk, mad as a wet hen

though he was, had to introduce every man-jack of them to me! One was a

member of Parliament, and another belonged to some kind of railway

committee, and another was a road construction official, and another was

a mere capitalist who owned two or three newspapers. The man Dinky-Dunk

had been calling a liar was a civil engineer, although it seemed to me

that he had been acting decidedly uncivil. They ventured a platitude

about the beautiful Indian summer weather and labored out a ponderous

joke or two about such a bad-tempered man having such a good-looking

wife--for which I despised them all. But I could see that even if my

intrusion had put the soft pedal on their talk it had also left

everything uncomfortably tentative and non-committal. For some reason or

other this was a man's fight, one which had to be settled in a man's

way. So I decided to retire with outward dignity even if with inward

embarrassment. But I resented their uncouth commercial gallantry almost

as much as I abominated their trying to bully my True Love. And I gave

them one Parthian shot as I turned away.

"The last prize-fight I saw was in a sort of _souteneur's_ cabaret in

the Avenue des Tilleuls," I sweetly explained to them. "But that was

nearly three years ago. So if there is going to be a bout in my back

yard, I trust you gentlemen will be so good as to call me!"

And smiling up into their somewhat puzzled faces, I turned on my heel

and went into the house. One of the men laughed loud and deep, at this

speech of mine, and a couple of the others seemed to sit puzzling over

it. Yet two minutes after I was inside the shack that most uncivil civil

engineer and Dinky-Dunk were at it again. Their language was more than I

should care to repeat. The end of it was, however, that the six dusty

pallbearers all stepped stiffly down out of their car and Dinky-Dunk

shouted for Olie and Terry. At first I thought it was to be a duel, only

I couldn't make out how it could be fought with a post-hole augur and a

few lengths of jointed gaspipe, for this was what the men carried away

with them.

Away across the prairie I could see them apparently engaged in the silly

and quite profitless occupation of putting down a post-hole where it

wasn't in the least needed, and then clustering about this hole like a

bunch of professorial bigwigs about a new specimen on a microscope

slide. Then they moved on and made another hole, and still another,

until I got tired of watching them. It was two hours later before they

came back. Their voices now seemed more facetious and there was more

laughing and joking, Dinky-Dunk and the uncivil civil engineer being the

only quiet ones. And then the car engine purred and hummed and they

climbed heavily in and lighted cigars and waved hands and were off in a

cloud of dust.

But Dinky-Dunk, when he came back to the shack with his papers, was in

no mood for talking. And I knew better than to try to pump him. To-night

he came in early for supper and announced that he'd have to leave for

Winnipeg right away and might even have to go on to Ottawa. So I cooked

his supper and packed his bag and held Babe up for him to kiss good-by.

But still I didn't bother him with questions, for I was afraid of bad

news. And he knew that I knew I could trust him.

He kissed me good-by in a tragically tender, or rather a tenderly tragic

sort of way, which made me wonder for a moment if he was possibly never

coming back again. So I made 'em all wait while I took one extra, for

good measure, in case I should be a grass widow for the rest of my

days.

To-night, however, I sat Terry down at the end of the table and third

degreed him to the queen's taste. The fight, as far as I can learn from

this circuitous young Irishman, is all about a right of way through our

part of the province. Dinky-Dunk, it seems, has been working for it for

over a year. And the man he called wicked names had been sent out by the

officials to report on the territory. My husband claims he was bribed by

the opposition party and turned in a report saying our district was

without water. He also proclaimed that our land--_our_ land, mark

you!--was unvaryingly poor and inferior soil! No wonder my Dinky-Dunk

had stormed! Then Terry rather disquieted me by chortlingly announcing

that they had put one over on the whole bunch. For, three days before,

he'd quietly put down twenty soil and water-test holes and carefully

filled them in again. But he'd found what he was after. And that little

army of paid knockers, he acknowledged, had been steered into the

neighborhood where the soil was deepest and the water was nearest. And

that soon showed who the liar was, for of course everything came out as

Dinky-Dunk wanted it to come out!

But this phase of it I didn't discuss with Terry, for I had no desire to

air my husband's moral obliquities before his hired man. Yet I am still

disturbed by what I have heard. Oh, Dinky-Dunk, I never imagined you

were one bit sly, even in business!

_Sunday the Eighteenth_

Olie and Terry seem convinced of the fact that Dinky-Dunk's farming has

been a success. We have saved all our wheat crop, and it's a whopper.

Terry, with his crazy Celtic enthusiasms, says that by next year they'll

be calling Dinky-Dunk the Wheat King of the West. Olga and Percy went

buggy riding this afternoon. I wish I had some sort of scales to weight

my Snoozerette. I know he's doubled in the last three weeks.

_Sunday the Twenty-fifth_

My Dinky-Dunk is home again. He looks a little tired and hollow-eyed,

but when the Boy crowed and smiled up at him his poor tired face

softened so wonderfully that it brought the tears to my eyes. I finally

persuaded him to stop petting Babe and pay a little attention to me.

After supper he opened up his extra hand-bag and hauled out the heaps of

things he'd brought Babe and me. Then I sat on his knee and held his

ears and made him blow away the smoke, every shred of it, so I could

kiss him in my own particular places.

_Tuesday the Twenty-seventh_

Dinky-Dunk has sailed off to Buckhorn to do some telegraphing he should

have done Saturday night. My suspicions about his slyness, by the way,

were quite unfounded. It was the guileless-eyed Terry who led those

railway officials out to the spot where he'd already secretly tested for

water and found signs of it. And Terry can't even understand why

Dinky-Dunk is so toweringly angry about it all!

_Wednesday the Twenty-eighth_

When Dinky-Dunk came in last night, after his drive out from Buckhorn,

there was a look on his face that rather frightened me. I backed him up

against the door, after he'd had a peep at the Boy, and said, "Let me

smell your breath, sir!" For with that strange light in his eyes I

surely thought he'd been drinking. "Lips that touch liquor," I sang,

"shall never touch mine!"

But I was mistaken. And Dinky-Dunk only laughed in a quiet inward

rumbling sort of way that was new to him. "I believe I am drunk, Boca

Chica," he solemnly confessed, "drunk as a lord!" Then he took both my

hands in his.

"D'you know what's going to happen?" he demanded. And of course I

didn't. Then he hurled it point-blank at me.

"_The railway's going to come!_"

"Come where?" I gasped.

"Come here, right across our land! It's settled. And there's no mistake

about it this time. Inside of ten months there'll be choo-choo cars

steaming past Casa Grande!"

"Skookum!" I shouted.

"And there'll be a station within a mile of where you stand! And inside

of two years this seventeen or eighteen hundred acres of land will be

worth forty dollars an acre, easily, and perhaps even fifty. And what

that means you can figure out for yourself!"

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

seventeen hundred was.

But that was not all. It would do away with the road haul to the

elevator, which might have taken most of the profit out of his grain

growing. To team wheat into Buckhorn would have been a terrible

discount, no matter what luck he might have with his crops. So he'd been

moving heaven and earth to get the steel to come his way. He'd pulled

wires and interviewed members and guaranteed a water-tank supply and

promised a right of way and made use of his old engineering

friends--until his battle was won. And his last fight had been against

the liar who'd sent in false reports about his district. But that was

over now, and Casa Grande will no longer be the jumping-off place of

civilization, the dot on the wilderness. It will be on the time-tables

and the mail-routes, and I know my Dinky-Dunk will be the first mayor of

the new city, if there ever is a city to be mayor of!

_Friday the Thirtieth_

Dinky-Dunk came in at noon to-day, tiptoed over to the crib to see if

the Boy was all right, and then came and put his hands on my shoulders,

looking me solemnly in the eye: "What do you suppose has happened?" he

demanded.

"Another railroad," I ventured.

He shook his head. Of course it was useless for me to try to guess. I

pushed my finger against Dinky-Dunk's Adam's apple and asked him what

the news was.

"Percival Benson Woodhouse has just calmly announced to me that, next

week, _he's going to marry Olga_," was my husband's answer.

And he wondered why I smiled.

_Sunday the First_

Little Dinky-Dink is fast asleep in his hand-carved Scandinavian cradle.

The night is cool, so we have a fire going. Big Dinky-Dunk, who has been

smoking his pipe, is sitting on one side of the table, and I am sitting

on the other. Between us lies the bundle of house-plans which have just

been mailed up to us from Philadelphia. This is the second night we've

pored over them. And we've decided what we're to do at Casa Grande.

We're to have a telephone, as soon as the railway gets through, and a

wind-mill and running water, and a new barn with a big soft-water tank

at one end, and a hot-water furnace in the new house and sleeping

porches and a butler's pantry and a laundry chute--and next winter in

California, if we want it. And Dinky-Dunk blames himself for never

having had brains enough to plant an avenue or two of poplars or

Manitoba maples about Casa Grande, for now we'll have to wait a few

years for foliage and shade. And he intends to have a playground for

little Dinky-Dink, for he agrees with me that our boy must be strong and

manly and muscular, and must not use tobacco in any form until he is

twenty at least. And Dinky-Dunk has also agreed that I shall do all the

punishing--if any punishing is ever necessary! His father, by the way,

has just announced that he wants Babe to go to McGill and then to

Oxford. But I have been insisting on Harvard, and I shall be firm about

this.

That promised to bring us to a dead-lock, so we went back to our

house-plans again, and Dinky-Dunk pointed out that the new living-room

would be bigger than all our present shack and the annex put together.

And that caused me to stare about our poor little cat-eyed cubby-hole of

a wickyup and for the first time realize that our first home was to be

wiped off the map. And nothing would ever be the same again, and even

the prairie over which I had stared in my joy and my sorrow would

always be different! A lump came in my throat. And when Olga came in and

I handed Dinky-Dink to her she could see that my lashes were wet. But

she couldn't understand.

So I slipped over to the piano and began to play. Very quietly I sang

through Herman Lohr's Irish song that begins:

In the dead av the night, acushla,

When the new big house is still ...

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

shaky.

In the dead av the year, acushla,

When me wide new fields are brown,

I think av a wee ould house,

At the edge av an ould gray town!

I think av the rush-lit faces,

Where the room and loaf was small:

_But the new years seem the lean years,

And the ould years, best av all!_

Dinky-Dunk came and stood close beside me. "Has my Gee-Gee a big sadness

in her little prairie heart?" he asked as he slipped his arms about me.

But I was sniffling and couldn't answer him. And the cling of his

blessed big arms about me only seemed to make everything worse. So I was

bawling openly when he held up my face and helped himself to what must

have been a terribly briny kiss. But I slipped away into my bedroom, for

I'm not one of those apple-blossom women who can weep and still look

pretty. And for two blessed hours I've been sitting here, Matilda Anne,

wondering if our new life will be as happy as our old life was.... Those

old days are over and gone, and the page must be turned. And on that

last page I was about to write "_Tamám shud_." But kinglike and

imperative through the quietness of Casa Grande I hear the call of my

beloved little _tenor robusto_--and if it is the voice of hunger it is

also the voice of hope!