called his son. Then he strode out of the room and out of the house.
Struthers, in the meantime, circumspectly took possession of Minty,
who was still indecorously shaking a bit of mohair between his jocund
young teeth. She and Minty vanished from the scene. A moment later,
however, Duncan walked back into the room. He had a riding-quirt in
his hand.
"Where's that boy?" he demanded.
I went out to the foot of the stairs, where I met Elmer coming down,
buttoning his waist as he came. For just a moment his eye met mine. It
was a questioning eye, but not a cowardly one. I had intended to speak
to him, but my voice, for some reason, didn't respond to my will. So I
merely took the boy's hand and led him into the living-room. There his
father stood confronting him.
"Did that pup sleep on your bed last night?" demanded the man with the
quirt.
"Yes," said the child, after a moment of silence.
"Did you hear me say that no dog was to sleep in this house?" demanded
the child's father.
"Yes," said Elmer, with his own face as white as his father's.
"Then I think that's about enough," asserted Duncan, turning a
challenging eye in my direction.
"What are you going to do?" I asked. My voice was shaking, in spite of
myself.
"I'm going to whale that youngster within an inch of his life," said
the master of the house, with a deadly sort of intentness.
"I don't want you to do that," I quavered, wondering why my words,
even as I uttered them, should seem so inadequate.
"Of course you don't," mocked my husband. "But this is the limit. And
what you want isn't going to count!"
"I don't want you to do that," I repeated. Something in my voice, I
suppose, must have arrested him, for he stood there, staring at me,
with a little knot coming and going on one side of his skull, just in
front of his upper ear-tip.
"And why not?" he asked, still with that hateful rough ironic note in
his voice.
"Because you don't know what you're punishing this child for," I told
him with all the quietness I could command. "And because you're in no
fit condition to do it."
"You needn't worry about my condition," he cried out--and I could see
by the way he said it that he was still blind with rage. "Come here,
you!" he called to Dinkie.
It was then that the fatal little bell clanged somewhere at the back
of my head, the bell that rings down the curtain on all the slowly
accumulated civilization the centuries may have brought to us. I not
only faced my husband with a snort of scorn, but I tightened my grip
on the child's hand. I tightened my grip on his hand and backed slowly
and deliberately away until I came to the door of my sewing-room.
Then, still facing my husband, I opened that door and said: "Go
inside, Dinkie." I could not see the boy, but I knew that he had done
as I told him. So I promptly slammed the door shut and stood there
facing the gray-lipped man with the riding-quirt in his hand. He took
two slow steps toward me. His chin was thrust out in a way that made
me think of a fighting-cock's beak. He had not shaved that morning,
and his squared jaw looked stubbled and blue and ugly.
"You can't pull that petticoat stuff this time," he said in a hard and
throaty tone which I had never heard from him before. "Get out of my
way!"
"You will not beat that child!" And I myself couldn't have made a
very pretty picture as I flung that challenge up in his teeth.
"Get out of my way," he repeated. He did not shout it. He said it
almost quietly. But I knew, even before he reached out a shaking hand
to thrust me aside, that he was in deadly earnest, that nothing I
could say would hold him back or turn him aside. And it was then that
my eye fell on the big Colt in its stained leather holster, hanging up
high over one corner of the book-cabinet, where it had been put beyond
the reach of the children.
I have no memory of giving any thought to the matter. My reaction must
have been both immediate and automatic. I don't think I even intended
to bunt my husband in the short-ribs the way I did, for the impact of
my body half twisted him about and sent him staggering back several
steps. All I know is that holster and belt came tumbling down as I
sprang and caught at the Colt handle. And I was back at the door
before I had even shaken the revolver free. I was back just in time to
hear my husband say, rather foolishly, for the third time: "Get out of
my way!"
"You stay back there!" I called, quite as foolishly, for by this time
I had the Colt balanced in my hand and was pointing it directly at his
body.
He stopped short, with a vacuous look in his eyes.
"_You fool!_" he said, in a sort of strangled whisper. But it was my
face, and not the weapon, that he was staring at all the while.
"Stay back!" I said again, with my eyes fixed on his.
He hesitated, for a moment, and made a sound that was like the short
bark of a laugh. It was too hard and horrible, though, ever to be
taken for laughter. And I knew that he was not going to do what I had
said.
"Stay back!" I warned him still again. But he stepped forward, with a
grim sort of deliberation, with his challenging gaze locked on mine. I
could hear a thousand warning voices, somewhere at the back of my
brain, and at the same time I could hear a thousand singing devils in
my blood trying to drown out those voices. I could see my husband's
narrowed eyes slowly widen, slowly open like the gills of a dying
fish, for the hate that he must have seen on my face obviously
arrested him. It arrested him, but it arrested him only for a moment.
He dropped his eyes to the Colt in my hand. Then he moved deliberately
forward until his body was almost against the barrel-end. I must have
known what it meant, just as he must have known what it meant. It was
his final challenge. And I must have met that challenge. For, without
quite knowing it, I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger.
There had been something awful, I know, in that momentary silence. And
there was something awful in the sound that came after it, though it
was not the sound my subconscious mind was waiting for. It was
distinct enough and significant enough, heaven knows. But instead of
the explosion of a shell it was the sharp snap of steel against
steel.
The revolver was empty. It was empty-had been empty for weeks. But the
significant fact remained that I had deliberately pulled the trigger.
I had stood ready, in my moment of madness, to kill the man that I
lived with....
Had a ball of lead gone through that man's body, I don't think he
could have staggered back with a more startled expression on his face.
He looked more than bewildered; he looked vaguely humiliated, oddly
and wordlessly affronted, as he stood leaning against the table-edge,
breathing hard, his skin a mottled blue-white to the very lips. He
made an effort to speak, but no sound came from him. For a moment the
dreadful thought raced through me that I had indeed shot him, that in
some mysterious way he was mortally hurt, without this particular
bullet announcing itself as bullets usually do. I looked at the
revolver, stupidly. It seemed to have grown heavy, as heavy as a
cook-stove in my hand.
"You'd do that?" whispered my husband, very slowly, with a stricken
light in his eyes which I couldn't quite understand. I intended to put
the Colt on the table. But something must have been wrong with my
vision, for the loathsome thing fell loathsomely to the floor. I felt
sick and shaken and a horrible misty feeling of homelessness settled
down about me, of a sudden, for I remembered how closely I had skirted
the black gulf of murder.
"Oh, Dinky-Dunk!" I blubbered, weakly, as I groped toward him. He must
have thought that I was going to fall, for he put out his arm and held
me up. He held me up, but there wasn't an atom of warmth in his
embrace. He held me up about the same as he'd hold up an open
wheat-sack that threatened to tumble over on his granary floor. I
don't know what reaction it was that took my strength away from me,
but I clung to his shoulders and sobbed there. I felt as alone in the
gray wastes of time as one of Gershom's lost stars. And I knew that
my Dinky-Dunk would never bend down now and whisper into my ear any
word of comfort, any word of forgiveness. For, however things may have
been at the first, I was the one who was now so hopelessly in the
wrong, _I_ was the big offender. And that knowledge only added to my
misery as I stood there clinging to my husband's shoulders and
blubbering "Oh, Dinky-Dunk!"
It must have grown distasteful to him, my foolish hanging on to him as
though he were a hitching-post, for he finally said in a remote voice:
"I guess we've had about enough of this." He led me rather
ceremoniously to a chair, and slowly let me down in it. Then he
crossed over to the old leather holster and picked it up, and stooped
for the revolver, and pushed it down in the holster and buckled the
cover-flap and tossed the whole thing up to the top of the
book-cabinet again. Then, without speaking to me, he walked slowly out
of the room.
I was tempted to call him back, but I knew, on second thought, that it
would be no use. I merely sat there, staring ahead of me. Then I shut
my eyes and tried to think. I don't know why, but I was thinking about
the bigness of Betelgeuse, which was twenty-seven million times as big
as our sun and which was going on through its millions of miles of
space without knowing anything about Chaddie McKail and what had
happened to her that morning. I was wondering if there were worlds
between me and Betelgeuse with women on them, with women as alone as I
was, when I felt a pair of small arms tighten about my knees and an
adoring small voice whispered "Mummsy!" And I forgot about Betelgeuse.
For it was my Dinkie there, with his little rough hand reaching
hungrily for mine....
Minty has been removed from Casa Grande. I took him over to the
Teetzel ranch in the car, and young Dode Teetzel is to get a dollar a
week for looking after him and feeding him. Only Elmer and I know of
his whereabouts. And once a week the boy can canter over on Buntie and
keep in touch with his pup.
We have a tacit understanding that the occurrences of yesterday
morning are a closed chapter, are not to be referred to by word or
deed. Duncan himself found it necessary to team in to Buckhorn and
left word with Struthers that he would stay in town over night. The
call for the Buckhorn trip was, of course, a polite fabrication, an
expedient _pax in bello_ to permit the dust of battle to settle a
little about this troubled house of McKail. All day to-day I have
felt rather languid. I suppose it's the lethargy which naturally
follows after all violence. Any respectable woman, I used to think,
could keep a dead-line in her soul, beyond which the impulses of evil
dare not venture. But I must have been wrong.... All week I've been
looking for a letter from Peter Ketley. But for once in his life he
seems to have forgotten us.
_Sunday the Twentieth_
I've been wondering to-day just what I'd do if I had to earn my own
living. I could run a ranch, I suppose, if I still had one, but two or
three years of such work would see me a hatchet-faced old termagant
with fallen arches and a prairie-squint. Or I could raise chickens and
peddle dated eggs in a flivver-and fresco hen-coops with whitewash
until the trap-nest of time swallowed me up in oblivion. Or I could
take a rural school somewhere and teach the three R's to little
Slovenes and Frisians and French-Canadians even more urgently in need
of soap and water. Or perhaps I could be housekeeper for one of our
new beef-kings in his new Queen-Anne Norman-Georgian Venetian palace
of Alberta sandstone with tesselated towers and bungalow
sleeping-porches. Or I might even peddle magazines, or start a little
bakery in one of the little board-fronted shops of Buckhorn, or take
in plain sewing and dispose of home-made preserves to the élite of the
community.
But each and all of them would be mere gestures of defeat. I'm of no
value to the world. There was a time when I regarded myself as quite a
Somebody, and prided myself on having an idea or two. Didn't Percy
even once denominate me as "a window-dresser"? There was a time when I
didn't have to wait to see if the pearl-handled knife was the one
intended for the fish-course, and I could walk across a waxed floor
without breaking my neck and do a bit of shopping in the Rue de la
Paix without being taken for a tourist. But that was a long, long time
ago. And life during the last few years has both humbled me and taught
me my limitations. I'm a house-wife, now, and nothing more--and not
even a successful house-wife. I've let everything fall away except the
thought of my home and my family. And now I find that the basket into
which I so carefully packed all my eggs hasn't even a bottom to it.
But I've no intention of repining. Heaven knows I've never wanted to
sit on the Mourner's Bench. I've never tried to pull a sour mug, as
Dinky-Dunk once inelegantly expressed it. I love life and the joy of
life, and I want all of it I can get. I believe in laughter, and I've
a weakness for men and women who can sing as they work. But I've
blundered into a black frost, and even though there was something to
sing about, there's scarcely a blue-bird left to do the singing. But
sometime, somewhere, there'll be an end to that silence. The blight
will pass, and I'll break out again. I know it. I don't intend to be
held down. I _can't_ be held down. I haven't the remotest idea of how
it's going to happen, but I'm going to love life again, and be happy,
and carol out like a meadow-lark on a blue and breezy April morning.
It may not come to-morrow, and it may not come the next day. But it's
going to come. And knowing it's going to come, I can afford to sit
tight, and abide my time....
I've just had a letter from Uncle Chandler, enclosing snap-shots of
the place he's bought in New Jersey. It looks very palatial and
settled and Old-Worldish, shaded and shadowed with trees and softened
with herbage, dignified by the hand of time. It reminds me how many
and many a long year will have to go by before our bald young prairie
can be tamed and petted into a homeyness like that. Uncle Chandler has
rather startled me by suggesting that we send Elmer through to him, to
go to school in the East. He says the boy can attend Montclair
Academy, that he can be taken there and called for every day by
faithful old Fisher, in the cabriolet, and that on Sunday he can be
toted regularly to St. Luke's Episcopal Church, and occasionally go
into New York for some of the better concerts, and even have a
governess of his own, if he'd care for it. And in case I should be
worrying about his welfare Uncle Chandler would send me a weekly
night-letter "describing the condition and the activities of the
child," as the letter expresses it. It sounds very appealing, but
every time I try to think it over my heart goes down like a dab-chick.
My Dinkie is such a little fellow. And he's my first-born, my
man-child, and he means so much in my life. Yet he and his father are
not getting along very well together. It would be better, in many
respects, if the boy could get away for a while, until the raw edges
healed over again. It would be better for both of them. But there's
one thing that would happen: he would grow away from his mother. He'd
come back to me a stranger. He'd come back a little ashamed of his
shabby prairie mater, with her ten-years-old style of hair-dressing
and her moss-grown ideas of things and her bald-looking prairie home
with no repose and no dignifying background and neither a private gym
nor a butler to wheel in the cinnamon-toast. He'd be having all those
things, under Uncle Chandler's roof: he'd get used to them and he'd
expect them.
But there's one thing he wouldn't and couldn't have. He wouldn't have
his mother. And no one can take a mother's place, with a boy like
that. No one could understand him, and make allowances for him, and
explain things to him, as his own mother could. I've been thinking
about that, all afternoon as I ironed his waists and his blue
flannellet pajamas with frogs on like his dad's. And I've been
thinking of it all evening as I patched his brown corduroy knickers
and darned his little stockings and balled them up in a neat little
row. I tried to picture myself as packing them away in a trunk, and
putting in beside them all the clothes he would need, and the books
that he could never get along without, and the childish little
treasures he'd have to carry away to his new home. But it was too much
for me. There was one thing, I began to see, which could never, never
happen. I could never willingly be parted from my Dinkie. I could
think of nothing to pay me up for losing him. And he needed me as I
needed him. For good or bad, we'd have to stick together. Mother and
son, together in some way we'd have to sink or swim!
_Wednesday the Thirtieth_
The tension has been relieved by Dinky-Dunk going off to Calgary.
Along with him he has taken a rather formidable amount of his personal
belongings. But he explains this by stating that business will keep
him in the city for at least six or seven weeks. He has been talking a
good deal about the Barcona coal-mine of late, and the last night he
was with us he talked to Gershom for an hour and more about the
advantages of those newer mines over the Drumheller. The newer field
has a solid slate roof which makes drifting safe and easy, a finer
type of coal, and a chance for big money once the railway runs in its
spur and the officials wake up to the importance of giving them the
cars they need. The whole country, Dinky-Dunk claims, is underlaid
with coal, and our province alone is estimated to contain almost
seventeen per cent. of the world's known supply. And my lord and
master expressed the intention of being in on the clean-up.
I don't know how much of this was intended for my ears. But it served
to disquiet me, for reasons I couldn't quite discern. And the same
vague depression crept over me when Dinky-Dunk took his departure. I
kept up my air of blitheness, it is true, to the last moment, and was
as casual as you please in helping Duncan to pack and reminding him to
put his shaving-things in his bag and making sure the last button was
on his pajamas. I kissed him good-by, as a dutiful wife ought, and
held Pauline Augusta up in the doorway so that she might attempt a
last-minute hand-waving at her daddy.
But I slumped, once it was all over. I felt mysteriously alone in an
indifferent big world with the rime of winter creeping along its
edges. Even Gershom, after the children had had their lesson, became
conscious of my preoccupation and went so far as to ask if I wasn't
feeling well.
I smilingly assured him that there was nothing much wrong with me.
"_Lerne zu leiden ohne zu klagen!_" as the dying Frederick said to a
singularly foolish son.
"But you're upset?" persisted Gershom, with his valorous brand of
timidity that so often reminds me of a robin defending her eggs.
"No, it's not that," I said with a shake of the head. "It's only that
I'm--I'm a trifle too chilly to be comfortable."
And the foolish youth, at that, straightway fell to stoking the fire.
I had to laugh a little. And that made him study me with solemn eyes.
"Just think, Gershom," I said as I gathered up my sewing, "my heart is
perishing of cold in a province which is estimated to contain almost
seventeen per cent. of the world's known coal supply!"
And that, apparently, left him with something to think about as I made
my way off to bed ... It's hard to write coherently, I find, when
you're not living coherently ...
Syd Woodward, of Buckhorn, having learned that I can drive a tractor,
has asked me if I'll take part in the plowing-match to-morrow. And
I've given my promise to show Mere Man what a woman can do in the
matter of turning a mile-long furrow. I feel rather audacious over it
all. And I'm glad to inject a little excitement into life ... I'm
saving up for a new sewing-machine ... Tarzanette has got rather badly
cut up in some of our barb-wire fencing.
_Friday the Fifteenth_
The plowing-match was good fun, and I enjoyed it even more than I had
expected. The men "kidded" me a good deal, and gave me a cheer at the
end (I don't quite know whether it was for my work or my costume) and
I had to pose for photographs, and a moving-picture man even followed
me about for a round, shooting me as I turned my prairie stubble
upside down. But the excitement of the plowing-match has been eclipsed
by a bit of news which has rather taken my breath away. _It is Peter
Ketley who has bought the Harris Ranch._
_Saturday the Twenty-Third_
The rains have brought mushrooms, slathers of mushrooms, and I joy in
gathering them.
Yesterday afternoon I rode past the Harris Ranch. The old place
brought back a confusion of memories. But I was most disturbed by the
signs of building going on there. It seems to mean a new shack on
Alabama Ranch. And a new shack of very considerable dimensions. I've
been wondering what this implies. I don't know whether to be elated or
depressed. And what business is it, after all, of mine?
My Dinkie--I have altogether given up trying to call my Dinkie
anything but Dinkie--came home two evenings ago with a discolored eye
and a distinct air of silence. Gershom, too, seemed equally reticent.
So I set about discreetly third-degreeing Poppsy, who finally
acknowledged, with awe in her voice, that Dinkie had been in a fight.
It was, according to my petticoated Herodotus, a truly terrible fight.
Noses got bloodied, and no one could make the fighters stop. But
Dinkie was unquestionably the conqueror. Yet, oddly enough, I am
informed that he cried all through the combat. He was a crying
fighter. And he had his fight with Climmie O'Lone--trust the Irish to
look for trouble!--who seems to have been accepted as the ring-master
of his younger clan. Their differences arose out of the accusation
that Dinkie, my bashful little Dinkie, had been forcing his unwelcomed
attention on one Doreen O'Lone, Climmie's younger sister. That's
absurd, of course. And Dinkie must have realized it. He didn't want to
fight, acknowledged Poppsy, from the first. He even cried over it. And
Doreen also cried. And Poppsy herself joined in.
I fancy it was a truly Homeric struggle, for it seems to have lasted
for round after round. It lasted, I have been able to gather, until
Climmie was worsted and down on his back crying "Enough!" Which Poppsy
reports Dinkie made him say three times, until Doreen nodded and said
she'd heard. But my young son, apparently, is one of those crying
fighters, who are reckoned, if I remember right, as the worst breed of
belligerents!
I have decided not to tell Dinkie what I know. But I'm rather anxious
to get a glimpse of this young Mistress Doreen, for whom lances are
already being shattered in the lists of youth. The O'Lones regard
themselves as the landed aristocracy of the Elk-trail District. And
Doreen O'Lone impresses me as a very musical appellative. Yet I prefer
to keep my kin free from all entangling alliances, even though they
have to do with a cattle-king's offspring....
I had a short letter from Dinky-Dunk to-day, asking me to send on a
package of papers which he had left in a pigeon-hole of his desk here.
It was a depressingly non-committal little note, without a glimmer of
warmth between the lines. I'm afraid there's a certain ugly truth
which will have to be faced some day. But I intend to stick to the
ship as long as the ship can keep afloat. I am so essentially a family
woman that I can't conceive of life without its home circle. Home,
however, is where the heart is. And it seems to take more than one
heart to keep it going. I keep reminding myself that I have my
children at the same time that I keep asking myself why my children
are not enough, why they can't seem to fill my cup of contentment as
they ought. Now that their father is so much away, a great deal of
their training is falling on my shoulders. And I must, in some way, be
a model to them. So I'll continue to show them what a Penelope I can
be. Perhaps, after all, they will prove our salvation. For our
offspring ought to be the snow-fences along the wind-harried rails of
matrimony. They should prevent drifting along the line, and from
terminal to lonely terminal should keep traffic open ... I have
to-night induced Poppsy to write a long and affectionate letter to her
_pater_, telling him all the news of Casa Grande. Perhaps it will
awaken a little pang in the breast of her absent parent.
_Monday the Twenty-Fifth_