telling her I was already interested in an outside man or two and that
my lord and master hadn't been much influenced by the extraneous
appreciations. But I'm a little afraid of Slinkie and her serpent's
tongue. And I'm a little afraid of this new circle into which my
Duncan has so laboriously engineered himself. They more and more
impress on my simple old prairie soul that the single-track woman is
the woman who gets most out of life, that there's nothing really
great and nothing really enduring that is not built on loyalty and
truth. Character is Fate, as I once before inscribed in this book of
my life. And I've been sitting up to-night, while the eternal bridge
game is going on below, asking myself if all is well with Chaddie
McKail. Have I, or have I not, conceded too much? Am I turning into
nothing more than a mush of concession? Haven't I been bribed by
comfort, and blinded to a situation which I am now almost afraid to
face? Haven't I been selfishly scheming for the welfare of my children
and endangering all their future and my own by the price I am paying?
Haven't I been crazily manning a rickety old pump, trying to keep
afloat a family hulk whose seams are wide open and whose timbers are
water-logged? And how long can this sort of thing go on? And what will
be the end of it?
I try to warn myself not to smash my goods to kill a rat, as the
Chinese say. I try to flatter myself that I am not letting
circumstances stampede me into any hasty decision. There's many a
woman, I suppose, with a husband whose legal promise has outlived his
loyalty. But all is not well here about my heart. I know that, by the
way it keeps sending up little trial-balloons, to see which way the
wind is really blowing.
... And Sunday night Cattalo Charlie went home quite drunk. And our
local member, emboldened by his seventh highball, offhandedly invited
me to accompany him on a little run up to Banff, stabbing me with a
hurt look when I told him I'd see when Duncan could get away from his
work....
I wonder if spring is coming to Casa Grande? And at Alabama Ranch? And
are the pussy-willows showing in the slough-ends? And why doesn't
Peter Ketley ever write to me?
_Saturday the Sixteenth_
Lossie and Gershom, I find, have drifted into the habit of writing to
each other. It is, of course, all purely platonic and pedagogic,
arising out of a common interest in my Dinkie's academic advancement.
But Lossie borrowed Dinkie this morning to have a photograph taken
with him, one copy of which she has very generously promised to send
on to Gershom.... Struthers has sent me a very satisfactory report
from Casa Grande, which I dreamed last night had burned to the ground,
compelling me and my kiddies to live in the old prairie-schooner,
laboriously pulled about the prairie by Tithonus and Calamity Kate.
And when I applied at Peter's door for a handful of meal for my
starving children, he called me worse than a fallen woman and drove me
off into the wilderness.
Duncan asked me to-day if I'd motor up to the mines with him for the
week-end. I had to tell him that I'd promised to take Elmer and
Pauline Augusta to hear Kathleen Parlow and that it wouldn't seem
quite fair to break my word. Duncan said that I was the best judge of
that. Then he slammed a drawer shut and asked me, in his newer manner,
how long I intended to pull this iceberg stuff. "For I can't see," he
concluded after calling out for Tokudo to bring his hat and coat,
"that I'm getting such a hell of a lot out of this arrangement!"
I asked him, as quietly as I could, what he expected of me. But I
could feel my heart pounding quick against my ribs. I am not, and
never pretended to be, any stained-glass saint. And there were a few
things I felt it was about time to unload. But Tokudo cat-footed back
with the coat, and I could hear Lossie's clear laugh as she came in
through the front door with the returning Dinkie, and some inner voice
warned me to hold my peace. So Duncan and I merely stood there staring
at each other, for a moment or two, across an abysmal and unbridgeable
gulf of silence. Then he strode out to his car without as much as a
howdy-do to the startled and slightly mystified Lossie.
_Monday the Eighteenth_
I have just learned that we were blackballed from the Country Club. My
husband, at least, has met with that experience.
It was Lois who let the cat out of the bag. She wasn't clear on all
the details, but it was that old has-been of a Goodhue who was at the
bottom of it all, according to the lady known as Slinkie. Duncan and
he had clashed, from the first. Then Duncan had bought up his paper,
and compelled him to mortgage his home. It was because of something to
do with the Barcona Mines directorate, Lois thought, that Captain
Goodhue had had Duncan blackballed when he applied for membership in
the Country Club, the Captain being vice-president of the original
holding company. Lois laughed none too pleasantly when she added that
her Charley and my Duncan had joined hands to go after the old man's
scalp. And they had got it. They turned him inside out, before they
got through with him. They took his fore-lock and his teepee and his
last string of wampum. And the old snob, of course, would never
forgive them.
... They took his fore-lock, and his teepee ... And it was Chaddie
McKail and her bairns who were now housing warm in that captured
teepee! And all this toiling and moiling, on the part of my husband,
all this scheming and intriguing and juggling with figures, had been a
campaign for power, a plotting and working to get even with this
haughty old enemy who could carry his defeat so lightly! To be
blackballed like that, I remembered, was to be proclaimed not a
gentleman. And it must have cut deep. At one time, I suppose, Duncan
would have called his monocled captain out. But men seem to fight
differently nowadays. They fight differently, but no less grimly. And
Duncan, whether it is a virtue or a vice in his make-up, would always
be a fighter.... Yet I have no sense of gratitude to Lois Murchison
for depositing her painful truths in my lap. She warned me, in her
artless soprano, that there wasn't much good in sentimentalizing the
situation. But she has thrown a shadow across the house which I was
trying to make into a home. Without quite knowing it, she has
cheapened her life-mate in my eyes. Without quite intending it, she
has left my own husband more ignominious than he once stood. I was
trying hard to school myself into a respect for his material
successes. I was struggling to excuse a great many things by the
engrossing nature of his work. But the motive behind all his efforts
seemed suddenly a sordid one, in many ways a mean one.
I keep remembering what Lois said about not sentimentalizing a
situation. But I'm not yet such a mush of concession that I can't tell
black from white. And there's some part of us, some vague but
unescapable part of us, which we must respect, otherwise we have no
right to walk God's good earth....
I want to get away, for a day or two, to think things out. I think,
before Duncan gets back to-morrow, I shall take Poppsy and run up to
Banff. I may get my view-point back. And the mountain quietness may do
me good....
I keep having that same dull ache of disappointment which came to me
as a girl, after I'd idolized a great man called Meredith and after
I'd almost prayed to a great poet called Browning, on finding that one
was so imperfectly monogamous and that the other philandered and
talked foolishly to women. I had thrust my girlish faith in their
hands, as so often befalls with the young, and they had betrayed
it.... But for the second time since I married, I have been reading
_Modern Love_. And I can almost forgive the Apollo of Box Hill for
that betrayal which he knew nothing about.
_Thursday the Twenty-Eighth_
This is Thursday the twenty-eighth of April. I want to be sure of
that. For there are very few things I can be sure of now.
The bottom has fallen out of my world. I sit here, telling myself to
be calm. But it's not easy to sit quiet when you face the very worst
that all life could confront you with. _My Dinkie has run away._
My boy has left me, has left his home, has vanished like smoke into
the Unknown. He is gone and I have no trace of him.
I find it hard to write. Yet I _must_ write, for the mere expression
of what I feel tends to ease the ache. It helps to keep me sane. And
already I realize I was wrong when I wrote "the very worst that all
life could confront you with." For my laddie, after all, is not dead.
He must still be alive. And while there's life, there's hope.
I got back from Banff yesterday morning about nine, and Hilton was
there with the car to meet me, as I had told him to be. I was anxious
to know at once if everything was all right, but I found it hard to
put a question so personal before that impersonal-eyed Englishman. So
I strove to give my interrogation an air of the casual by offhandedly
inquiring: "How's Rowdy, Hilton?"
"Dead, ma'am," was his prompt reply.
This rather took my breath away.
"Do you mean to say that Rowdy is _dead_?" I insisted, noticing
Poppsy's color change as she listened.
"Killed, ma'am," said the laconic Hilton.
"By whom?" I demanded.
"Mr. Murchison, ma'am," was the answer.
"How?" I asked, feeling my vague dislike for that particular name
sharpen up to something dangerously like hatred.
"He always comes up the drive a bit fast-like, ma'am. He hit the pup,
and that was the end of him!"
"Does Dinkie know?" was my first question, after that.
"He _saw_ it, ma'am," admitted my car-driver.
"Saw what?"
"Saw Mr. Murchison throw the dog over the wall into the brush!"
"What did he say?"
"He swore a bit, ma'am, and then laughed," admitted Hilton, after a
pause.
"Dinkie laughed?" I cried, incredulous.
"No; Mr. Murchison, ma'am," explained Hilton.
"What did Dinkie say?" I insisted. And again the man on the
driving-seat remained silent a moment or two.
"It was what he _did_, ma'am," he finally remarked.
"What did he do?" I demanded.
"Ran into the house, ma'am, and snatched the icepick off the kitchen
table. Then he went to the big car like a mad 'un, he did. Pounded
holes in every blessed tire with his pick!"
"And then what?" I asked, with my heart up in my throat.
Hilton waited until he had taken a crowded corner before answering.
"Then he found the dead dog, ma'am, and bathed it, and borrowed the
garden spade from me. Then he took it somewheres back in the ravine
and buried it. I gave him the tool-box off the old roadster, to put
what was left of the pup in."
"And then?" I prompted, with a quaver in my voice I couldn't control.
"He met Mr. Murchison coming out and he called him w'at I'd not like
to repeat, ma'am, until Mr. McKail stepped out to see what was wrong,
and interfered."
"_How_ did he interfere?" was my next question.
"By taking the lad into the house, ma'am," was my witness's retarded
reply.
"Then what happened?" I exacted.
I waited, knowing what was coming, but I dreaded to hear it.
"He gave him a threshing, ma'am," I heard Hilton's voice saying, far
away, as though it came to me over a long-distance telephone on a wet
night.
I sat rigid as we mounted American Hill. I sat rigid as we swerved in
through the ridiculous manor-like gate and up the winding drive and in
under the ugly new porte-cochère. I didn't even wait for Poppsy as I
got out of the car. I didn't even speak to Tokudo as he ran mincingly
to take my things. I walked straight to the breakfast-room where I saw
my husband sitting at the end of the oblong white table, stirring a
cup of coffee with a spoon.
"Where's Dinkie?" I asked, trying to keep my voice low but not quite
succeeding.
Duncan looked up at me with a coldly meditative eye.
"Where he usually is at this time of day," he finally answered.
"Where?" I repeated.
"At school, of course," admitted my husband as he reached out for a
piece of buttered toast. He was making a pretense at being very
tranquil-minded. But his hand, I noticed, wasn't so steady as it might
have been.
"Is he all right?" I demanded, with my voice rising in spite of
myself.
"Considerably better, I imagine, than he has been for some time," was
the deliberate answer from the man with the bloodshot eyes at the end
of the table.
"What do you mean by that?" I asked. And any one of intelligence, I
suppose, could see I was making that question a challenge.
"I mean that since you saw him last he's had a damned good whaling,"
said Duncan, with his jaw squared, so that he reminded me of a
King-Lud bulldog.
I paid no attention to Tokudo, who came into the room to repeat that
his master was wanted at the telephone.
"Do you mean you struck that child?" I demanded, leaning on the table
and looking straight into his eyes, which met mine quite unabashed,
and with an air of mockery about them.
My husband nodded as he pushed back his chair.
"He got a good one," he asserted as he rose to his feet and rather
leisurely brushed a crumb or two from his vest-front. He could even
afford to smile as he said it. My expression, I suppose, would have
made any man smile. But there was something maddening in his mockery,
at such a moment. There was something gratuitously cruel in his parade
of unconcern. Yet, oddly enough, as I looked at his slightly blotched
face I couldn't help remembering that that was the face I had once
kissed and held close against my cheek, had _wanted_ to hold against
my cheek. And now I hated it.
I had to wait and cast about for words of hatred strong enough to
carry the arrows of enmity which nothing could stop me from
delivering. But while I waited Tokudo announced for the third time
that my husband was wanted at the telephone. And a very simple thing
happened. My husband answered his call.
I saw Duncan turn and walk out of the room. I could hear his steps in
the hallway, loud on the waxed hardwood and low on the rugs. I could
hear his deliberated chest-tones as he talked over the wire, talked
quietly and earnestly, talked me and my hatred out of his head and out
of his world. And I realized, as I sat there at the table-end with my
gloves twisted up under my hands and my heart even more twisted up
under my ribs, that it was all useless, that it was all futile. He was
beyond the reach of my resentment. We were in different worlds,
forevermore.
I was still sitting there when he looked in at the door, with his hat
and coat on, on his way out. I could feel him there, without directly
seeing him. And I could feel, too, that he wanted to say something.
But I declined to lift my head, and I could hear the door close as he
went out to the waiting car.
I sat there for a long time, thinking about my Dinkie. Twice I almost
surrendered to the impulse to telephone to Lossie Brown. But I knew it
would be no easy matter to get in touch with her. And in two hours it
would be twelve, and any minute after that my boy would be home again.
I tried to cross-examine Tokudo, but I could get nothing out of that
tight-lipped Jap. I watched the clock. I noticed Hilton, when he got
back, raking blood-stains off the gravel of the driveway. I wandered
about, like a lost turkey-hen, trying to dramatize my meeting with
Dinkie, doing my best to cooper together some incident which might
keep our first minute or two together from being too hard on my poor
kiddie. I heard the twelve o'clock whistles, at last, and then the
Westminster-chimes of the over-ornate clock in the library announce
that noon had come. And still the minutes dragged on.
And when the tension was becoming almost unbearable I heard a step on
the gravel and my heart started to pound.
But instead of Dinkie, it was Lossie, Lossie with smiling lips and
inquiring brown eyes and splashes of rose in her cheeks from rapid
walking.
"Where's Dinkie?" I asked.
She stopped short, still smiling.
"That's exactly what I was going to ask?" I heard her saying. Then her
smile faded as she searched my face. "There's--there's nothing
happened, has there?"
I groped my way to a pillar of the porte-cochère and leaned against
it.
"Didn't Dinkie come to school this morning?" I asked as the earth
wavered under my feet.
"No," acknowledged Lossie, still searching my face. And a frown of
perplexity came into her own.
I knew then what had happened. I knew it even before I went up to
Dinkie's room and started my frantic search through his things. I
could see that a number of his more treasured small possessions were
gone. I delved forlornly about, hoping that he might have left some
hidden message for me. But I could find nothing. I sat looking at his
books and broken toys, at the still open copy of _The Count of Monte
Cristo_ which he must have been poring over only the night before, at
his neatly folded underclothes and the little row of gravel-worn
shoes. They took on an air of pathos, an atmosphere of the memorial.
Yet, oddly enough, it was Lossie, and Lossie alone, who broke into
tears. The more she cried, in fact, the calmer I found myself
becoming, though all the while that dead weight of misery was hanging
like lead from my heart.
I went at once to the telephone and called up Duncan's office. He was
still there, though I had to wait several minutes before I could get
in touch with him.
I had thought, at first, that he would be offhandedly skeptical at the
message which I was sending him over the wire, the message that my boy
had run away. He might even be flippantly indifferent, and remind me
that much worse things could have happened.
But I knew at once that he was genuinely alarmed at the news which I'd
given him. It apparently staggered him for a moment. Then he said in
his curt telephonic chest-tones, "I'll be up at the house, at once."
He came, before I'd even completed a second and more careful search.
His face was cold and non-committal enough, but his color was gone and
there was a look that was almost one of contrition in his troubled
eyes, which seemed unwilling to meet mine. He questioned Lossie and
cross-examined Hilton and Tokudo, and then called up the Chief of
Police. Then he telephoned to the different railway stations, and
carried Lossie off in the car to the McArthurs', to interview Benny,
and came back an hour later with that vague look of frustration still
on his face.
He sat down to luncheon, but he ate very little. He was silent for
quite a long time.
"Your boy's all right," he said in a much softer voice than I had
expected from him. "He's big enough to look after himself. And we'll
be on his trail before nightfall. He can't go far."
"No; he can't go far," I echoed, trying to fortify myself with the
knowledge that he must have taken little more than a dollar from the
gilded cast-iron elephant which he used as a bank.
"I don't want this to get in the papers," explained my husband.
"It's--it's all so ridiculous. I've put Kearney and two of his men on
the job. He's a private detective, and he'll keep busy until he gets
the boy back."
Duncan got up from the table, rather heavily. He stood hesitating a
moment and then stepped closer to my chair.
"I know it's hard," he said as he put a hand on my shoulder. "But
it'll be all right. We'll get your boy back for you."
I didn't speak, because I knew that if I spoke I'd break down and make
an idiot of myself. My husband waited, apparently expecting me to say
something. Then he took his hand away.
"I'll get busy with the car," he said with a forced matter-of-factness,
"and let you know when there's any news. I've wired Buckhorn and sent word
to Casa Grande--and we ought to get some news from there."
But there was no news. The afternoon dragged away and the house seemed
like a tomb. And at five o'clock I did what I had wanted to do for
six long hours. I sent off a forty-seven word telegram to Peter
Ketley, telling him what had happened....
Duncan came back, at seven o'clock, to get one of the new photographs
of Dinkie and Lossie for identification purposes. They had rounded up
a small boy at Morley and Kearney was motoring out to investigate.
We'd know by midnight....
It is well after midnight, and Duncan has just had a phone-message
from Morley. The little chap they had rounded up was a Barnado boy
fired with a sudden ambition to join his uncle in the gold-fields of
Australia. Somewhere, in the blackness of this big night, my homeless
Dinkie is wandering unguarded and alone.
_Friday the Twenty-Ninth_
I have had no word from Peter.... I've had no news to end the ache
that pins me like a spear-head to the wall of hopelessness. Duncan, I
know, is doing all he can. But there is so little to do. And this
world of ours, after all, is such a terrifyingly big one.
_Saturday the Thirtieth_
I was called to the phone before breakfast this morning and it was the
blessed voice of Peter I heard from the other end of the wire. My
telegram had got out to him from Buckhorn a day late. But he had no
definite news for me. He was quite fixed in his belief, however, that
Dinkie would be bobbing up at his old home in a day or two.
"The boy will travel this way," he assured me. "He's bound to do that.
It's as natural as water running down-hill!"
Duncan asked me whom I'd been talking to, and I had to tell him. His
face clouded and the familiar quick look of resentment came into his
eyes.
"I can't see what that Quaker's got to do with this question," he
barked out. But I held my peace.
_Sunday the First_
I have found a message from my Dinkie. I came across it this morning,
by accident. It was in my sewing-basket, the basket made of birch-bark
and stained porcupine quills and lined with doe-skin, which I'd once
bought from a Reservation squaw in Buckhorn with a tiny papoose on her
back. Duncan had upbraided me for passing out my last five-dollar bill
to that hungry Nitchie, but the poor woman needed it.
My fingers were shaking as I unfolded the note. And written there in
the script I knew so well I read:
"Darligest Mummsey:
I am going away. But dont worry about me for I will be alright. I
couldn't stay Mummsey after what hapened. Some day I will come
back to you. But I'm not as bad as all that. I'll love you always
as much as ever. I can take care for myself so don't worry,
please. And please feed my two rabits reglar and tell Benny I'll
save his jacknife and rember every day I'm rembering you. X X X X
X X X
Your aff'cte son,
DINKIE."
It seemed like a voice from the dead, it was bittersweet consolation,
and, in a way, it stood redemption of Dinkie himself. I'd been
upbraiding him, in my secret heart of hearts, for his silence to his
mother. That's a streak of his father in him, had been my first
thought, that unthinking cruelty which didn't take count of the
anguish of others. But he hadn't forgotten me. Whatever happens, I
have at least this assuaging secret message from my son. And some day
he'll come back to me. "Ye winna leave me for a', laddie?" I keep
saying, in the language of old Whinstane Sandy. And my mind goes back,
almost six years at a bound, to the time he was lost on the prairie.
That time, I tell myself, God was good to me. And surely He will be
good to me again!
_Tuesday the Third_
We still have no single word of our laddie.... They all tell me not to
worry. But how can a mother keep from worrying? I had rather an awful
nightmare last night, dreaming that Dinkie was trying to climb the
stone wall about our place. He kept falling back with bleeding
fingers, and he kept calling and calling for his mother. Without being
quite awake I went down to the door in my night-gown, and opened it,
and called out into the darkness: "Is anybody there? Is it you,
Dinkie?"
My husband came down and led me back to bed, with rather a frightened
look on his face.
They tell me not to worry, but I've been up in Dinkie's room turning
over his things and wondering if he's dead, or if he's fallen into the
hands of cruel people who would ill-use a child. Or perhaps he has
been stolen by Indians, and will come back to me with a morose and
sullen mind, and with scars on his body....
_Thursday the Fifth_
What a terrible thing is loneliness. The floors of Hell, I'm sure, are
paved with lonesome hearts. Day by day I wait and long for my laddie.
Always, at the back of my brain, is that big want. Day by day I brood
about him and night by night I dream of him. I turn over his old
playthings and his books, and my throat gets tight. I stare at the
faded old snap-shots of him, and my heart turns to lead. I imagine I
hear his voice, just outside the door, or just beyond a bend in the
road, and a two-bladed sword of pain pushes slowly through my
breast-bone. Dear old Lossie comes twice a day, and does her best to
cheer me up. And Gershom has offered to give up his school and join in
the search. Peter Ketley, he tells me, has been on the road for a
week, in a car covered with mud and clothes that have never come off.
_Friday the Sixth_