one's chickens coming home to roost. I can even detect sudden impulses
of cruelty in little Dinkie, when, young and tender as he appears to
the casual eye, a quick and wilful passion to hurt something takes
possession of him. Yesterday I watched him catch up his one-eyed Teddy
Bear, which he loves, and beat its head against the shack-floor.
Sometimes, too, he'll take possession of a plate and fling it to the
floor with all his force, even though he knows such an act is surely
followed by punishment. It's the same with Poppsy and Pee-Wee, with
whom he is apt to be over-rough, though his offenses in that direction
may still be touched with just a coloring of childish jealousy, long
and arduously as I struggle to implant some trace of fraternal feeling
in his anarchistic little breast. There are even times, after he's
been hugging my knees or perhaps stroking my cheek with his little
velvet hands and murmuring "Maaa-maa!" in his small and bird-like coo,
when he will suddenly turn savage and try to bite my patella or pull
my ear out by the root.
Most of this cruelty, I think, is born of a sheer excess of animal
spirits. But not all of it. Some of it is based on downright
wilfulness. I have seen him do without things he really wanted, rather
than unbend and say the necessary "Ta-ta" which stands for both
"please" and "thanks" in his still limited vocabulary. The little Hun
will also fall on his picture-books, at times, and do his best to tear
the linen pages apart, flailing them about in the air with genuine
Berserker madness. But along with this, as I've already said, he has
his equally sudden impulses of affection, especially when he first
wakens in the morning and his little body seems to be singing with the
pure joy of living. He'll smooth my hair, after I've lifted him from
the crib into my bed, and bury his face in the hollow of my neck and
kiss my cheek and pat my forehead and coo over me until I squeeze him
so hard he has to grunt. Then he'll probably do his best to pick my
eyes out, if I pretend to be asleep, or experiment with the end of my
nose, to see why it doesn't lift up like a door-knocker. Then he'll
snuggle down in the crook of my arm, perfectly still except for the
wriggling of his toes against my hip, and croon there with happiness
and contentment, like a ring-neck dove.
_Friday the Seventeenth_
Lady Allie couldn't have been picked quite clean to the bone by the
McKails, for she's announced her intention of buying a touring-car and
a gasoline-engine and has had a conference with Dinky-Dunk on the
matter. She also sent to Montreal for the niftiest little English
sailor suit, for Dinkie, together with a sailor hat that has
"Agamemnon" printed in gold letters on its band.
I ought to be enthusiastic about it, but I can't. Dinkie himself,
however, who calls it his "new nailor nuit"--not being yet able to
manage the sibilants--struts about in it proud as a peacock, and
refuses to sit down in his supper-chair until Ikkie has carefully
wiped off the seat of the same, to the end that the beloved nailor
nuit might remain immaculate. He'll lose his reverence for it, of
course, when he knows it better. It's a habit men have, big or little.
Lady Allie has confessed that she is succumbing to the charm of
prairie life. It ought to make her more of a woman and less of a
silk-lined idler. Dinky-Dunk still nurses the illusion that she is
delicate, and manages to get a lot of glory out of that clinging-vine
pose of hers, big oak that he is! But it is simply absurd, the way he
falls for her flattery. She's making him believe that he's a
twentieth-century St. Augustine and a Saint Christopher all rolled
into one. Poor old Dinky-Dunk, I'll have to keep an eye on him or
they'll be turning his head, for all its gray hairs. He is wax in the
hand of designing beauty, as are most of the race of man. And the fair
Allie, I must acknowledge, is dangerously appealing to the eye. It's
no wonder poor old Dinky-Dunk nearly broke his neck trying to teach
her to ride astride. But I intend to give her ladyship an inkling,
before long, that I'm not quite so stupid as I seem to be. She mustn't
imagine she can "vamp" my Kaikobad with impunity. It's a case of any
port in a storm, I suppose, for she has to practise on somebody. But I
must say she looks well on horseback and can lay claim to a poise that
always exacts its toll of respect. She rides hard, though I imagine
she would be unwittingly cruel to her mount. Yet she has been more
offhanded and friendly, the last two or three times she has dropped
over to the shack, and she is kind to the kiddies, especially Dinkie.
She seems genuinely and unaffectedly fond of him. As for me, she
thinks I'm hard, I feel sure, and is secretly studying me--trying to
decipher, I suppose, what her sainted cousin could ever see in me to
kick up a dust about!
Lady Allie's London togs, by the way, make me feel rather shoddy and
slattern. I intend to swing in a little stronger for personal
adornment, as soon as we get things going again. When a woman gives
up, in that respect, she's surely a goner. And I may be a hard-handed
and slabsided prairie huzzy, but there was a time when I stood beside
the big palms by the fountain in the conservatory of Prince Ernest de
Ligne's Brussels house in the _Rue Montoyer_ and the Marquis of
What-Ever-His-Name-Was bowed and set all the orders on his chest
shaking when he kissed my hand and proclaimed that I was the most
beautiful woman in Belgium!
Yes, there was such a time. But it was a long, long time ago, and I
never thought then I'd be a rancher's wife with a barrel-churn to
scald out once a week and a wheezy old pump to prime in the morning
and a little hanging garden of Babylon full of babies to keep warm and
to keep fed and to keep from falling on their boneless little cocos! I
might even have married Theobald Gustav von Brockdorff and turned into
an embassy ball lizard and ascended into the old family landau of his
aunt the baroness, to disport along the boulevards therein very much
like an oyster on the half-shell. I might have done all that, and I
might not. But it's all for the best, as the greatest pessimist who
ever drew the breath of life once tried to teach in his _Candide_. And
in my career, as I have already written, there shall be no jeremiads.
_Sunday the Nineteenth_
I've been trying to keep tab on the Twins' weight, for it's important
that they should gain according to schedule. But I've only Dinky-Dunk's
bulky grain-scales, and it's impossible to figure down to anything as
fine as ounces or even quarter-pounds on such a balancer. Yet my
babies, I'm afraid, are not gaining as they ought. Poppsy is especially
fretful of late. Why can't somebody invent children without colic,
anyway? I have a feeling that I ought to run on low gear for a while.
But that's a luxury I can't quite afford.
Last night, when I was dead-tired and trying to give the last licks to
my day's work without doing a Keystone fall over the kitchen table,
Dinky-Dunk said: "Why haven't you ever given a name to this new place?
They tell me you have a genius for naming things--and here we are
still dubbing our home the Harris shack."
"I suppose it ought to be an Indian name, in honor of Ikkie?" I
suggested, doing my best to maintain an unruffled front. And Duncan
Argyll absently agreed that it might just as well.
"Then what's the matter with calling it Alabama?" I mordantly
suggested. "For as I remember it, that means 'Here we rest.' And I can
imagine nothing more appropriate."
I was half-sorry I said it, for the Lord deliver me always from a
sarcastic woman. But I've a feeling that the name is going to stick,
whether we want it or not. At any rate, Alabama Ranch has rather a
musical turn to it....
I wonder if there are any really perfect children in the world? Or do
the good little boys and girls only belong to that sentimentalized
mid-Victorian fiction which tried so hard to make the world like a
cross between an old maid's herb-garden and a Sunday afternoon in a
London suburb? I have tried talking with little Dinkie, and reasoning
with him. I have striven long and patiently to blow his little spark
of conscience into the active flame of self-judgment. And averse as I
am to cruelty and hardness, much as I hate the humiliation of physical
punishment, my poor kiddie and I can't get along without the slipper.
I have to spank him, and spank him soundly, about once a week. I'm
driven to this, or there'd be no sleep nor rest nor roof about our
heads at Alabama Ranch. I don't give a rip what Barrie may have
written about the bringing up of children--for he never had any of his
own! He never had an imperious young autocrat to democratize. He never
had a family to de-barbarize, even though he did write very pretty
books about the subject. It's just another case, I suppose, where
fiction is too cowardly or too finicky to be truthful. I had theories
about this child-business myself, at one time, but my pipe of illusion
has plumb gone out. It wasn't so many years ago that I imagined about
all a mother had to do was to dress in clinging _negligees_, such as
you see in the toilet-soap advertisements, and hold a spotless little
saint on her knee, or have a miraculously docile nurse in cap and
apron carry in a little paragon all done up in dotted Swiss and
rose-pink, and pose for family groups, not unlike popular prints of
the royal family in full evening dress, on _Louis Quinze_ settees. And
later on, of course, one could ride out with a row of sedate little
princelings at one's side, so that one could murmur, when the world
marveled at their manners, "It's blood, my dears, merely blood!"
But fled, and fled forever, are all such dreams. Dinkie prefers
treading on his bread-and-butter before consuming it, and does his
best to consume the workings of my sewing-machine, and pokes the
spoons down through the crack in the kitchen floor, and betrays a
weakness for yard-mud and dust in preference to the well-scrubbed
boards of the sleeping porch, which I've tried to turn into a sort of
nursery by day. Most fiction, I find, glides lightly over this eternal
Waterloo between dirt and water--for no active and healthy child is
easy to keep clean. That is something which you never, never, really
succeed at. All that you can do is to keep up the struggle, consoling
yourself with the memory that cleanness, even surgical cleanness, is
only an approximation. The plain everyday sort of cleanness promptly
resolves itself into a sort of neck and neck race with dirt and
disorder, a neck and neck race with the soap-bar habitually running
second. Sometimes it seems hopeless. For it's incredible what can
happen to an active-bodied boy of two or three years in one brief but
crowded afternoon. It's equally amazing what can happen to a
respectably furnished room after a healthy and high-spirited young
Turk has been turned loose in it for an hour or two.
It's a battle, all right. But it has its compensations. It _has_ to,
or the race would wither up like an unwatered cucumber-vine. Who
doesn't really love to tub a plump and dimpled little body like my
Dinkie's? I'm no petticoated Paul Peel, but I can see enough beauty in
the curves of that velvety body to lift it up and bite it on its
promptly protesting little flank. And there's unclouded glory in
occasionally togging him out in spotless white, and beholding him as
immaculate as a cherub, if only for one brief half-hour. It's the
transiency of that spotlessness, I suppose, which crowns it with
glory. If he was forever in that condition, we'd be as indifferent to
it as we are to immortelles and wax flowers. If he was always cherubic
and perfect, I suppose, we'd never appreciate that perfection or know
the joy of triumphing over the mother earth that has an affinity for
the finest of us.
But I _do_ miss a real nursery, in more ways than one. The absence of
one gives Dinkie the range of the whole shack, and when on the range
he's a timber-wolf for trouble, and can annoy his father even more
than he can me by his depredations. Last night after supper I heard an
icy voice speaking from the end of the dining-room where Dinky-Dunk
has installed his desk.
"Will you kindly come and see what your son has done?" my husband
demanded, with a sort of in-this-way-madness-lies tone.
I stepped in through the kitchen door, ignoring the quite unconscious
humor of "_my_ son" under the circumstances, and found that Dinkie had
provided a novel flavor for his dad by emptying the bottle of ink into
his brand-new tin of pipe-tobacco. There was nothing to be done, of
course, except to wash as much of the ink as I could off Dinkie's
face. Nor did I reveal to his father that three days before I had
carefully compiled a list of his son and heir's misdeeds, for one
round of the clock. They were, I find, as follows:
Overturning a newly opened tin of raspberries, putting bread-dough in
his ears; breaking my nail-buffer, which, however, I haven't used for
a month and more; paring the bark, with the bread-knife, off the
lonely little scrub poplar near the kitchen door, our one and only
shade; breaking a drinking-glass, which was accident; cutting holes
with the scissors in Ikkie's new service-apron; removing the covers
from two of his father's engineering books; severing the wire joint in
my sewing-machine belt (expeditiously and secretly mended by Whinnie,
however, when he came in with the milk-pails); emptying what was left
of my bottle of vanilla into the bread mixer; and last but not least,
trying to swallow and nearly choking on my silver thimble, in which he
seems to find never-ending disappointment because it will not remain
fixed on the point of his nose.
It may sound like a busy day, but it was, on the whole, merely an
average one. Yet I'll wager a bushel of number one Northern winter
wheat to a doughnut ring that if Ibsen had written an epilogue for
_The Doll's House_, Nora would have come crawling back to her home and
her kiddies, in the end.
_Wednesday the Twenty-second_
Lady Allie is either dunderheaded or designing. She has calmly
suggested that her rural phone-line be extended from Casa Grande to
Alabama Ranch so that she can get in touch with Dinky-Dunk when she
needs his help and guidance. Even as it is, he's called on about five
times a week, to run to the help of that she-remittance-man in
corduroy and dog-skin gauntlets and leggings.
She seems thunderstruck to find that she can't get the hired help she
wants, at a moment's notice. Dinky-Dunk says she's sure to be imposed
on, and that although she's as green as grass, she's really anxious to
learn. He feels that it's his duty to stand between her and the
outsiders who'd be only too ready to impose on her ignorance.
She rode over to see the Twins yesterday, who were sleeping out under
the fly-netting I'd draped over them, the pink-tinted kind they put
over fruit-baskets in the city markets and shops. Poppsy and Pee-Wee
looked exactly like two peaches, rosy and warm and round.
Lady Allie stared at them with rather an abstracted eye, and then,
idiot that she is, announced that she'd like to have twelve. But talk
is cheap. The modern woman who's had even half that number has pretty
well given up her life to her family. It's remarkable, by the way, the
silent and fathomless pity I've come to have for childless women. The
thought of a fat spinster fussing over a French poodle or a faded
blond forlornly mothering a Pekinese chow gives me a feeling that is
at least first cousin to sea-sickness.
Lady Allie, I find, has very fixed and definite theories as to the
rearing of children. They should never be rocked or patted, or be
given a "comfort," and they should be in bed for the night at sundown.
There was a time I had a few theories of my own, but I've pretty well
abandoned them. I've been taught, in this respect, to travel light, as
the overland voyageurs of this country would express it, to travel
light and leave the final resort to instinct.
_Friday the Twenty-fourth_
I was lazy last night, so both the ink-pot and its owner had a rest.
Or perhaps it wasn't so much laziness as wilful revolt against the
monotony of work, for, after all, it's not the 'unting as 'urts the
'osses, but the 'ammer, 'ammer, 'ammer on the 'ard old road! I loafed
for a long time in a sort of sit-easy torpor, with Bobs' head between
my knees while Dinky-Dunk pored over descriptive catalogues about
farm-tractors, for by hook or by crook we've got to have a tractor for
Alabama Ranch.
"Bobs," I said after studying my collie's eyes for a good many
minutes, "you are surely one grand old dog!"
Whereupon Bobs wagged his tail-stump with sleepy content. As I bent
lower and stared closer into those humid eyes of his, it seemed as
though I were staring down into a bottomless well, through a peep-hole
into Infinity, so deep and wonderful was that eye, that dusky pool of
love and trust. It was like seeing into the velvet-soft recesses of a
soul. And I could stare into them without fear, just as Bobs could
stare back without shame. That's where dogs are slightly different
from men. If I looked into a man's eye like that he'd either rudely
inquire just what the devil I was gaping at or he'd want to ask me out
to supper in one of those Pompeian places where a bald-headed waiter
serves lobsters in a _chambre particuliere_.
But all I could see in the eye of my sedate old Bobs was love, love
infinite and inarticulate, love too big ever to be put into words.
"Dinky-Dunk," I said, interrupting my lord and master at his reading,
"if God is really love, as the Good Book says, I don't see why they
ever started talking about the Lamb of God."
"Why shouldn't they?" asked Diddums, not much interested.
"Because lambs may be artless and innocent little things, but when
you've got their innocence you've got about everything. They're not
the least bit intelligent, and they're self-centered and self-immured.
Now, with dogs it's different. Dogs love you and guard you and ache to
serve you." And I couldn't help stopping to think about the dogs I'd
known and loved, the dogs who once meant so much in my life: Chinkie's
Bingo, with his big baptizing tongue and his momentary rainbow as he
emerged from the water and shook himself with my stick still in his
mouth; Timmie with his ineradicable hatred for cats; Maxie with all
his tricks and his singsong of howls when the piano played; Schnider,
with his mania for my slippers and undies, which he carried into most
unexpected quarters; and Gyp, God bless him, who was so homely of face
and form but so true blue in temper and trust.
"Life, to a dog," I went on, "really means devotion to man, doesn't
it?"
"What are you driving at, anyway?" asked Dinky-Dunk.
"I was just wondering," I said as I sat staring into Bobs' eyes, "how
strange it would be if, after all, God was really a dog, the loving
and faithful Watch-Dog of His universe!"
"Please don't be blasphemous," Dinky-Dunk coldly remarked.
"But I'm not blasphemous," I tried to tell him. "And I was never more
serious in my life. There's even something sacred about it, once you
look at it in the right way. Just think of the Shepherd-Dog of the
Stars, the vigilant and affectionate Watcher who keeps the wandering
worlds in their folds! That's not one bit worse than the lamb idea,
only we've got so used to the lamb it doesn't shock us into attention
any more. Why, just look at these eyes of Bobs right now. There's more
nobility and devotion and trust and love in them than was ever in all
the eyes of all the lambs that ever frisked about the fields and
sheep-folds from Dan to Beersheba!"
"Your theory, I believe, is entertained by the Igorrotes," remarked
Dinky-Dunk as he made a pretense of turning back to his
tractor-pamphlet. "The Igorrotes and other barbarians," he repeated,
so as to be sure the screw was being turned in the proper direction.
"And now I know why she said the more she knew about men the better
she liked dogs," I just as coldly remarked, remembering Madame de
Stael. "And I believe you're jealous of poor old Bobs just because he
loves me more than you do."
Dinky-Dunk put down his pamphlet. Then he called Bobs over to his side
of the table. But Bobs, I noticed, didn't go until I'd nodded
approval. So Dinky-Dunk took his turn at sitting with Bobs' nose in
his hand and staring down into the fathomless orbs that stared up at
him.
"You'll never get a lady, me lud, to look up at you like that," I told
him.
"Perhaps they have," retorted Dinky-Dunk, with his face slightly
averted.
"And having done so in the past, there's the natural chance that
they'll do so in the future," I retorted, making it half a question
and half a statement. But he seemed none too pleased at that thrust,
and he didn't even answer me when I told him I supposed I was his
Airedale, because they say an Airedale is a one-man dog.
"Then don't at least get distemper," observed my Kaikobad, very
quietly, over the top of his tractor-catalogue.
I made no sign that I had heard him. But Dinky-Dunk would never have
spoken to me that way, three short years ago. And I imagine he knows
it. For, after all, a change has been taking place, insubstantial and
unseen and subterranean, a settling of the foundations of life which
comes not only to a building as it grows older but also to the heart
as it grows older. And I'm worried about the future.
_Monday the--Monday the I-forget-what_
It's Monday, blue Monday, that's all I remember, except that there's a
rift in the lute of life at Alabama Ranch. Yesterday of course was
Sunday. And out of that day of rest Dinky-Dunk spent just five hours
over at Casa Grande. When he showed up, rather silent and constrained
and an hour and a half late for dinner, I asked him what had happened.
He explained that he'd been adjusting the carbureter on Lady Alicia's
new car.
"Don't you think, Duncan," I said, trying to speak calmly, though I
was by no means calm inside, "that it's rather a sacrifice of dignity,
holding yourself at that woman's beck and call?"
"We happen to be under a slight debt of obligation to _that woman_,"
my husband retorted, clearly more upset than I imagined he could be.
"But, Dinky-Dunk, you're not her hired man," I protested, wondering
how, without hurting him, I could make him see the thing from my
standpoint.
"No, but that's about what I'm going to become," was his altogether
unexpected answer.
"I can't say that I quite understand you," I told him, with a sick
feeling which I found it hard to keep under. Yet he must have noticed
something amusingly tragic in my attitude, for he laughed, though it
wasn't without a touch of bitterness. And laughter, under the
circumstances, didn't altogether add to my happiness.
"I simply mean that Allie's made me an offer of a hundred and fifty
dollars a month to become her ranch-manager," Dinky-Dunk announced
with a casualness that was patently forced. "And as I can't wring that
much out of this half-section, and as I'd only be four-flushing if I
let outsiders come in and take everything away from a tenderfoot, I
don't see--"
"And such a lovely tenderfoot," I interrupted.
"--I don't see why it isn't the decent and reasonable thing," concluded
my husband, without stooping to acknowledge the interruption, "to
accept that offer."
I understood, in a way, every word he was saying; yet it seemed
several minutes before the real meaning of a somewhat startling
situation seeped through to my brain.
"But surely, if we get a crop," I began. It was, however, a lame
beginning. And like most lame beginnings, it didn't go far.
"How are we going to get a crop when we can't even raise money enough
to get a tractor?" was Dinky-Dunk's challenge. "When we haven't help,
and we're short of seed-grain, and we can't even get a gang-plow on
credit?"
It didn't sound like my Dinky-Dunk of old, for I knew that he was
equivocating and making excuses, that he was engineering our ill luck
into an apology for worse conduct. But I was afraid of myself, even
more than I was afraid of Dinky-Dunk. And the voice of Instinct kept
whispering to me to be patient.
"Why couldn't we sell off some of the steers?" I valiantly suggested.
"It's the wrong season for selling steers," Dinky-Dunk replied with a
ponderous sort of patience. "And besides, those cattle don't belong to
me."
"Then whose are they?" I demanded.
"They're yours," retorted Dinky-Dunk, and I found his hair-splitting,
at such a time, singularly exasperating.
"I rather imagine they belonged to the family, if you intend it to
remain a family."
He winced at that, as I had proposed that he should.
"It seems to be getting a dangerously divided one," he flung back,
with a quick and hostile glance in my direction.
I was ready to fly to pieces, like a barrel that's lost its hoops. But
a thin and quavery and over-disturbing sound from the swing-box out on
the sleeping-porch brought me up short. It was a pizzicato note which
I promptly recognized as the gentle Pee-Wee's advertisement of
wakefulness. So I beat a quick and involuntary retreat, knowing only
too well what I'd have ahead of me if Poppsy joined in to make that
solo a duet.
But Pee-Wee refused to be silenced, and what Dinky-Dunk had just said
felt more and more like a branding-iron against my breast. So I
carried my wailing infant back to the dinner-table where my husband
still stood beside his empty chair. The hostile eye with which he
regarded the belcantoing Pee-Wee reminded me of the time he'd spoken
of his own off-spring as "squalling brats." And the memory wasn't a
tranquillizing one. It was still another spur roweling me back to the
ring of combat.
"Then you've decided to take that position?" I demanded as I surveyed
the cooling roast-beef and the fallen Yorkshire pudding.
"As soon as they can fix up my sleeping-quarters in the bunk-house
over at Casa Grande," was Dinky-Dunk's reply. He tried to say it
casually, but didn't quite succeed, for I could see his color deepen a
little. And this, in turn, led to a second only too obvious gesture of
self-defense.
"My monthly check, of course, will be delivered to you," he announced,
with an averted eye.
"Why to me?" I coldly inquired.
"It wouldn't be of much use to me," he retorted. And I resented his
basking thus openly in the fires of martyrdom.
"In that case," I asked, "what satisfaction are you getting out of
your new position?"
That sent the color ebbing from his face again, and he looked at me as
I'd never seen him look at me before. We'd both been mauled by the paw
of Destiny, and we were both nursing ragged nerves and oversensitized
spirits, facing each other as irritable as teased rattlers, ready to
thump rocks with our head. More than once I'd heard Dinky-Dunk
proclaim that the right sort of people never bickered and quarreled.
And I remembered Theobald Gustav's pet aphorism to the effect that
_Hassen machts nichts_. But life had its limits. And I wasn't one of
those pink-eared shivery little white mice who could be intimidated
into tears by a frown of disapproval from my imperial mate. And
married life, after all, is only a sort of _guerre d'usure_.
"And you think you're doing the right thing?" I demanded of my
husband, not without derision, confronting him with a challenge on my
face and a bawling Pee-Wee on my hip.
Dinky-Dunk sniffed.
"That child seems to have its mother's disposition," he murmured,
ignoring my question.
"The prospects of its acquiring anything better from its father seem
rather remote," I retorted, striking blindly. For that over-deft
adding of insult to injury had awakened every last one of my seven
sleeping devils. It was an evidence of cruelty, cold and calculated
cruelty. And by this time little waves of liquid fire were running
through my tingling body.
"Then I can't be of much service to this family," announced Dinky-Dunk,
with his maddening note of mockery.
"I fail to see how you can be a retriever for a flabby-minded idler
and the head of this household at one and the same time," I said out
of the seething crater-fogs of my indignation.
"She's never impressed me as being flabby," he ventured, with a
quietness which only a person who knew him would or could recognize as
dangerous.
"Well, I don't share your admiration for her," I retorted, letting the
tide of vitriol carry me along in its sweep.
Dinky-Dunk's face hardened.
"Then what do you intend doing about it?" he demanded.
That was a poser, all right. That was a poser which, I suppose, many a
woman at some time in her life has been called on to face. What did I
intend doing about it? I didn't care much. But I at least intended to
save the bruised and broken hulk of my pride from utter annihilation.
"I intend," I cried out with a quaver in my voice, "since you're not
able to fill the bill, to be head of this household myself."
"That sounds like an ultimatum," said Dinky-Dunk very slowly, his face
the sickly color of a meerschaum-pipe bowl.
"You can take it any way you want to," I passionately proclaimed,
compelled to raise my voice to the end that it might surmount
Pee-Wee's swelling cries. "And while you're being lackey for Lady
Alicia Newland I'll run this ranch. I'll run it in my own way, and
I'll run it without hanging on to a woman's skirt!"
Dinky-Dunk stared at me as though he were looking at me through a
leper-squint. But he had been brutal, was being brutal. And it was a
case of fighting fire with fire.
"Then you're welcome to the job," I heard him proclaiming out of his
blind white heat of rage. "After _that_, I'm through!"
"It won't be much of a loss," I shot back at him, feeling that he'd
soured a bright and sunny life into eternal blight.
"I'll remember that," he said with his jaw squared and his head down.
I saw him push his chair aside and wheel about and stride away from
the Yorkshire pudding with the caved-in roof, and the roast-beef that
was as cold as my own heart, and the indignantly protesting Pee-Wee
who in some vague way kept reminding me that I wasn't quite as
free-handed as I had been so airily imagining myself. For I mistily
remembered that the Twins, before the day was over, were going to find
it a very flatulent world. But I wasn't crushed. For there are times
when even wives and worms will turn. And this was one of them.
_Thursday the Thirtieth_
It's a busy three days I've been having, and if I'm a bit tuckered out
in body I'm still invincible in spirit. For I've already triumphed
over a tangle or two and now I'm going to see this thing through. I'm
going to see Alabama Ranch make good.
I teamed in to Buckhorn, with Dinkie and the Twins and Ikkie bedded
down in the wagon-box on fresh wheat-straw, and had a talk with Syd
Woodward, the dealer there. It took me just about ten minutes to get
down to hard-pan with him, once he was convinced that I meant
business. He's going to take over my one heavy team, Tumble-Weed and
Cloud-Maker, though it still gives my heart a wrench to think of
parting with those faithful animals. I'm also going to sell off
fifteen or eighteen of the heaviest steers and turn back the tin
Lizzie, which can be done without for a few months at least.
But, on the other hand, I'm going to have an 8-16 tractor that'll turn
over an acre of land in little more than an hour's time, and turn it
over a trifle better than the hired hand's usual "cut and cover"
method, and at a cost of less than fifty cents an acre. Later on, I
can use my tractor for hauling, or turn it to practically any other
form of farm-power there may be a call for. I'm also getting a special
grade of seed-wheat. There was a time when I thought that wheat was
just merely wheat. It rather opened my eyes to be told that in one
season the Shippers' Clearance Association definitely specified and
duly handled exactly four hundred and twenty-eight grades of this
particular grain. Even straight Northern wheat, without the taint of
weed-seed, may be classified in any of the different numbers up to
six, and also assorted into "tough," "wet," "damp," "musty,"
"binburnt" and half a dozen other grades and conditions, according to
the season. But since I'm to be a wheat-grower, it's my duty to find
out all I can about the subject.
I am also the possessor of three barrels of gasoline, and a new
disk-drill, together with the needed repairs for the old drill which
worked so badly last season. I've got Whinstane Sandy patching up the
heavy sets of harness, and at daybreak to-morrow I'm going to have him
out on the land, and also Francois, who has promised to stay with us
another two weeks. It may be that I'll put Ikkie in overalls and get
her out there too, for there's not a day, not an hour, to be lost. I
want my crop in. I want my seed planted, and the sooner the better.
Whinstane Sandy, on account of his lame foot, can't follow a plow. But
there's no reason he shouldn't run a tractor. If it wasn't for my
bairns, of course, I'd take that tractor in hand myself. But my two
little hostages to fortune cut off that chance. I've decided, however,
to have Whinnie build a canopy-top over the old buckboard, and fit two
strong frames, just behind the dashboard, that will hold a couple of
willow-baskets, end to end. Then I can nest Poppsy and Pee-Wee in
these two baskets, right under my nose, with little Dinkie beside me
in the seat, and drive from one end of the ranch to the other and see
that the work is being done, and done right. The Lord knows how I'll
get back to the shack in time to rustle the grub--but we'll manage, in
some way.
The Twins have been doing better, the last week or two. And I rather
dread the idea of weaning them. If I had somebody to look after them I
could, I suppose, get a breast-pump and leave their mid-morning and
mid-afternoon luncheons in cold-storage for them, and so ride my
tractor without interruption. I remember a New York woman who did
that, left the drawn milk of her breast on ice, so that she might gad
and shop for a half-day at a time. But the more I think it over the
more unnatural and inhuman it seems. Yet to hunt for help, in this
busy land, is like searching for a needle in a hay-stack. Already, in
the clear morning air, one can hear the stutter and skip and cough of
the tractors along the opalescent sky-line, accosting the morning sun
with their rattle and tattle of harvests to be. And I intend to be in
on the game.
_Sunday the Second_
I'm too busy to puddle in spilt milk or worry over things that are
past. I can't even take time to rhapsodize over the kitchen-cabinet to
which Whinnie put the finishing touches to-day at noon, though I know
it will save me many a step. Poor old Whinnie, I'm afraid, is more a
putterer than a plowman. He's had a good deal of trouble with the
tractor, and his lame foot seems to bother him, on account of the long
hours, but he proclaims he'll see me through.
Tractor-plowing, I'm beginning to discover, isn't the simple operation
it sounds, for your land, in the first place, has to be staked off and
marked with guidons, since you must know your measurements and have
your headlands uniform and your furrows straight or there'll be a
woeful mix-up before you come to the end of your job. The great
trouble is that a tractor can't turn in its own length, as a team of
horses can. Hence this deploying space must be wasted, or plowed later
with horses, and your headlands themselves must be wide enough for the
turning radius of your tractor. Some of the ranchers out here, I
understand, even do their tractor-plowing in the form of a series of
elongated figure-eights, beginning at one corner of their tract,
claiming this reduces the time spent with plows out of the ground. But
that looked too complex for me to tackle.
Then, too, machinery has one thing in common with man: they occasionally
get out of kilter at the very time you expect most from them. So this
morning I had to bend, if I did not actually break, the Sabbath by
working on my tractor-engine. I put on Ikkie's overalls--for I _have_
succeeded in coercing Ikkie into a jumper and the riding-seat of the old
gang-plow--and went out and studied that tractor. I was determined to
understand just what was giving the trouble.
It was two hours before I located the same, which was caused by the
timer. But I've conquered the doggoned thing, and got her to spark
right, and I went a couple of rounds, Sunday and all, just to make
sure she was in working order. And neither my actions nor my language,
I know, are those of a perfect lady. But any one who'd lamped me in
that get-up, covered with oil and dust and dirt, would know that never
again could I be a perfect lady. I'm a wiper, a greaser, a clodhopper,
and, according to the sullen and brooding-eyed Ikkie, a bit of a
slave-driver. And the odd part of it all is that I'm wringing a
perverse sort of enjoyment out of the excitement and the novelty of
the thing. I'm being something more than a mere mollusk. I'm making my
power felt, and producing results. And self-expression, I find, is the
breath of life to my soul. But I've scarcely time to do my hair, and
my complexion is gone, and I've got cracks in my cheek-skin. I'm
getting old and ugly, and no human being will ever again love me. Even
my own babies gape at me kind of round-eyed when I take them in my
arms.
But I'm wrong there, and I know I'm wrong. My little Dinkie will
always love me. I know that by the way his little brown arms cling
about my wind-roughened neck, by the way he burrows in against my
breast and hangs on to me and hollers for his Mummsy when she's out of
sight. He's not a model youngster, I know. I'm afraid I love him too
much to demand perfection from him. It's the hard and selfish women,
after all, who make the ideal mothers--at least from the standpoint of
the disciplinarian. For the selfish woman refuses to be blinded by
love, just as she refuses to be imposed upon and declines to be
troubled by the thought of inflicting pain on those perverse little
toddlers who grow so slowly into the knowledge of what is right and
wrong. It hurts me like Sam-Hill, sometimes, to have to hurt my little
man-child. When the inevitable and slow-accumulating spanking _does_
come, I try to be cool-headed and strictly just about it--for one look
out of a child's eyes has the trick of bringing you suddenly to the
judgment-bar. Dinkie, young as he is, can already appraise and arraign
me and flash back his recognition of injustice. More than once he's
made me think of those lines of Frances Lyman's:
"Just a look of swift surprise
From the depths of childish eyes,
Yet my soul to judgment came,
Cowering, as before a flame.
Not a word, a lisp of blame:
Just a look of swift surprise
In the quietly lifted eyes!"
_Saturday the Twenty-second_
I've got my seed in, glory be! The deed is done; the mad scramble is
over. And Mother Earth, as tired as a child of being mauled, lies
sleeping in the sun.
If, as some one has said, to plow is to pray, we've been doing a heap
of mouth-worship on Alabama Ranch this last few weeks. But the final
acre has been turned over, the final long sea of furrows disked and
plank-dragged and seeded down, and after the heavy rains of Thursday
night there's just the faintest tinge of green, here and there, along
my billiard-table of a granary-to-be.
But the mud is back, and to save my kitchen floor, last night, I
trimmed down a worn-out broom, cut off most of the handle, and
fastened it upside down in a hole I'd bored at one end of the lower
door-step.
All this talk of mine about wheat sounds as though I were what they
call out here a Soil Robber, or a Land Miner, a get-rich-quick
squatter who doesn't bother about mixed farming or the rotation of
crops, with no true love for the land which he impoverishes and leaves
behind him when he's made his pile. I want to make my pile, it's true,
but we'll soon have other things to think about. There's my home
garden to be made ready, and the cattle and pigs to be looked after,
and a run to be built for my chickens. The latter, for all their
neglect, have been laying like mad and I've three full crates of eggs
in the cellar, all dipped in water-glass and ready for barter at
Buckhorn. If the output keeps up I'll store away five or six crates of
the treated eggs for Christmas-season sale, for in midwinter they
easily bring eighty cents a dozen.
And speaking of barter reminds me that both Dinkie and the Twins are
growing out of their duds, and heaven knows when I'll find time to make
more for them. They'll probably have to promenade around like Ikkie's
ancestors. I've even run out of safety-pins. And since the enduring
necessity for the safety-pin is evidenced by the fact that it's even
found on the baby-mummies of ancient Egypt, and must be a good four
thousand years old, I've had Whinnie supply me with some home-made ones,
manufactured out of hair-pins.... My little Dinkie, I notice, is going
to love animals. He seems especially fond of horses, and is fearless
when beside them, or on them, or even under them--for he walked calmly
in under the belly of Jail-Bird, who could have brained him with one
pound of his wicked big hoof. But the beast seemed to know that it was a
friend in that forbidden quarter, and never so much as moved until
Dinkie had been rescued. It won't be long now before Dinkie has a pinto
of his own and will go bobbing off across the prairie-floor, I suppose,
like a monkey on a circus-horse. Even now he likes nothing better than
coming with his mother while she gathers her "clutch" of eggs. He can
scramble into a manger--where my unruly hens persist in making an
occasional nest--like a marmoset. The delight on his face at the
discovery of even two or three "cackle-berries," as Whinnie calls them,
is worth the occasional breakage and yolk-stained rompers. For I share
in that delight myself, since egg-gathering always gives me the feeling
that I'm partaking of the bounty of Nature, that I'm getting something
for next-to-nothing. It's the same impulse, really, which drives city
women to the bargain-counter and the auction-room, the sublimated
passion to adorn the home teepee-pole with the fruits of their cunning!
_Tuesday the Twenty-fifth_
Yesterday I teamed in to Buckhorn, for supplies. And as I drove down
the main street of that squalid little western town I must have looked
like something the crows had been roosting on. But just as I was
swinging out of Syd Woodward's store-yard I caught sight of Lady Allie
in her big new car, drawn up in front of the modestly denominated "New
York Emporium." What made me stare, however, was the unexpected vision
of Duncan Argyll McKail, emerging from the aforesaid "Emporium" laden
down with parcels. These he carried out to the car and was dutifully
stowing away somewhere down in the back seat, when he happened to look
up and catch sight of me as I swung by in my wagon-box. He turned a
sort of dull brick-red, and pretended to be having a lot of trouble
with getting those parcels where they ought to be. But he looked
exactly like a groom. And he knew it. And he knew that I knew he knew
it. And if he was miserable, which I hope he was, I'm pretty sure he
wasn't one-half so miserable as I was--and as I am. "_Damn that
woman!_" I caught myself saying, out loud, after staring at my mottled
old map in my dressing-table mirror.
I've been watching the sunset to-night, for a long time, and thinking
about things. It was one of those quiet and beautiful prairie sunsets
which now and then flood you with wonder, in spite of yourself, and
give you an achey little feeling in the heart. It was a riot of orange
and Roman gold fading out into pale green, with misty opal and
pearl-dust along the nearer sky-line, then a big star or two, and then
silence, the silence of utter peace and beauty. But it didn't bring
peace to my soul. I could remember watching just such a sunset with my
lord and master beside me, and turning to say: "Don't you sometimes
feel, Lover, that you were simply made for joy and rapture in moments
like this? Don't you feel as though your body were a harp that could
throb and sing with the happiness of life?"
And I remembered the way my Dunkie had lifted up my chin and kissed
me.
But that seemed a long, long time ago. And I wasn't in tune with the
Infinite. And I felt lonely and old and neglected, with callouses on
my hands and the cords showing in my neck, and my nerves not exactly
what they ought to be. For Sunday, which is reckoned as a day of rest,
had been a long and busy day for me. Dinkie had been obstreperous and
had eaten most of the paint off his Noah's Ark, and had later burnt
his fingers pulling my unbaked loaf-cake out of the oven, after
eventually tiring of breaking the teeth out of my comb, one by one.
Poppsy and Pee-Wee had been peevish and disdainful of each other's
society, and Iroquois Annie had gruntingly intimated that she was
about fed up on trekking the floor with wailing infants. But I'd had
my week's mending to do, and what was left of the ironing to get
through and Whinnie's work-pants to veneer with a generous new patch,
and thirteen missing buttons to restore to the kiddies' different
garments. My back ached, my finger-bones were tired, and there was a
jumpy little nerve in my left temple going for all the world like a
telegraph-key. And then I gave up.
I sat down and stared at that neatly folded pile of baby-clothes two
feet high, a layer-cake of whites and faded blues and pinks. I stared
at it, and began to gulp tragically, wallowing in a wave of self-pity.
I felt so sorry for myself that I let my flat-iron burn a hole clean
through the ironing-sheet, without even smelling it. That, I told
myself, was all that life could be to me, just a round of washing and
ironing and meal-getting and mending, fetch and carry, work and worry,
from sun-up until sun-down, and many a time until midnight.
And what, I demanded of the frying-pan on its nail above the
stove-shelf, was I getting out of it? What was it leading to? And what
would it eventually bring me? It would eventually bring me crabbed and
crow-footed old age, and fallen arches and a slabsided figure that a
range-pinto would shy at. It would bring me empty year after year out
here on the edge of Nowhere. It would bring me drab and spiritless
drudgery, and faded eyes, and the heart under my ribs slowly but
surely growing as dead as a door-nail, and the joy of living just as
slowly but surely going out of my life, the same as the royal blue had
faded out of Dinkie's little denim jumpers.
At that very moment, I remembered, there were women listening to
symphony music in Carnegie Hall, and women sitting in willow-rockers
at Long Beach contentedly listening to the sea-waves. There were women
driving through Central Park, soft and lovely with early spring, or
motoring up to the Clairemont for supper and watching the searchlights
from the war-ships along the Hudson, and listening to the music on the
roof-gardens and dancing their feet off at that green-topped heaven of
youth which overlooks the Plaza where Sherman's bronze horse forever
treads its spray of pine. There were happy-go-lucky girls crowding the
soda-fountains and regaling themselves on fizzy water and fruit
sirups, and dropping in at first nights or motoring out for sea-food
dinners along lamp-pearled and moonlit boulevards of smooth asphalt.
And here I was planted half-way up to the North Pole, with coyotes for
company, with a husband who didn't love me, and not a jar of decent
face-cream within fifteen miles of the shack! I was lost there in a
sea of flat desolation, without companionable neighbors, without an
idea, without a chance for any exchange of thought. I had no time for
reading, and what was even worse, I had no desire for reading, but
plodded on, like the stunned ox, kindred to the range animals and
sister to the cow.
Then, as I sat luxuriating before my crowded banquet-table of misery,
as I sat mopping my nose--which was getting most unmistakably rough
with prairie-winds and alkali-water--and thinking what a fine mess I'd
made of a promising young life, I fancied I heard an altogether too
familiar C-sharp cry. So I got wearily up and went tiptoeing in to see
if either Poppsy or Pee-Wee were awake.
But they were there, safe and sound and fast asleep, curled up like two
plump little kittens, with their long lashes on their cheeks of
peach-blow pink and their dewy little lips slightly parted and four
little dimples in the back of each of the four little hands. And as I
stood looking down at them, with a shake still under my breastbone, I
couldn't keep from saying: "God bless your sleepy old bones!" Something
melted and fell from the dripping eaves of my heart, and I felt that it
was a sacred and God-given and joyous life, this life of being a
mother, and any old maid who wants to pirouette around the Plaza roof
with a lounge-lizard breathing winy breaths into her false hair was
welcome to her choice. I was at least in the battle of life--and life
is a battle which scars you more when you try to keep out of it than
when you wade into it. I was a mother and a home-maker and the hope and
buttress of the future. And all I wanted was a good night's sleep and
some candid friend to tell me not to be a feather-headed idiot, but a
sensible woman with a sensible perspective on things!
_Friday the Twenty-seventh--Or Should It Be the Twenty-eighth_
It has turned quite cold again, with frosts sharp enough at night to
freeze a half-inch of ice on the tub of soft-water I've been so
carefully saving for future shampoos. It's just as well I didn't try to
rush the season by getting too much of my truck-garden planted. We're
glad of a good fire in the shack-stove after sun-down. I've rented
thirty acres from the Land Association that owns the half-section next
to mine and am going to get them into oats. If they don't ripen up
before the autumn frosts come and blight them, I can still use the
stuff for green feed. And I've bargained for the hay-rights from the
upper end of the section, but heaven only knows how I'll ever get it
cut and stacked.
Whinnie had to kill a calf yesterday, for we'd run out of meat. As
we're in a district that's too sparsely settled for a Beef Ring, we
have to depend on ourselves for our roasts. But whatever happens, I
believe in feeding my workers. I wonder, by the way, how the fair Lady
Allie is getting along with her _cuisine_. Is she giving Dinky-Dunk a
Beautiful Thought for breakfast, instead of a generous plate of ham
and eggs? If she is, I imagine she's going to blight Romance in the
bud.
I've just had a circular letter from the Women Grain Growers'
Association explaining their fight for community medical service and a
system of itinerant rural nurses. They're organized, and they're in
earnest, and I'm with them to the last ditch. They're fighting for the
things that this raw new country is most in need of. It will take us
some time to catch up with the East. But the westerner's a scrambler,
once he's started.
I can't get away from the fact, since I know them both, that there's a
big gulf between the East and the West. It shouldn't be there, of
course, but that doesn't seem to affect the issue. It's the opposition
of the New to the Old, of the Want-To-Bes to the Always-Has-Beens, of
the young and unruly to the settled and sedate. We seem to want
freedom, and they seem to prefer order. We want movement, and they
want repose. We look more feverishly to the future, and they dwell
more fondly on the past. They call us rough, and we try to get even by
terming them _effete_. They accentuate form, and we remain satisfied
with performance. We're jealous of what they have and they're jealous
of what we intend to be. We're even secretly envious of certain things
peculiarly theirs which we openly deride. We're jealous, at heart, of
their leisure and their air of permanence, of their accomplishments
and arts and books and music, of their buildings and parks and towns
with the mellowing tone of time over them. And as soon as we make
money enough, I notice, we slip into their neighborhood for a gulp or
two at their fountains of culture. Some day, naturally, we'll be more
alike, and have more in common. The stronger colors will fade out of
the newer fabric and we'll merge into a more inoffensive monotone of
respectability. Our Navajo-blanket audacities will tone down to
wall-tapestry sedateness--but not too, too soon, I pray the gods!
Speaking of Navajo reminds me of Redskins, and Redskins take my
thoughts straight back to Iroquois Annie, who day by day becomes
sullener and stupider and more impossible. I can see positive dislike
for my Dinkie in her eyes, and I'm at present applying zinc ointment
to Pee-Wee's chafed and scalded little body because of her neglect.
I'll ring-welt and quarter that breed yet, mark my words! As it is,
there's a constant cloud of worry over my heart when I'm away from the
shack and my bairns are left behind. This same Ikkie, apparently,
tried to scald poor old Bobs the other day, but Bobs dodged most of
that steaming potato-water and decided to even up the ledger of
ill-usage by giving her a well-placed nip on the hip. Ikkie now sits
down with difficulty, and Bobs shows the white of his eye when she
comes near him, which isn't more often than Ikkie can help--And of
such, in these troublous Ides of March, and April and May, is the
kingdom of Chaddie McKail!
_Tuesday the Second_
I may as well begin at the beginning, I suppose, so as to get the
whole thing straight. And it started with Whinstane Sandy, who broke
the wheel off the spring-wagon and the third commandment at one and
the same time. So I harnessed Slip-Along up to the buckboard, and put
the Twins in their two little crow's-nests and started out to help get
my load out of that bogged trail, leaving Dinkie behind with Iroquois
Annie.
There was a chill in the air and I was glad of my old coonskin coat.
It was almost two hours before Whinnie and I got the spring-wagon out
of its mud-bath, and the load on again, and a willow fence-post lashed
under the drooping axle-end to sustain it on its journey back to
Alabama Ranch. The sun was low, by this time, so I couldn't wait for
Whinnie and the team, but drove on ahead with the Twins.
I was glad to see the smoke going up from my lonely little
shack-chimney, for I was mud-splashed and tired and hungry, and the
thought of fire and home and supper gave me a comfy feeling just under
the tip of the left ventricle. I suppose it was the long evening
shadows and the chill of the air that made the shack look so
unutterably lonely as I drove up to it. Or perhaps it was because I
stared in vain for some sign of life. At any rate, I didn't stop to
unhitch Slip-Along, but gathered up my Twins and made for the door,
and nearly stumbled on my nose over the broom-end boot-wiper which
hadn't proved such a boon as I'd expected.
I found Iroquois Annie in front of my home-made dressing-table mirror,
with my last year's summer hat on her head and a look of placid
admiration on her face. The shack seemed very quiet. It seemed so
disturbingly quiet that I even forgot about the hat.
"Where's Dinkie?" I demanded, as I deposited the Twins in their
swing-box.
"He play somew'ere roun'," announced Ikkie, secreting the purloined
head-gear and circling away from the forbidden dressing-table.
"But where?" I asked, with exceptional sharpness, for my eye had
already traversed the most of that shack and had encountered no sign
of him.
That sloe-eyed breed didn't know just where, and apparently didn't
care. He was playing somewhere outside, with three or four old wooden
decoy-ducks. That was all she seemed to know. But I didn't stop to
question her. I ran to the door and looked out. Then my heart began
going down like an elevator, for I could see nothing of the child. So
I made the rounds of the shack again, calling "Dinkie!" as I went.
Then I looked through the bunk-house, and even tried the cellar. Then
I went to the rainwater tub, with my heart up in my throat. He wasn't
there, of course. So I made a flying circle of the out-buildings. But
still I got no trace of him.
I was panting when I got back to the shack, where Iroquois Annie was
fussing stolidly over the stove-fire. I caught her by the snake-like
braid of her hair, though I didn't know I was doing it, at the moment,
and swung her about so that my face confronted hers.
"Where's my boy?" I demanded in a sort of shout of mingled terror and
rage and dread. "Where is he, you empty-eyed idiot? _Where is he?_"
But that half-breed, of course, couldn't tell me. And a wave of sick
fear swept over me. My Dinkie was not there. He was nowhere to be
found. He was lost--lost on the prairie. And I was shouting all this
at Ikkie, without being quite conscious of what I was doing.
"And remember," I hissed out at her, in a voice that didn't sound like
my own as I swung her about by her suddenly parting waist, "if
anything has happened to that child, _I'll kill you!_ Do you
understand, I'll kill you as surely as you're standing in those
shoes!"
I went over the shack, room by room, for still the third time. Then I
went over the bunk-house and the other buildings, and every corner of
the truck-garden, calling as I went.
But still there was no answer to my calls. And I had to face the
steel-cold knowledge that my child was lost. That little toddler,
scarcely more than a baby, had wandered away on the open prairie.
For one moment of warming relief I thought of Bobs. I remembered what
a dog is sometimes able to do in such predicaments. But I also
remembered that Bobs was still out on the trail with Whinnie. So I
circled off on the undulating floor of the prairie, calling "Dinkie"
every minute or two and staring into the distance until my eyes ached,
hoping to see some moving dot in the midst of all that silence and
stillness.
"My boy is lost," I kept saying to myself, in sobbing little whimpers,
with my heart getting more and more like a ball of lead. And there
could only be an hour or two of daylight left. If he wasn't found
before night came on--I shut the thought out of my heart, and started
back for the shack, in a white heat of desperation.
"If you want to live," I said to the now craven and shrinking Ikkie,
"you get in that buckboard and make for Casa Grande. Drive there as
fast as you can. Tell my husband that our boy, that my boy, is lost on
the prairie. Tell him to get help, and come, come quick. And stop at
the Teetzel ranch on your way. Tell them to send men on horses, and
lanterns! But move, woman, move!"
Ikkie went, with Slip-Along making the buckboard skid on the uneven
trail as though he were playing a game of crack-the-whip with that
frightened Indian. And I just as promptly took up my search again,
forgetting about the Twins, forgetting about being tired, forgetting
everything.
Half-way between the fenced-in hay-stacks and the corral-gate I found
a battered decoy-duck with a string tied to its neck. It was one of a
set that Francois and Whinstane Sandy had whittled out over a year
ago. It was at least a clue. Dinkie must have dropped it there.
It sent me scuttling back among the hay-stacks, going over the ground
there, foot by foot and calling as I went, until my voice had an eerie
sound in the cold air that took on more and more of a razor-edge as
the sun and the last of its warmth went over the rim of the world. It
seemed an empty world, a plain of ugly desolation, unfriendly and
pitiless in its vastness. Even the soft green of the wheatlands took
on a look like verdigris, as though it were something malignant and
poisonous. And farther out there were muskegs, and beyond the
three-wire fence, which would stand no bar to a wandering child, there
were range-cattle, half-wild cattle that resented the approach of
anything but a man on horseback. And somewhere in those darkening
regions of peril my Dinky-Dink was lost.
I took up the search again, with the barometer of hope falling lower
and lower. But I told myself that I must be systematic, that I must
not keep covering the same ground, that I must make the most of what
was left of the daylight. So I blocked out imaginary squares and kept
running and calling until I was out of breath, then resting with my
hand against my heart, and running on again. But I could find no trace
of him.
He was such a little tot, I kept telling myself. He was not warmly
dressed, and night was coming on. It would be a cold night, with
several degrees of frost. He would be alone, on that wide and empty
prairie, with terror in his heart, chilled to the bone, wailing for
his mother, wailing until he was able to wail no more. Already the
light was going, I realized with mounting waves of desperation, and no
child, dressed as Dinkie was dressed, could live through the night.
Even the coyotes would realize his helplessness and come and pick his
bones clean.
I kept thinking of Bobs, more than of anything else, and wondering why
Whinnie was so slow in getting back with his broken wagon, and
worrying over when the men would come. I told myself to be calm, to be
brave, and the next moment was busy picturing a little dead body with
a tear-washed face. But I went on, calling as I went. Then suddenly I
thought of praying.
"O God, it wouldn't be fair, to take that little mite away from me," I
kept saying aloud. "O God, be good to me in this, be merciful, and
lead me to him! Bring him back before it is too late! Bring him back,
and do with me what You wish, but have pity on that poor little
toddler! What You want of me, I will do, but don't, O God, don't take
my boy away from me!"
I made promises to God, foolish, desperate, infantile promises; trying
to placate Him in His might with my resolutions for better things,
trying to strike bargains, at the last moment, with the Master of Life
and Death--even protesting that I'd forgive Dinky-Dunk for anything
and everything he might have done, and that it was the Evil One
speaking through my lips when I said I'd surely kill Iroquois Annie.
Then I heard the signal-shots of a gun, and turned back toward the
shack, which looked small and squat on the floor of the paling
prairie. I couldn't run, for running was beyond me now. I heard Bobs
barking, and the Twins crying, and I saw Whinnie. I thought for one
fond and foolish moment, as I hurried toward the house, that they'd
found my Dinkie. But it was a false hope. Whinnie had been frightened
at the empty shack and the wailing babies, and had thought something
might have happened to me. So he had taken my duck-gun and fired those
signal-shots.
He leaned against the muddy wagon-wheel and said "Guid God! Guid God!"
over and over again, when I told him Dinkie was lost. Then he flung
down the gun and drew his twisted old body up, peering through the
twilight at my face.