"Have you any clue--any hint?" he asked, and I could catch the quaver
in his voice as he spoke.
"Not a thing," I told him, remembering that we were losing time. "He
simply wandered off, when that Indian girl wasn't looking. He didn't
even have a cap or a coat on."
I heard Lady Alicia, who had slipped down out of the saddle, make a
little sound as I said this. It was half a gasp and half a groan of
protest. For one brief moment Dinky-Dunk stared at her, almost
accusingly, I thought. Then he swung his horse savagely about, and
called out over our heads. Other horsemen, I found, had come loping up
in the ghostly twilight where we stood. I could see the breath from
their mounts' nostrils, white in the frosty air.
"You, Teetzel, and you, O'Malley," called my husband, in an oddly
authoritative and barking voice, "and you on the roan there, swing
twenty paces out from one another and circle the shack. Then widen the
circle, each turn. There's no use calling, for the boy'll be down.
He'll be done out. But don't speak until you see something. And for
the love of God, watch close. He's not three yet, remember. He
couldn't have got far away!"
I should have found something reassuring in those quick and purposeful
words of command, but they only served to bring the horror of the
situation closer home to me. They brought before me more graphically
than ever the thought that I'd been trying to get out of my head, the
picture of a huddled small body, with a tear-washed face, growing
colder and colder, until the solitary little flame of life went
completely out in the midst of that star-strewn darkness. Only too
willingly, I knew, I would have covered that chilling body with the
warmth of my own, though wild horses rode over me until the end of
time. I tried to picture life without Dinkie. I tried to imagine my
home without that bright and friendly little face, without the patter
of those restless little feet, without the sound of those beleaguering
little coos of child-love with which he used to burrow his head into
the hollow of my shoulder.
It was too much for me. I had to lean against the wagon-wheel and
gulp. It was Lady Alicia, emerging from the shack, who brought me back
to the world about me. I could just see her as she stood beside me,
for night had fallen by this time, night nearly as black as the
blackness of my own heart.
"Look here," she said almost gruffly. "Whatever happens, you've got to
have something to drink. I've got a kettle on, and I'm going back to
make tea, or a pot of coffee, or whatever I can find."
"Tea?" I echoed, as the engines of indignation raced in my shaken
body. "Tea? It sounds pretty, doesn't it, sitting down to a pink tea,
when there's a human being dying somewhere out in that darkness!"
My bitterness, however, had no visible effect on Lady Alicia.
"Perhaps coffee would be better," she coolly amended. "And those
babies of yours are crying their heads off in there, and I don't seem
to be able to do anything to stop them. I rather fancy they're in need
of feeding, aren't they?"
It was then and then only that I remembered about my poor neglected
Twins. I groped my way in through the darkness, quite calm again, and
sat down and unbuttoned my waist and nursed Poppsy, and then took up
the indignant and wailing Pee-Wee, vaguely wondering if the milk in my
breast wouldn't prove poison to them and if all my blood hadn't turned
to acid.
I was still nursing Pee-Wee when Bud Teetzel came into the shack and
asked how many lanterns we had about the place. There was a sullen
look on his face, and his eyes refused to meet mine. So I knew his
search had not succeeded.
Then young O'Malley came in and asked for matches, and I knew even
before he spoke, that he too had failed. They had all failed.
I could hear Dinky-Dunk's voice outside, a little hoarse and throaty.
I felt very tired, as I put Pee-Wee back in his cradle. It seemed as
though an invisible hand were squeezing the life out of my body and
making it hard for me to breathe. I could hear the cows bawling,
reminding the world that they had not yet been milked. I could smell
the strong coffee that Lady Alicia was pouring out into a cup. She
stepped on something as she carried it to me. She stopped to pick it
up--and it was one of Dinkie's little stub-toed button shoes.
"Let me see it," I commanded, as she made a foolish effort to get it
out of sight. I took it from her and turned it over in my hand. That
was the way, I remembered, mothers turned over the shoes of the
children they had lost, the children who could never, never, so long
as they worked and waited and listened in this wide world, come back
to them again.
Then I put down the shoe, for I could hear one of the men outside say
that the upper muskeg ought to be dragged.
"Try that cup of coffee now," suggested Lady Alicia. I liked her
quietness. I admired her calmness, under the circumstances. And I
remembered that I ought to give some evidence of this by accepting the
hot drink she had made for me. So I took the coffee and drank it. The
bawling of my milk-cows, across the cold night air, began to annoy me.
"My cows haven't been milked," I complained. It was foolish, but I
couldn't help it. Then I reached out for Dinkie's broken-toed shoe,
and studied it for a long time. Lady Alicia crossed to the shack door,
and stood staring out through it....
She was still standing there when Whinnie came in, with the stable
lantern in his hand, and brushed her aside. He came to where I was
sitting and knelt down in front of me, on the shack-floor, with his
heavy rough hand on my knee. I could smell the stable-manure that
clung to his shoes.
"God has been guid to ye, ma'am!" he said in a rapt voice, which was
little more than an awed whisper. But it was more his eyes, with the
uncanny light in them making them shine like a dog's, that brought me
to my feet. For I had a sudden feeling that there was Something just
outside the door which he hadn't dared to bring in to me, a little
dead body with pinched face and trailing arms.
I tried to speak, but I couldn't. I merely gulped. And Whinnie's rough
hand pushed me back into my chair.
"Dinna greet," he said, with two tears creeping crookedly down his own
seamed and wind-roughened face.
But I continued to gulp.
"Dinna greet, for _your laddie's safe and sound_!" I heard the rapt
voice saying.
I could hear what he'd said, quite distinctly, yet his words seemed
without color, without meaning, without sense.
"Have you found him?" called out Lady Alicia sharply.
"Aye, he's found," said Whinnie, with an exultant gulp of his own, but
without so much as turning to look at that other woman, who,
apparently, was of small concern to him. His eyes were on me, and he
was very intimately patting my leg, without quite knowing it.
"He says that the child's been found," interpreted Lady Alicia,
obviously disturbed by the expression on my face.
"He's just yon, as warm and safe as a bird in a nest," further
expounded Whinstane Sandy.
"Where?" demanded Lady Alicia. But Whinnie ignored her.
"It was Bobs, ma'am," were the blessed words I heard the old lips
saying to me, "who kept whimper-in' and grievin' about the upper
stable door, which had been swung shut. It was Bobs who led me back
yon, fair against my will. And there I found our laddie, asleep in the
manger of Slip-Along, nested deep in the hay, as safe and warm as if
in his own bed."
I didn't speak or move for what must have been a full minute. I
couldn't. I felt as though my soul had been inverted and emptied of
all feeling, like a wine-glass that's turned over. For a full minute I
sat looking straight ahead of me. Then I got up, and went to where I
remembered Dinky-Dunk kept his revolver. I took it up and started to
cross to the open door. But Lady Alicia caught me sharply by the arm.
"What are you doing?" she gasped, imagining, I suppose, that I'd gone
mad and was about to blow my brains out. She even took the firearm
from my hand.
"It's the men," I tried to explain. "They should be told. Give them
three signal-shots to bring them in." Then I turned to Whinnie. He
nodded and took me by the hand.
"Now take me to my boy," I said very quietly.
I was still quite calm, I think. But deep down inside of me I could
feel a faint glow. It wasn't altogether joy, and it wasn't altogether
relief. It was something which left me just a little bewildered, a
good deal like a school-girl after her first glass of champagne at
Christmas dinner. It left me oddly self-immured, miles and miles from
the figures so close to me, remote even from the kindly old man who
hobbled a little and went with a decided list to starboard as he led
me out toward what he always spoke of as the upper stable.
[Illustration: He was warm and breathing, and safe and sound]
Yet at the back of my brain, all the while, was some shadow of doubt,
of skepticism, of reiterated self-warning that it was all too good to
be true. It wasn't until I looked over the well-gnawed top rail of
Slip-Along's broken manger and saw that blessed boy there, by the
light of Whinnie's lantern, saw that blessed boy of mine half buried
in that soft and cushioning prairie-grass, saw that he was warm and
breathing, and safe and sound, that I fully realized how he had been
saved for me.
"The laddie'd been after a clutch of eggs, I'm thinkin'," whispered
Whinnie to me, pointing to a yellow stain on his waist, which was
clearly caused by the yolk of a broken egg. And Whinnie stooped over
to take Dinkie up in his arms, but I pushed him aside.
"No, I'll take him," I announced.
He'd be the hungry boy when he awakened, I remembered as I gathered him
up in my arms. My knees were a bit shaky, as I carried him back to the
shack, but I did my best to disguise that fact. I could have carried
him, I believe, right on to Buckhorn, he seemed such a precious burden.
And I was glad of that demand for physical expenditure. It seemed to
bring me down to earth again, to get things back into perspective. But
for the life of me I couldn't find a word to say to Lady Allie as I
walked into my home with Dinky-Dink in my arms. She stood watching me
for a moment or two as I started to undress him, still heavy with
slumber. Then she seemed to realize that she was, after all, an
outsider, and slipped out through the door. I was glad she did, for a
minute later Dinkie began to whimper and cry, as any child would with
an empty stomach and an over-draft of sleep. It developed into a good
lusty bawl, which would surely have spoilt the picture to an outsider.
But it did a good turn in keeping me too busy to pump any more brine on
my own part.
When Dinky-Dunk came in I was feeding little Dinkie a bowl of hot
tapioca well drowned in cream and sugar. My lord and master took off
his hat--which struck me as funny--and stood regarding us from just
inside the door. He stood there by the door for quite a long while.
"Hadn't I better stay here with you to-night?" he finally asked, in a
voice that didn't sound a bit like his own.
I looked up at him. But he stood well back from the range of the
lamplight and I found it hard to decipher his expression. The one
feeling I was certain of was a vague feeling of disappointment. What
caused it, I could not say. But it was there.
"After what's happened," I told him as quietly as I could, "I think
I'd rather be alone!"
He stood for another moment or two, apparently letting this sink in.
It wasn't until he'd turned and walked out of the door that I realized
the ambiguity of that retort of mine. I was almost prompted to go
after him. But I checked myself by saying: "Well, if the shoe fits,
put it on!" But in my heart of hearts I didn't mean it. I wanted him
to come back, I wanted him to share my happiness with me, to sit and
talk the thing over, to exploit it to the full in a sweet retrospect
of relief, as people seem to want to do after they've safely passed
through great peril.
It wasn't until half an hour later, when Dinkie was sound asleep again
and tucked away in his crib, that I remembered my frantic promises to
God to forgive Dinky-Dunk everything, if He'd only bring my boy back
to me. And there'd been other promises, equally foolish and frantic.
I've been thinking them over, in fact, and I _am_ going to make an
effort to keep them. I'm so happy that it hurts. And when you're
happy, you want other people to be that way, too.
_Wednesday the Third_
Humor is the salt of life. The older I grow the more I realize that
truth. And I'm going to keep more of it, if I can, in the work-room of
my soul. Last night, when Dinky-Dunk and I were so uppish with each
other, one single clap of humor might have shaken the solemnity out of
the situation and shown us up for the poseurs we really were. But
Pride is the mother of all contention. If Dinky-Dunk, when I was so
imperially dismissing him from his own home, had only up and said:
"Look here, Lady-bird, this is as much my house as it is yours, you
feather-headed little idiot, and I'll put a June-bug down your neck if
you don't let me stay here!" If he'd only said that, and sat down and
been the safety-valve to my emotions which all husbands ought to be to
all wives, the igloo would have melted about my heart and left me
nothing to do but crawl over to him and tell him that I missed him
more than tongue could tell, and that getting Dinkie's daddy back was
almost as good as getting Dinkie himself back to me.
But we missed our chance. And I suppose Lady Allie sat up until all
hours of the night, over at Casa Grande, consoling my Diddums and
talking things over. It gives me a sort of bruised feeling, for I've
nobody but Whinstane Sandy to unbosom my soul to....
Iroquois Annie has flown the coop. She has gone for good. I must have
struck terror deeper into the heart of that Redskin than I imagined,
for rather than face death and torture at my hands she left Slip-Along
and the buckboard at the Teetzel Ranch and vamoosed off into the great
unknown. I have done up her valuables in an old sugar-sack, and if
they're not sent for in a week's time I'll make a bonfire of the
truck. Whinnie, by the way, is to help me with the house-work. He is
much better at washing dishes than I ever thought he could be. And he
announces he can make a fair brand of bannock, if we run out of bread.
_Tuesday the Ninth_
I've got a hired man. He dropped like manna, out of the skies, or,
rather, he emerged like a tadpole out of the mud. But there's
something odd about him and I've a floaty idea he's a refugee from
justice and that some day one of the Mounties will come riding up to
my shack-door and lead my farm-help away in handcuffs.
Whatever he is, I can't quite make him out. But I have my suspicions,
and I'm leaving everything in abeyance until they're confirmed.
I was on Paddy the other morning, in my old shooting-jacket and
Stetson, going like the wind for the Dixon Ranch, after hearing they
had a Barnado boy they wanted to unload on anybody who'd undertake to
keep him under control. The trail was heavy from the night rain that
had swept the prairie like a new broom, but the sun was shining again
and the air was like champagne. The ozone and the exercise and Paddy's
_legato_ stride all tended to key up my spirits, and I went along
humming:
"Bake me a bannock,
And cut me a callop,
For I've stole me a grey mare
And I'm off at a gallop!"
It wasn't until I saw Paddy's ear prick up like a rabbit's that I
noticed the gun-boat on the trail ahead. At least I thought it was a
gun-boat, for a minute or two, until I cantered closer and saw that it
was a huge gray touring-car half foundered in the prairie-mud. Beside
it sat a long lean man in very muddy clothes and a rather
disreputable-looking hat. He sat with a ridiculously contented look on
his face, smoking a small briar pipe, and he laughed outright as I
circled his mud-hole and came to a stop opposite the car with its nose
poked deep down in the mire, for all the world like a rooting shote.
"Good morning, Diana," he said, quite coolly, as he removed his
battered-looking cap.
His salutation struck me as impertinent, so I returned it in the
curtest of nods.
"Are you in trouble?" I asked.
"None whatever," he airily replied, still eying me. "But my car seems
to be, doesn't it?"
"What's wrong?" I demanded, determined that he shouldn't elbow me out
of my matter-of-factness.
He turned to his automobile and inspected it with an indifferent eye.
"I turned this old tub into a steam-engine, racing her until the water
boiled, and she got even with me by blowing up an intake hose. But I'm
perfectly satisfied."
"With what?" I coldly inquired.
"With being stuck here," he replied; He had rather a bright gray eye
with greenish lights in it, and he looked rational enough. But there
was something fundamentally wrong with him.
"What makes you feel that way?" I asked, though for a moment I'd been
prompted to inquire if they hadn't let him out a little too soon.
"Because I wouldn't have seen you, who should be wearing a crescent
moon on your brow, if my good friend Hyacinthe hadn't mired herself in
this mud-hole," he had the effrontery to tell me.
"Is there anything so remarkably consolatory in that vision?" I asked,
deciding that I might as well convince him he wasn't confronting an
untutored she-coolie of the prairie. Whereupon he studied me more
pointedly and more impersonally than ever.
"It's more than consolatory," he said with an accentuating flourish of
the little briar pipe. "It's quite compensatory."
It was rather ponderously clever, I suppose; but I was tired of both
verbal quibbling and roadside gallantry.
"Do you want to get out of that hole?" I demanded. For it's a law of
the prairie-land, of course, never to side-step a stranger in
distress.
"Not if it means an ending to this interview," he told me.
It was my turn to eye him. But there wasn't much warmth in the
inspection.
"What are you trying to do?" I calmly inquired, for prairie life
hadn't exactly left me a shy and timorous gazelle in the haunts of
that stalker known as Man.
"I'm trying to figure out," he just as calmly retorted, apparently
quite unimpressed by my uppity tone, "how anything as radiant and
lovely as you ever got landed up here in this heaven of chilblains and
coyotes."
The hare-brained idiot was actually trying to make love to me. And I
then and there decided to put a brake on his wheel of eloquence.
"And I'm still trying to figure out," I told him, "how what impresses
me as rather a third-class type of man is able to ride around in what
looks like a first-class car! Unless," and the thought came to me out
of a clear sky, and when they come that way they're inspirations and
are usually true, "unless you stole it!"
He turned a solemn eye on the dejected-looking vehicle and studied it
from end to end.
"If I'm that far behind Hyacinthe," he indifferently acknowledged, "I
begin to fathom the secret of my life failure. So my morning hasn't
been altogether wasted."
"But you did steal the car?" I persisted.
"That must be a secret between us," he said, with a distinctly guilty
look about the sky-line, as though to make sure there were no sheriffs
and bloodhounds on his track.
"What are you doing here?" I demanded, determined to thrash the thing
out, now that it had been thrust upon me.
"Talking to the most charming woman I've encountered west of the Great
Lakes," he said with an ironic and yet a singularly engaging smile.
But I didn't intend him to draw a herring across the trail.
"I'd be obliged if you'd be sincere," I told him, sitting up a little
straighter on Paddy.
"I am sincere," he protested, putting away his pipe.
"But the things you're saying are the things the right sort of person
refrains from expressing, even when he happens to be the victim of
their operation."
"Yes, that's quite true, in drawing-rooms," he airily amended. "But
this is God's open and untrammeled prairie."
"Where crudeness is king," I added.
"Where candor is worth more than convention," he corrected, with
rather a wistful look in his eye. "And where we mortals ought to be at
least as urbane as that really wonderful robin-egg sky up there with
the chinook arch across it."
He wasn't flippant any more, and I had a sense of triumph in forcing
his return to sobriety. I wanted to ask him what his name was, once we
were back to earth again. But as that seemed a little too direct, I
merely inquired where his home happened to be.
"I've just come from up North!" he said. And that, I promptly
realized, was an evasive way of answering an honest question,
especially as there was a California license-number on the front of
his car.
"And what's your business?" I inquired, deciding to try him out with
still one more honest question.
"I'm a windmill man," he told me, as he waded in toward his
dejected-looking automobile and lifted up its hood. I took him
literally, for there wasn't anything, at the time, to make me think of
Cervantes. But I'd already noticed his hands, and I felt sure they
weren't the hands of a laboring man. They were long and lean and
finicky-fingered hands, the sort that could span an octave much better
than they could hold a hayfork. And I decided to see him hoisted by
his own petard.
"Then you're just the man I'm looking for," I told him. He stopped for
a moment to look up from the bit of heavy rubber-hose he was winding
with a stretch of rubber that looked as though it had been cut from an
inner tube.
"Words such as those are honey to my ears," he said as he went on with
his work. And I saw it was necessary to yank him down to earth again.
"I've a broken-down windmill over on my ranch," I told him. "And if
you're what you say you are, you ought to be able to put it in running
order for me."
"Then you've a ranch?" he observed, stopping in his work.
"A ranch and a husband and three children," I told him with the
well-paraded air of a tabby-cat who's dragged her last mouse into the
drawing-room. But my announcement didn't produce the effect I'd
counted on. All I could see on the face of the windmill man was a sort
of mild perplexity.
"That only deepens the mystery," he observed, apparently as much to
himself as to me.
"What mystery?" I asked.
"You!" he retorted.
"What's wrong with me?" I demanded.
"You're so absurdly alive and audacious and sensitive and
youthful-hearted, dear madam! For the life of me I can't quite fit you
into the narrow little frame you mention."
"Is it so narrow?" I inquired, wondering why I wasn't much more
indignant at him. But instead of answering that question, he asked me
another.
"Why hasn't this husband of yours fixed the windmill?" he casually
asked over his shoulder, as he resumed his tinkering on the car-engine.
"My husband's work keeps him away from home," I explained, promptly on
the defensive.
"I thought so," he announced, with the expression of a man who's had a
pet hypothesis unexpectedly confirmed.
"Then what made you think so?" I demanded, with a feeling that he was
in some way being subtler than I could quite comprehend.
"Instinct--if you care to call it that," he said as he stooped low
over his engine. He seemed offensively busy there for a considerable
length of time. I could see that he was not what in the old days I'd
have called a window-dresser. And I rather liked that pretense of
candor in his make-up, just as I cottoned to that melodious drawl of
his, not altogether unlike Lady Alicia's, with its untoward suggestion
of power and privilege. He was a man with a mind of his own; there was
no denying that. I was even compelled to remind myself that with all
his coolness and suavity he was still a car-thief, or perhaps
something worse. And I had no intention of sitting there and watching
him pitch shut-out ball.
"What are you going to do about it?" I asked, after he'd finished his
job of bailing ditch-water into his car-radiator with a little
collapsible canvas bucket.
He climbed into his driving-seat, mud to the knees, before he answered
me.
"I'm going to get Hyacinthe out of this hole," was what he said. "And
then I'm going to fix that windmill!"
"On what terms?" I inquired.
"What's the matter with a month's board and keep?" he suggested.
It rather took my breath away, but I tried not to betray the fact. He
_was_ a refugee, after all, and only too anxious to go into hiding for
a few weeks.
"Can you milk?" I demanded, deciding to keep him in his place, from
the start. And he sadly acknowledged that he wasn't able to milk.
Windmill men seldom were, he casually asserted.
"Then you'll have to make yourself handy, in other ways," I proclaimed
as he sat appraising me from his deep-padded car-seat.
"All right," he said, as though the whole thing were settled, on the
spot. But it wasn't so simple as it seemed.
"How about this car?" I demanded. His eye met mine; and I made note of
the fact that he was compelled to look away.
"I suppose we'll have to hide it somewhere," he finally acknowledged.
"And how'll you hide a car of that size on the open prairie?" I
inquired.
"Couldn't we bury it?" he asked with child-like simplicity.
"It's pretty well that way now, isn't it? But I saw it three miles
off," I reminded him.
"Couldn't we pile a load of prairie-hay over it?" he suggested next,
with the natural cunning of the criminal. "Then they'd never suspect."
"Suspect what?" I asked.
"Suspect where we got it," he explained.
"Kindly do not include me in any of your activities of this nature," I
said with all the dignity that Paddy would permit of, for he was
getting restless by this time.
"But you've included yourself in the secret," he tried to argue, with
a show of injured feelings. "And surely, after you've wormed that out
of me, you're not going to deliver a poor devil over to--"
"You can have perfect confidence in me," I interrupted, trying to be
stately but only succeeding, I'm afraid, in being stiff. And he nodded
and laughed in a companionable and _laisser-faire_ sort of way as he
started his engine and took command of the wheel.
Then began a battle which I had to watch from a distance because Paddy
evinced no love for that purring and whining thing of steel as it
rumbled and roared and thrashed and churned up the mud at its flying
heels. It made the muskeg look like a gargantuan cake-batter, in which
it seemed to float as dignified and imperturbable as a schooner in a
canal-lock. But the man at the wheel kept his temper, and reversed,
and writhed forward, and reversed again. He even waved at me, in a
grim sort of gaiety, as he rested his engine and then went back to the
struggle. He kept engaging and releasing his clutch until he was able
to impart a slight rocking movement to the car. And again the big
motor roared and churned up the mud and again Paddy took to prancing
and pirouetting like a two-year-old. But this time the spinning rear
wheels appeared to get a trace of traction, flimsy as it was, for the
throbbing gray mass moved forward a little, subsided again, and once
more nosed a few inches ahead. Then the engine whined in a still
higher key, and slowly but surely that mud-covered mass emerged from
the swale that had sought to engulf and possess it, emerged slowly and
awkwardly, like a dinosauros emerging from its primeval ooze.
The man in the car stepped down from his driving-seat, once he was
sure of firm ground under his wheels again, and walked slowly and
wistfully about his resurrected devil-wagon.
"The wages of sin is mud," he said as I trotted up to him. "And how
much better it would have been, O Singing Pine-Tree, if I'd never
taken that car!"
The poor chap was undoubtedly a little wrong in the head, but likable
withal, and not ill-favored in appearance, and a man that one should
try to make allowances for.
"It would have been much better," I agreed, wondering how long it
would be before the Mounted Police would be tracking him down and
turning him to making brooms in the prison-factory at Welrina.
"Now, if you'll kindly trot ahead," he announced as he relighted his
little briar pipe, "and show me the trail to the ranch of the blighted
windmill, I'll idle along behind you."
I resented the placidity with which he was accepting a situation that
should have called for considerable meekness on his part. And I sat
there for a silent moment or two on Paddy, to make that resentment
quite obvious to him.
"What's your name?" I asked, the same as I'd ask the name of any new
help that arrived at Alabama Ranch.
"Peter Ketley," he said, for once both direct and sober-eyed.
"All right, Peter," I said, as condescendingly as I was able. "Just
follow along, and I'll show you where the bunk-house is."
It was his grin, I suppose, that irritated me. So I started off on
Paddy and went like the wind. I don't know whether he called it idling
or not, but once or twice when I glanced back at him that touring-car
was bounding like a reindeer over some of the rougher places in the
trail, and I rather fancy it got some of the mud shaken off its
running-gear before it pulled up behind the upper stable at Alabama
Ranch.
"You ride like a _ritt-meister_," he said, with an approvingly
good-natured wag of the head, as he came up as close as Paddy would
permit.
"_Danke-schoen!_" I rather listlessly retorted, "And if you leave the
car here, close beside this hay-stack, it'll probably not be seen
until after dinner. Then some time this afternoon, if the coast is
clear, you can get it covered up."
I was a little sorry, the next moment, that I'd harped still again on
an act which must have become painful for him to remember, since I
could see his face work and his eye betray a tendency to evade mine.
But he thanked me, and explained that he was entirely in my hands.
Such being the case, I was more excited than I'd have been willing to
admit when I led him into the shack. Frontier life had long since
taught me not to depend too much on appearances, but the right sort of
people, the people who out here are called "good leather," would
remain the right sort of people in even the roughest wickiup. We may
have been merely ranchers, but I didn't want Peter, whatever his
morals, to think that we ate our food raw off the bone and made fire
by rubbing sticks together.
Yet he must have come pretty close to believing that, unimpeachable as
his manners remained, for Whinnie had burned the roast of veal to a
charry mass, the Twins were crying like mad, and Dinkie had painted
himself and most of the dining-room table with Worcestershire sauce. I
showed Peter where he could wash up and where he could find a whisk to
remove the dried mud from his person. Then I hurriedly appeased my
complaining bairns, opened a can of beans to take the place of
Whinnie's boiled potatoes, which most unmistakably tasted of yellow
soap, and supplemented what looked dishearteningly like a Dixon dinner
with my last carefully treasured jar of raspberry preserve.
Whinstane Sandy, it is true, remained as glum and silent as a glacier
through all that meal. But my new man, Peter, talked easily and
uninterruptedly. And he talked amazingly well. He talked about
mountain goats, and the Morgan rose-jars in the Metropolitan, and why
he disliked George Moore, and the difference between English and
American slang, and why English women always wear the wrong sort of
hats, and the poetry in Indian names if we only had the brains to
understand 'em, and how the wheat I'd manufactured my home-made bread
out of was made up of cellulose and germ and endosperm, and how the
alcohol and carbonic acid gas of the fermented yeast affected the
gluten, and how the woman who could make bread like that ought to have
a specially designed decoration pinned on her apron-front. Then he
played "Paddy-cake, paddy-cake, Baker's man," with Dinkie, who took to
him at once, and when I came back from getting the extra cot ready in
the bunk-house, my infant prodigy was on the new hired man's back,
circling the dinner-table and shouting "Gid-dap, 'ossie, gid-dap!" as
he went, a proceeding which left the seamed old face of Whinstane
Sandy about as blithe as a coffin-lid. So I coldly informed the
newcomer that I'd show him where he could put his things, if he had
any, before we went out to look over the windmill. And Peter rather
astonished me by lugging back from the motor-car so discreetly left in
the rear a huge suit-case of pliable pigskin that looked like a
steamer-trunk with carrying-handles attached to it, a laprobe lined
with beaver, a llama-wool sweater made like a Norfolk-jacket, a
chamois-lined ulster, a couple of plaid woolen rugs, and a lunch-kit
in a neatly embossed leather case.
"Quite a bit of loot, isn't it?" he said, a little red in the face
from the effort of portaging so pretentious a load.
That word "loot" stuck in my craw. It was a painful reminder of
something that I'd been trying very hard to forget.
"Did it come with the car?" I demanded.
"Yes, it came with the car," he was compelled to acknowledge. "But it
would be exhausting, don't you see, to have to tunnel through a
hay-stack every time I wanted a hair-brush!"
I icily agreed that it would, scenting tacit reproof in that
mildly-put observation of his. But I didn't propose to be trifled
with. I calmly led Mr. Peter Ketley out to where the overturned
windmill tower lay like a museum skeleton along its bed of weeds and
asked him just what tools he'd need. It was a simple question,
predicating a simple answer. Yet he didn't seem able to reply to it.
He scratched his close-clipped pate and said he'd have to look things
over and study it out. Windmills were tricky things, one kind
demanding this sort of treatment and another kind demanding that.
"You'll have no trouble, of course, in raising the tower?" I asked,
looking him square in the eye. More than once I'd seen these windmill
towers of galvanized steel girders put up on the prairie, and I had a
very good idea of how the thing was done. They were assembled lying on
the ground, and then a heavy plank was bolted to the bottom side of
the tower base. This plank was held in place by two big stakes. Then a
block and tackle was attached to the upper part of the tower, with the
running-rope looped over a tripod of poles, to act as a fulcrum, so
that when a team of horses was attached to the tackle the tower
pivoted on its base and slowly rose in the air, steadied by a couple
of guy-ropes held out at right angles to it.
"Oh, no trouble at all," replied the expert quite airily. But I
noticed that his eye held an especially abstracted and preoccupied
expression.
"Just how is it done?" I innocently inquired.
"Well, that all depends," he sapiently observed. Then, apparently
nettled by my obviously superior smile, he straightened up and said:
"I want you to leave this entirely to me. It's my problem, and you've
no right to be worried over it. It'll take study, of course, and it'll
take time. Rome wasn't built in a day. But before I leave you, madam,
your tower will be up."
"I hope you're not giving yourself a life sentence," I remarked as I
turned and left him.
I knew that he was looking after me as I went, but I gave no outer sign
of that inner knowledge. I was equally conscious of his movements,
through the shack window, when he possessed himself of a hay-fork and
with more than one backward look over his shoulder circled out to where
his car still stood. He tooled it still closer up beside the hay-stack,
which he mounted, and then calmly and cold-bloodedly buried under a
huge mound of sun-cured prairie-grass that relic of a past crime which
he seemed only too willing to obliterate.
But he was callous, I could see, for once that telltale car was out of
sight, he appeared much more interested in the water-blisters on his
hands than the stain on his character. I could even see him inspect
his fingers, from time to time, as he tried to round off the top of
his very badly made stack, and test the joints by opening and closing
them, as though not quite sure they were still in working order. And
when the stack-making was finished and he returned to the windmill,
circling about the fallen tower and examining its mechanism and
stepping off its dimensions, I noticed that he kept feeling the small
of his back and glancing toward the stack in what seemed an attitude
of resentment.
When Whinnie came in with one of the teams, after his day a-field, I
noticed that Peter approached him blithely and attempted to draw him
into secret consultation. But Whinnie, as far as I could see, had no
palate for converse with suspicious-looking strangers. He walked
several times, in fact, about that mysterious new hay-stack, and moved
shackward more dour and silent than ever. So that evening the worthy
Peter was a bit silent and self-contained, retiring early, though I
strongly suspected, and still suspect, that he'd locked himself in the
bunk-house to remove unobserved all the labels from his underwear.
In the morning his appearance was not that of a man at peace with his
own soul. He even asked me if he might have a horse and rig to go in
to the nearest town for some new parts which he'd need for the
windmill. And he further inquired if I'd mind him bringing back a tent
to sleep in.
"Did you find the bunk-house uncomfortable?" I asked, noticing again
the heavy look about his eyes.
"It's not the bunk-house," he admitted. "It's that old Caledonian
saw-mill with the rock-ribbed face."
"What's the matter with Whinnie?" I demanded, with a quick touch of
resentment. And Peter looked up in astonishment.
"Do you mean you've never heard him--and your shack not sixty paces
away?"
"Heard him what?" I asked.
"_Heard him snore_," explained Peter, with a sigh.
"Are you sure?" I inquired, remembering the mornings when I'd had
occasion to waken Whinnie, always to find him sleeping as silent and
placid as one of my own babies.
"I had eight hours of it in which to dissipate any doubts," he
pointedly explained.
This mystified me, but to object to the tent, of course, would have
been picayune. I had just the faintest of suspicions, however, that
the fair Peter might never return from Buckhorn, though I tried to
solace myself with the thought that the motor-car and the beaver-lined
lap-robe would at least remain with me. But my fears were groundless.
Before supper-time Peter was back in high spirits, with the needed new
parts for the windmill, and an outfit of blue denim apparel for
himself, and a little red sweater for Dinkie, and an armful of
magazines for myself.
Whinnie, as he stood watching Peter's return, clearly betrayed the
disappointment which that return involved. He said nothing, but when
he saw my eye upon him he gazed dourly toward his approaching rival
and tapped a weather-beaten brow with one stubby finger. He meant, of
course, that Peter was a little locoed.
But Peter is not. He is remarkably clear-headed and quick-thoughted, and
if there's any madness about him it's a madness with a deep-laid method.
The one thing that annoys me is that he keeps me so continuously and yet
so obliquely under observation. He pretends to be studying out my
windmill, but he is really trying to study out its owner. Whinnie, I
know, won't help him much. And I refuse to rise to his gaudiest flies.
So he's still puzzling over what he regards as an anomaly, a farmerette
who knows the difference between De Bussey and a side-delivery
horse-rake, a mother of three children who can ride a pinto and play a
banjo, a clodhopper in petticoats who can talk about Ragusa and Toarmina
and the summer races at Piping Rock. But it's a relief to converse about
something besides summer-fallowing and breaking and seed-wheat and
tractor-oil and cows' teats. And it's a stroke of luck to capture a
farm-hand who can freshen you up on foreign opera at the same time that
he campaigns against the domestic weed!
_Thursday the Eleventh_
We are a peaceful and humdrum family, very different from the
westerners of the romantic movies. If we were the cinema kind of
ranchers Pee-Wee would be cutting his teeth on a six-shooter, little
Dinkie would be off rustling cattle, Poppsy would be away holding up
the Transcontinental Limited, and Mummsie would be wearing chaps,
toting a gun, and pretending to the sheriff that her jail-breaking
brother was _not_ hidden in the cellar!
Whereas, we are a good deal like the easterners who till the soil and
try to make a home for themselves and their children, only we are
without a great many of their conveniences, even though we do beat them
out in the matter of soil. But breaking sod isn't so picturesque as
breaking laws, and a plow-handle isn't so thrilling to the eye as a
shooting-iron, so it's mostly the blood-and-thunder type of westerners,
from the ranch with the cow-brand name, who goes ki-yi-ing through
picture and story, advertising us as an aggregation of train-robbers
and road-agents and sheriff-rabbits. And it's a type that makes me
tired.
The open range, let it be remembered, is gone, and the cowboy is going
after it. Even the broncho, they tell me, is destined to disappear. It
seems hard to think that the mustang will be no more, the mustang which
Dinky-Dunk once told me was the descendant of the three hundred Arab
and Spanish horses which Cortez first carried across the Atlantic to
Mexico. For we, the newcomers, mesh the open range with our barb-wire,
and bring in what Mrs. Eagle-Moccasin called our "stink-wagon" to turn
the grass upside down and grow wheat-berries where the buffalo once
wallowed. But sometimes, even in this newfangled work-a-day world, I
find a fresh spirit of romance, quite as glamorous, if one has only the
eye to see it, as the romance of the past. In one generation, almost,
we are making a home-land out of a wilderness, we are conjuring up
cities and threading the continent with steel, we are feeding the world
on the best and cleanest wheat known to hungry man. And on these clear
and opaline mornings when I see the prairie-floor waving with its
harvest to be, and hear the clack and stutter of the tractor breaking
sod on the outer quarter and leaving behind it the serried furrows of
umber, I feel there is something primal and poetic in the picture,
something mysteriously moving and epic....
The weather has turned quite warm again, with glorious spring days of
winy and heart-tugging sunlight and cool and starry nights. In my
spare time I've been helping Whinnie get in my "truck" garden, and
Peter, who has reluctantly forsaken the windmill and learned to run
the tractor, is breaking sod and summer-fallowing for me. For there is
always another season to think of, and I don't want the tin-can of
failure tied to my spirit's tail. As I say, the days slip by. Morning
comes, fresh as a new-minted nickel, we mount the treadmill, and
somebody rolls the big red ball off the table and it's night again.
But open-air work leaves me healthy, my children grow a-pace, and I
should be most happy.
But I'm not.
I'm so homesick for something which I can't quite define that it gives
me a misty sort of ache just under the fifth rib. It's just three
weeks now since Dinky-Dunk has ventured over from Casa Grande. If this
aloofness continues, he'll soon need to be formally introduced to his
own offspring when he sees them.
Now that I have Peter out working on the land, I can safely give a
little more time to my household. But meals are still more or less a
scramble. Peter has ventured the opinion that he might get a Chinaman
for me, if he could have a week off to root out the right sort of
Chink. But I prefer that Peter sticks to his tractor, much as I need
help in the house.
My new hired man is still a good deal of a mystery to me, just as I
seem to remain a good deal of a mystery to him. I've been asking myself
just why it is that Peter is so easy to get along with, and why, in
some indescribable way, he has added to the color of life since coming
to Alabama Ranch. It's mostly, I think, because he's supplied me with
the one thing I had sorely missed, without being quite conscious of it.
He has been able to give me mental companionship, at a time when my
mind was starving for an idea or two beyond the daily drudgery of
farm-work. He has given a fillip to existence, loath as I am to
acknowledge it. He's served to knock the moss off my soul by more or
less indirectly reminding me that all work and no play could make
Chaddie McKail a very dull girl indeed.
I was rather afraid, at one time, that he was going to spoil it all by
making love to me, after the manner of young Bud Dyruff, from the Cowen
Ranch, who, because I waded bare-kneed into a warm little slough-end
when the horses were having their noonday meal, assumed that I could be
persuaded to wade with equal celerity into indiscriminate affection.
That rudimentary and ingenuous youth, in fact, became more and more
offensive in his approaches, until finally I turned on him. "Are you
trying to make love to me?" I demanded. "The surest thing you know," he
said with a rather moonish smile. "Then let me tell you something," I
hissed out at him, with my nose within six inches of his, "I'm a
high-strung hell-cat, I am. I'm a bob-cat, and I'm not aching to be
pawed by you or any other hare-brained he-mutt. So now, right from this
minute, keep your distance! Is that clear? Keep your distance, or I'll
break your head in with this neck-yoke!"
Poor Bud! That rather blighted the flower of Bud's tender young
romance, and to this day he effects a wide detour when he happens to
meet me on the trail or in the byways of Buckhorn.
But Peter Ketley is not of the Bud Dyruff type. He is more complex,
and, accordingly, more disturbing. For I can see admiration in his
eye, even though he no longer expresses it by word of mouth. And there
is something tonic to any woman in knowing that a man admires her. In
my case, in fact, it's so tonic that I've ordered some benzoin and
cucumber-cream, and think a little more about how I'm doing my hair,
and argue with myself that it's a woman's own fault if she runs to
seed before she's seen thirty. I may be the mother of three children,
but I still have a hankering after personal power--and that comes to
women through personal attractiveness, disquieting as it may be to
have to admit it. We can't be big strong men and conquer through
force, but our frivolous little bodies can house the triumphant
weaknesses which make men forget their strength.
_Sunday the Fourteenth_
I've had a talk with Peter. It simply _had_ to come, for we couldn't
continue to play-act and evade realities. The time arrived for getting
down to brass tacks. And even now the brass tacks aren't as clear-cut
as I'd like them to be.
But Peter is not and never was a car-thief. That beetle-headed
suspicion has passed slowly but surely away, like a snow-man
confronted by a too affectionate sun. It slipped away from me little
by little, and began losing its lines, not so much when I found that
Peter carried a bill-fold and a well-thumbed copy of _Marius The
Epicurean_ and walked about in undergarments that were expensive
enough for a _prima donna_, but more because I found myself face to
face with a Peter-Panish sort of honorableness that was not to be
dissembled. So I cornered Peter and put him through his paces.
I began by telling him that I didn't seem to know a great deal about
him.
"The closed makimono," he cryptically retorted, "is the symbol of
wisdom."