I was ashamed to ask just what that meant, so I tried another tack.

"Folks are thrown pretty intimately together, in this frontier life,

like worms in a bait-tin. So they naturally need to know what they're

tangled up with."

Peter, at that, began to look unhappy.

"Would you mind telling me what brought you to this part of the

country?" I asked.

"Would you mind telling me what brought _you_ to this part of the

country?" countered Peter.

"My husband," I curtly retorted. And that chilled him perceptibly. But

he saw that I was not to be shuttled aside.

"I was interested," he explained with a shrug of finality, "in the

nesting-ground of the Canada goose!"

"Then you came to the right point," I promptly retorted. "For _I_ am

it!"

But he didn't smile, as I'd expected him to do. He seemed to feel that

something approaching seriousness was expected of that talk.

"I really came because I was more interested in one of your earliest

settlers," he went on. "This settler, I might add, came to your

province some three million years ago and is now being exhumed from

one of the cut-banks of the Red Deer River. He belongs to the Mesozoic

order of archisaurian gentlemen known as _Dinosauria_, and there's

about a car-load of him. This interest in one of your cretaceous

dinosaur skeletons would imply, of course, that I'm wedded to science.

And I _am_, though to nothing else. I'm as free as the wind, dear

lady, or I wouldn't be holidaying here with a tractor-plow that makes

my legs ache and a prairie Penelope, who, for some reason or other,

has the power of making my heart ache."

"_Verboten!_" I promptly interjected.

Peter saluted and then sighed.

"There are things up here even more interesting than your Edmonton

formation," he remarked. "But I was born a Quaker, you see, and I

can't get rid of my self-control!"

"I like you for that," I rather depressed him by saying. "For I find

that one accepts you, Peter, as one accepts a climate. You're intimate

in your very remoteness."

Peter looked at me out of a rueful yet ruminative eye. But Whinnie

came forth and grimly announced that the Twins were going it. So I had

to turn shackward.

"You really ought to get that car out," I called over my shoulder to

him, with a head-nod toward the hay-stack. And he nodded absently back

at me.

_Thursday the--I Can't Remember_

Dinky-Dunk rode over to-day when Peter was bolting some new wire stuts

on the windmill tower and I was busy dry-picking two polygamous old

roosters which Whinnie had beheaded for me. My husband attempted an

offhand and happy-go-lucky air which, I very soon saw, was merely a

mask to hide his embarrassment. He even flushed up to the ears when

little Dinkie drew back for a moment or two, as any child might who

didn't recognize his own father, though he later solicitously tiptoed

to the sleeping-porch where the Twins were having their nap, and

remarked that they were growing prodigiously.

It was all rather absurd. But when one member of this life-partnership

business is stiff with constraint, you can't expect the other member

to fall on his neck and weep. And Dinky-Dunk, for all his nonchalance,

looked worried and hollow-eyed. He was in the saddle again, and headed

back for Casa Grande, when he caught sight of Peter at work on the

windmill. So he loped over to my hired man and had a talk with him.

What they talked about I couldn't tell, of course, but it seemed a

casual and friendly enough conversation. Peter, in his blue-jeans,

dirt-marked and oil-stained, and with a wrench in his hand, looked

like an I. W. W. agitator who'd fallen on evil days.

I felt tempted to sally forth and reprove Dinky-Dunk for wasting the

time of my hired help. But that, I remembered in time, might be

treading on rather thin ice, or, what would be even worse, might seem

like snooping. And speaking of snooping, reminds me that a few nights

ago I listened carefully at the open window of the bunk-house where

Whinstane Sandy was deep in repose. Not a sound, not a trace of a

snore, arose from Whinnie's cot.

So my suspicions were confirmed. That old sourdough had deliberately

lain awake and tried to trumpet my second man from the precincts which

Whinnie felt he'd already preempted. He had attempted to snore poor

Peter off the map and away from Alabama Ranch!

_Saturday the Thirtieth_

The sedatest lives, I suppose, have their occasional Big Surprises.

Life, at any rate, has just treated me to one. Lady Alicia Newland's

English maid, known as Struthers, arrived at Alabama Ranch yesterday

afternoon and asked if I'd take her in. She'd had some words, she

said, with her mistress, and didn't propose to be treated like the

scum of the earth by anybody.

So the inevitable has come about. America, the liberalizer, has touched

the worthy Struthers with her wand of democracy and transformed her

from a silent machine of service into a Vesuvian female with a mind and

a voice of her own.

I told Struthers, who was still a bit quavery and excited, to sit down

and we'd talk the matter over, for rustling maids, in a land where

they're as scarce as hen's teeth, is a much graver crime than rustling

cattle. Yet if Lady Allie had taken my husband away from me, I didn't

see why, in the name of poetic justice, I shouldn't appropriate her

hand-maid.

And Struthers, I found, was quite definite as to her intentions. She

is an expert needle-woman, can do plain cooking, and having been a

nurse-maid in her younger days, is quite capable of looking after

children, even American children. I winced at that, naturally, and

winced still harder when she stipulated that she must have four

o'clock tea every afternoon, and every alternate Sunday morning off

for the purpose of "saging" her hair, which was a new one on me. But I

weighed the pros and cons, very deliberately, and discussed her

predicament very candidly, and the result is that Struthers is now

duly installed at Alabama Ranch. Already, in fact, that efficient hand

of hers has left its mark on the shack. Her muffins this morning were

above reproach and to-morrow we're to have Spotted Dog pudding. But

already, I notice, she is casting sidelong glances in the direction of

poor Peter, to whom, this evening at supper, she deliberately and

unquestionably donated the fairest and fluffiest quarter of the lemon

pie. I have no intention of pumping the lady, but I can see that there

are certain matters pertaining to Casa Grande which she is not averse

to easing her mind of. I am not quite sure, in fact, that I could find

it possible to lend an ear to the gossipings of a servant. And

yet--and yet, there are a few things I'd like to find out. And dignity

may still be slaughtered on the altar of curiosity.

_Sunday the Sixth_

Now that I've had a breathing-spell, I've been sitting back and

mentally taking stock. The showers of last week have brought the

needed moisture for our wheat, which is looking splendid. Our oats are

not quite so promising, but everything will depend upon the season.

The season, in fact, holds our fate and our fortune in its lap. Those

ninety days that include June and July and August are the days when

the northwest farmer is forever on tiptoe watching the weather. It's

his time of trial, his period of crisis, when our triple foes of

Drought and Hail and Fire may at any moment creep upon him. It keeps

one on the _qui vive_, making life a gamble, giving the zest of the

uncertain to existence, and leaving no room for boredom. It's the big

drama which even dwarfs the once momentous emotions of love and hate

and jealousy. For when the Big Rush is on, I've noticed, husbands are

apt to neglect their wives, and lovers forget their sweethearts, and

neighbors their enmities. Let the world go hang, but before and above

everything else, _save your crop!_

Yet, as I was saying, I've been taking stock. It's clear that I should

have more cattle. And if all goes well, I want a bank-barn, the same

as they have in the East, with cement flooring and modern stalling.

And I've got to comb over my herd, and get rid of the boarders and

hatracks, and acquire a blooded bull for Alabama Ranch, to improve the

strain. Two of my milkers must go for beef, as well as several scrub

springers which it would be false economy to hold. I've also got to do

something about my hogs. They are neither "easy feeders" nor good

bacon types. With them, too, I want a good sire, a pure-bred Yorkshire

or Berkshire. And I must have cement troughs and some movable fencing,

so that my young shoats may have pasture-crop. For there is money in

pigs, and no undue labor, provided you have them properly fenced.

My chickens, which have been pretty well caring for themselves, have

done as well as could be expected. I've tried to get early hatchings

from my brooders, for pullets help out with winter eggs when prices

are high, laying double what a yearling does during the cold months.

My yellow-beaks and two-year-olds I shall kill off as we're able to

eat them, for an old hen is a useless and profitless possession and I

begin to understand why lordly man has appropriated that phrase as a

term of contempt for certain of my sex. I'm trading in my eggs--and

likewise my butter--at Buckhorn, selling the Number One grade and

holding back the Number Twos for home consumption. There is an amazing

quantity of Number Twos, because of "stolen nests" and the lack of

proper coops and runs. But we seem to get away with them all. Dinkie

now loves them and would eat more than one at a time if I'd let him.

The gluttony of the normal healthy three-year-old child, by the way,

is something incredible. Dinkie reminds me more and more of a robin in

cherry-time. He stuffs sometimes, until his little tummy is as tight

as a drum, and I verily believe he could eat his own weight in

chocolate blanc-mange, if I'd let him. Eating, with him, is now a

serious business, demanding no interruptions or distractions. Once

he's decently filled, however, his greediness takes the form of

exterior application. He then rejoices to plaster as much as he can in

his hair and ears and on his face, until he looks like a cross between

a hod-carrier and a Fiji-Islander. And grown men, I've concluded, are

very much the same with their appetite of love. They come to you with

a brave showing of hunger, but when you've given until no more remains

to be given, they become finicky and capricious, and lose their

interest in the homely old porridge-bowl which looked all loveliness

to them before they had made it theirs....

This afternoon, tired of scheming and conceiting for the future, I had

a longing to be frivolous and care-free. So I got out the old

rusty-rimmed banjo, tuned her up, and sat on an overturned milk-bucket,

with Dinkie and Bobs and Poppsy and Pee-Wee for an audience.

I was leaning back with my knees crossed, strumming out _Turkey in the

Straw_ when Peter walked up and sat down between Bobs and Dinkie. So I

gave him _The Whistling Coon_, while the Twins lay there positively

pop-eyed with delight, and he joined in with me on _Dixie_, singing in

a light and somewhat throaty baritone. Then we swung on to _There's a

Hole in the Bottom of the Sea_, which must always be sung to a

church-tune, and still later to that dolorous ballad, _Oh, Bury Me Not

on the Lone Prair-hee!_ Then we tried a whistling duet with banjo

accompaniment, pretty well murdering the Tinker's Song from _Robin

Hood_ until Whinstane Sandy, who was taking his Sabbath bath in the

bunk-house, loudly opened the window and stared out with a dourly

reproving countenance, which said as plain as words: "This is nae the

day for whustlin', folks!"

But little Dinkie, obviously excited by the music, shouted "A-more!

A-more!" so we went on, disregarding Whinnie and the bunk-house window

and Struthers' acrid stare from the shack-door. I was in the middle of

Fay Templeton's lovely old _Rosie, You Are My Posey_, when Lady Alicia

rode up, as spick and span as though she'd just pranced off Rotten

Row. And as I'd no intention of showing the white feather to her

ladyship, I kept right on to the end. Then I looked up and waved the

banjo at her where she sat stock-still on her mount. There was an

enigmatic look on her face, but she laughed and waved back, whereupon

Peter got up, and helped her dismount as she threw her reins over the

pony's head.

I noticed that her eye rested very intently on Peter's face as I

introduced him, and he in turn seemed to size the stately newcomer up

in one of those lightning-flash appraisals of his. Then Lady Allie

joined our circle, and confessed that she'd been homesick for a sight

of the kiddies, especially Dinkie, whom she took on her knee and

regarded with an oddly wistful and abstracted manner.

My hired man, I noticed, was in no way intimidated by a title in our

midst, but wagered that Lady Allie's voice would be a contralto and

suggested that we all try _On the Road to Mandalay_ together. But Lady

Allie acknowledged that she had neither a voice nor an ear, and would

prefer listening. We couldn't remember the words, however, and the

song wasn't much of a success. I think the damper came when Struthers

stepped out into full view, encased in my big bungalow-apron of

butcher's linen. Lady Alicia, after the manner of the English, saw her

without seeing her. There wasn't the flicker of an eyelash, or a

moment's loss of poise. But it seemed too much like a Banquo at the

feast to go on with our banjo-strumming, and I attempted to bridge the

hiatus by none too gracefully inquiring how things were getting along

over at Casa Grande. Lady Allie's contemplative eye, I noticed,

searched my face to see if there were any secondary significances to

that bland inquiry.

"Everything seems to be going nicely," she acknowledged. Then she

rather took the wind out of my sails by adding: "But I really came

over to see if you wouldn't dine with me to-morrow at seven. Bring the

children, of course. And if Mr.--er--Ketley can come along, it will be

even more delightful."

Still again I didn't intend to be stumped by her ladyship, so I said

that I'd be charmed, without one second of hesitation, and Peter, with

an assumption of vast gravity, agreed to come along if he didn't have

to wear a stiff collar and a boiled shirt. And he continued to rag

Lady Allie in a manner which seemed to leave her a little bewildered.

But she didn't altogether dislike it, I could see, for Peter has the

power of getting away with that sort of thing.

_Tuesday the Eighth_

Lady Alicia's dinner is over and done with. I can't say that it was a

howling success. And I'm still very much in doubt as to its _raison

d'etre_, as the youthful society reporters express it. At first I

thought it might possibly be to flaunt my lost grandeur in my face.

And then I argued with myself that it might possibly be to exhibit

Sing Lo, the new Chink man-servant disinterred from one of the

Buckhorn laundries. And still later I suspected that it might be a

sort of demonstration of preparedness, like those carefully timed

naval parades on the part of one of the great powers disquieted by the

activities of a restive neighbor. And then came still another

suspicion that it might possibly be a move to precipitate the

impalpable, as it were, to put certain family relationships to the

touch, and make finally certain as to how things stood.

But that, audacious as I felt Lady Alicia to be, didn't quite hold

water. It didn't seem any more reasonable than my earlier theories. And

all I'm really certain of is that the dinner was badly cooked and badly

served, rather reminding me of a chow-house meal on the occasion of a

Celestial New Year. We all wore our every-day clothes (with Peter's

most carefully pressed and sponged by the intriguing Struthers) and the

Twins were put asleep up-stairs in their old nursery and Dinkie was

given a place at the table with two sofa-cushions to prop him up in his

armchair (and acted like a little barbarian) and Peter nearly broke his

neck to make himself as pleasant as possible, chattering like a magpie

and reminding me of a circus-band trying to make the crowd forget the

bareback rider who's just been carried out on a stretcher. But

Constraint was there, all the while, first in the form of Dinky-Dunk's

unoccupied chair, which remained that way until dinner was two-thirds

through, and then in the form of Dinky-Dunk himself, whose explanation

about some tractor-work keeping him late didn't quite ring true. His

harried look, I must acknowledge, wore away with the evening, but to me

at least it was only too plain that he was there under protest.

I did my utmost to stick to the hale-fellow-well-met role, but it

struck me as uncommonly like dancing on a coffin. And for all his

garrulity, I know, Peter was really watching us with the eye of a

hawk.

"I'm too old a dog," I overheard him telling Lady Alicia, "ever to be

surprised at the crumbling of an ideal or the disclosure of a

skeleton."

I don't know what prompted that statement, but it had the effect of

making Lady Allie go off into one of her purl-two knit-two trances.

"I think you English people," I heard him telling her a little later,

"have a tendency to carry moderation to excess."

"I don't quite understand that," she said, lighting what must have

been about her seventeenth cigarette.

"I mean you're all so abnormally normal," retorted Peter--which

impressed me as being both clever and true. And when Lady Allie,

worrying over that epigram, became as self-immured as a Belgian

milk-dog, Peter cocked an eye at me as a robin cocks an eye at a

fish-worm, and I had the audacity to murmur across the table at him,

"Lady Barbarina." Whereupon he said back, without batting an eye:

"Yes, I happen to have read a bit of Henry James."

But dinner came to an end and we had coffee in what Lady Alicia had

rechristened the Lounge, and then made doleful efforts to be light and

airy over a game of bridge, whereat Dinky-Dunk lost fourteen dollars

of his hard-earned salary and twice I had to borrow six bits from

Peter to even up with Lady Allie, who was inhospitable enough to

remain the winner of the evening. And I wasn't sorry when those

devastating Twins of mine made their voices heard and thrust before me

an undebatable excuse for trekking homeward. And another theatricality

presented itself when Dinky-Dunk announced that he'd take us back in

the car. But we had White-Face and Tumble-Weed and our sea-going

spring-wagon, with plenty of rugs, and there was no way, of course, of

putting a team and rig in the tonneau. So I made my adieux and planted

Peter meekly in the back seat with little Dinkie to hold and took the

reins myself.

I started home with a lump in my throat and a weight in my heart,

feeling it really wasn't a home that I was driving toward. But it was

one of those crystal-clear prairie nights when the stars were like

electric-lights shining through cut-glass and the air was like a

razor-blade wrapped in panne-velvet. It took you out of yourself. It

reminded you that you were only an infinitely small atom in the

immensity of a crowded big world, and that even your big world was

merely a microscopic little mote lost amid its uncounted millions of

sister-motes in the infinitudes of time and space.

"_Nitchevo!_" I said out loud, as I stopped on the trail to readjust

and wrap the Twins in their rug-lined laundry-basket.

"In that case," Peter unexpectedly remarked, "I'd like to climb into

that front seat with you."

"Why?" I asked, not greatly interested.

"Because I want to talk to you," was Peter's answer.

"But I think I'd rather not talk," I told him.

"Why?" it was his turn to inquire.

"Isn't it a rum enough situation as it is?" I demanded. For Peter,

naturally, had not used his eyes for nothing that night.

But Peter didn't wait for my permission to climb into the front seat.

He plumped himself down beside me and sat there with my first-born in

his arms and one-half of the mangy old buffalo-robe pulled up over his

knees.

"I think I'm beginning to see light," he said, after a rather long

silence, as we went spanking along the prairie-trail with the cold air

fanning our faces.

"I wish _I_ did," I acknowledged.

"You're not very happy, are you?" he ventured, in a voice with just

the slightest trace of _vibrato_ in it.

But I didn't see that anything was to be gained by parading my

troubles before others. And life, of late, had been teaching me to

consume my own smoke. So I kept silent.

"Do you like me, Peter?" I suddenly asked. For I felt absurdly safe

with Peter. He has a heart, I know, as clean as an Alpine village, and

the very sense of his remoteness, as I'd already told him, gives birth

to a sort of intimacy, like the factory girl who throws a kiss to the

brakeman on the through freight and remains Artemis-on-ice to the

delicatessen-youth from whom she buys her supper "weenies."

"What do you suppose I've been hanging around for?" demanded Peter,

with what impressed me as an absence of finesse.

"To fix the windmill, of course," I told him. "Unless you have

improper designs on Struthers!"

He laughed a little and looked up at the Great Bear.

"If it's true, as they say, that Fate weaves in the dark, I suppose

that's why she weaves so badly," he observed, after a short silence.

"She undoubtedly drops a stitch now and then," I agreed, wondering if

he was thinking of me or Struthers when he spoke. "But you do like me,

don't you?"

"I adore you," admitted Peter quite simply.

"In the face of all these?" I said with a contented little laugh,

nodding toward my three children.

"In the face of everything," asserted Peter.

"Then I wish you'd do something for me," I told him.

"What?"

"Break that woman's heart," I announced, with a backward nod of my

head toward Casa Grande.

"I'd much rather break _yours_," he coolly contended. "Or I'd prefer

knowing I had the power of doing it."

I shook my head. "It can't be done, Peter. And it can't even be

pretended. Imagine the mother of twins trying to flirt with a man even

as nice as you are! It would be as bad as an elephant trying to be

kittenish and about as absurd as one of your dinosauria getting up and

trying to do a two-step. And I'm getting old and prosy, Peter, and if

I pretend to be skittish now and then it's only to mask the fact that

I'm on the shelf, that I've eaten my pie and that before long I'll be

dyeing my hair every other Sunday, the same as Struthers, and----"

"Rot!" interrupted Peter. "All rot!"

"Why rot?" I demanded.

"Because to me you're the embodiment of undying youth," asserted the

troubadour beside me. It was untrue, and it was improper, but for a

moment or two at least my hungry heart closed about that speech the

same as a child's hand closes about a chocolate-drop. Women are made

that way. But I had to keep to the trail.

"Supposing we get back to earth," I suggested.

"What's the matter with the way we were heading?" countered the

quiet-eyed Peter.

"It doesn't seem quite right," I argued. And he laughed a little

wistfully.

"What difference does it make, so long as we're happy?" he inquired.

And I tried to reprove him with a look, but I don't think it quite

carried in the misty starlight.

"I can't say," I told him, "that I approve of your reasoning."

"That's just the point," he said with a slightly more reckless note in

his laughter. "It doesn't pretend to be reasoning. It's more like that

abandoning of all reasoning which brings us our few earthly glories."

"_Cogito, ergo sum_," I announced, remembering my Descartes.

"Well, I'm going to keep on just the same," protested Peter.

"Keep on at what?" I asked.

"At thinking you're adorable," was his reply.

"Well, the caterpillars have been known to stop the train, but you

must remember that it's rather hard on the caterpillars," I proclaimed

as we swung off the trail and headed in for Alabama Ranch.

_Sunday the Thirteenth_

On Friday night there were heavy showers again, and now Whinnie

reports that our Marquis wheat couldn't look better and ought to run

well over forty bushels to the acre. We are assured of sufficient

moisture, but our two enemies yclept Fire and Hail remain. I should

like to have taken out hail insurance, but I haven't the money on

hand.

I can at least make sure of my fire-guards. Turning those essential

furrows will be good training for Peter. That individual, by the way,

has been quieter and more ruminative of late, and, if I'm not

mistaken, a little gentler in his attitude toward me. Yet there's not

a trace of pose about him, and I feel sure he wouldn't harm the morals

of a lady-bug. He's kind and considerate, and doing his best to be a

good pal. Whinnie, by the way, regards me with a mildly reproving eye,

and having apparently concluded that I am a renegade, is concentrating

his affection on Dinkie, for whom he is whittling out a new Noah's Ark

in his spare time. He is also teaching Dinkie to ride horseback,

lifting him up to the back of either Nip or Tuck when they come for

water and letting him ride as far as the stable. He looks very small

up on that big animal.

At night, now that the evenings are so long, Whinnie takes my laddie

on his knee and tells him stories, stories which he can't possibly

understand, I'm sure, but Dinkie likes the drone of Whinnie's voice

and the feel of those rough old arms about his little body. We all

hunger for affection. The idiot who said that love was the bitters in

the cocktail of life wasn't either a good liver or a good philosopher.

For love is really the whole cocktail. Take that away, and nothing is

left....

I seem to be getting moodier, as summer advances. Alternating waves of

sourness and tenderness sweep through me, and if I wasn't a busy woman

I'd possibly make a fine patient for one of those fashionable

nerve-specialists who don't flourish on the prairie.

But I can't quite succeed in making myself as miserable as I feel I

ought to be. There seems to be a great deal happening all about us,

and yet nothing ever happens. My children are hale and hearty, my

ranch is fat with its promise of harvest, and I am surrounded by

people who love and respect me. But it doesn't seem enough. Coiled in

my heart is one small disturbing viper which I can neither scotch nor

kill. Yet I decline to be the victim of anything as ugly as jealousy.

For jealousy is both poisonous and pathetic. But I'd like to choke

that woman!

Yesterday Lady Alicia, who is now driving her own car, picked up Peter

from his fire-guard work and carried him off on an experimental ride

to see what was wrong with her carbureter--the same old carbureter!

She let him out at the shack, on her way home, and Struthers witnessed

the tail end of that _enlevement_. It spoilt her day for her. She

fumed and fretted and made things fly--for Struthers always works

hardest, I've noticed, when in a temper--and surrendering to the

corroding tides which were turning her gentle nature into gall and

wormwood, obliquely and tremulously warned the somewhat startled Peter

against ungodly and frivolous females who 'ave no right to be

corrupting simple-minded colonials and who 'ave no scruples against

playing with men the same as a cat would play with a mouse.

"So be warned in time," I sternly exclaimed to Peter, when I

accidentally overheard the latter end of Struthers' exhortation.

"And there are others as ought to be warned in time!" was Struthers'

Parthian arrow as she flounced off to turn the omelette which she'd

left to scorch on the cook-stove.

Peter's eye met mine, but neither of us said anything. It reminded me

of cowboy honor, which prompts a rider never to "touch leather," no

matter how his bronco may be bucking. And _omelette_, I was later

reminded, comes from the French _alumelle_, which means ship's

plating, a bit of etymology well authenticated by Struthers' skillet.

_Wednesday the Twenty-third_

Summer is here, here in earnest, and already we've had a few scorching

days. Haying will soon be upon us, and there is no slackening in the

wheels of industry about Alabama Ranch. My Little Alarm-Clocks have me

up bright and early, and the morning prairie is a joy that never grows

old to the eye. Life is good, and I intend to be happy, for

I'm going alone,

Though Hell forefend,

By a way of my own

To the bitter end!

And our miseries, after all, are mostly in our own minds. Yesterday I

came across little Dinkie lamenting audibly over a scratch on his hand

at least seven days old. He insisted that I should kiss it, and, after

witnessing that healing touch, was perfectly satisfied. And there's no

reason why grown-ups should be more childish than children themselves.

One thing that I've been missing this year, more than ever before, is

fresh fruit. During the last few days I've nursed a craving for a tart

Northern-Spy apple, or a Golden Pippin with a water-core, or a juicy

and buttery Bartlett pear fresh from the tree. Those longings come

over me occasionally, like my periodic hunger for the Great Lakes and

the Atlantic, a vague ache for just one vision of tumbling beryl

water, for the plunge of cool green waves and the race of foam. And

Peter overheard me lamenting our lack of fruit and proclaiming I could

eat my way right across the Niagara Peninsula in peach time. So when

he came back from Buckhorn this afternoon with the farm supplies, he

brought on his own hook two small boxes of California plums and a

whole crate of oranges.

It was very kind of him, and also very foolish, for the oranges will

never keep in this hot weather, and the only way that I can see to

save them is to make them up into marmalade. It was pathetic to see

little Dinkie with his first orange. It was hard to persuade him that

it wasn't a new kind of ball. But once the flavor of its interior

juices was made known to him, he took to it like a cat to cream.

It brought home to me how many things there are my kiddies have had to

do without, how much that is a commonplace to the city child must

remain beyond the reach of the prairie tot. But I'm not complaining. I

am resolved to be happy, and in my prophetic bones is a feeling that

things are about to take a turn for the better, something better than

the humble stewed prune for Dinkie's little tummy and something better

than the companionship of the hired help for his mother. Not that both

Peter and Whinnie haven't a warm place in my heart! They couldn't be

better to me. But I'm one of those neck-or-nothing women, I suppose,

who are silly enough to bank all on a single throw, who have to put

all their eggs of affection in one basket. I can't be indiscriminate,

like Dinkie, for instance, whom I found the other day kissing every

picture of a man in the Mail-Order Catalogue and murmuring "Da-da!"

and doing the same to every woman-picture and saying "Mummy." To be

lavish with love is, I suppose, the prerogative of youth. Age teaches

us to treasure it and sustain it, to guard it as we'd guard a lonely

flame against the winds of the world. But the flame goes out, and we

grope on through the darkness wondering why there can never be

another....

I wonder if Lady Alicia is as cold as she seems? For she has the

appearance of keeping her emotions in an ice-box of indifferency, the

same as city florists keep their flowers chilled for commercial

purposes. Lady Allie, I'm sure, is fond of my little Dinkie. Yet

there's a note of condescension in her affection, for even in what

seems like an impulse of adoration her exclamation nearly always is

"Oh, you lovable little rabbit!" or, if not that, it's likely to be

"You adorable little donkey you!" She says it very prettily, of

course, setting it to music almost with that melodious English drawl

of hers. She is, she must be, a very fascinating woman. But at the

first tee, friendship ends, as the golf-nuts say.

...I asked Peter the other day what he regarded as my besetting sin

and the brute replied: "Topping the box." I told him I didn't quite

get the idea. "A passion to produce a good impression," he explained,

"by putting all your biggest mental strawberries on the top!"

"That sounds suspiciously like trying to be a Smart Aleck," I

retorted.

"It may sound that way, but it isn't. You're so mentally alive, I

mean, that you've simply got to be slightly acrobatic. And it's as

natural, of course, as a child's dancing."

But Peter is wrong. I've been out of the world so long that I've a

dread of impressing people as stupid, as being a clodhopper. And if

trying hard not to be thought that is "topping the box," I suppose I'm

guilty.

"You are also not without vanity," Peter judicially continued. "But

every naturally beautiful woman has a right to that." And I proved

Peter's contention by turning shell-pink even under my sunburn and

feeling a warm little runway of pleasure creep up through my carcass,

for the homeliest old prairie-hen that ever made a pinto shy, I

suppose, loves to be told that she's beautiful.

Peter, of course, is a conscienceless liar, but I can't help liking

him, and he'll always nest warm in the ashes of my heart....

There's one thing I must do, as soon as I have the chance, and that is

get in to a dentist and have my teeth attended to. And now that I'm so

much thinner I want a new and respectable pair of corsets. I've been

studying my face in the glass, and I can see, now, what an awful

Ananias Peter really is. Struthers, by the way, observed me in the

midst of that inspection, and, if I'm not greatly mistaken, indulged

in a sniff. To her, I suppose, I'm one of those vain creatures who

fall in love with themselves as a child and perpetuate, thereby, a

life romance!

_Saturday the Twenty-sixth_

Coming events do _not_ cast their shadows before them. I was busy in

the kitchen this morning, making marmalade out of what was left of

Peter's oranges and contentedly humming _Oh, Dry Those Tears_ when the

earthquake that shook the world from under my feet occurred.

The Twins had been bathed and powdered and fed and put out in their

sleeping-box, and Dinkie was having his morning nap, and Struthers was

busy at the sewing-machine, finishing up the little summer shirts for

Poppsy and Pee-Wee which I'd begun to make out of their daddy's

discarded B. V. D.'s. It was a glorious morning with a high-arching

pale blue sky and little baby-lamb cloudlets along the sky-line and

the milk of life running warm and rich in the bosom of the sleeping

earth. And I was bustling about in my apron of butcher's linen, after

slicing oranges on my little maple-wood carving-slab until the house

was aromatic with them, when the sound of a racing car-engine smote on

my ear. I went to the door with fire in my eye and the long-handled

preserving spoon in my hand, ready to call down destruction on the

pinhead who'd dare to wake my kiddies.

My visitor, I saw, was Lady Alicia; and I beheld my broken wash-tub

under the front axle of her motor-car.

I went out to her, with indignation still in my eye, but she paid no

attention to either that or the tub itself. She was quite pale, in

fact, as she stepped down from her driving-seat, glanced at her

buckskin gauntlets, and then looked up at me.

"There's something we may as well face, and face at once," she said,

with less of a drawl than usual.

I waited, without speaking, wondering if she was referring to the tub.

But I could feel my heart contract, like a leg-muscle with a cramp in

it. And we stood there, face to face, under the flat prairie sunlight,

ridiculously like two cockerels silently estimating each other's

intentions.

"I'm in love with your husband," Lady Alicia suddenly announced, with

a bell-like note of challenge in her voice. "And I'd rather like to

know what you're going to do about it."

I was able to laugh a little, though the sound of it seemed foolish in

my own startled ears.

"That's rather a coincidence, isn't it?" I blithely admitted. "For so

am I."

I could see the Scotch-granite look that came into the thick-lashed

tourmaline eyes. And they'd be lovely eyes, I had to admit, if they

were only a little softer.

"That's unfortunate," was her ladyship's curt retort.

"It's more than unfortunate," I agreed, "it's extremely awkward."

"Why?" she snapped, plainly annoyed at my lightness of tone.

"Because he can't possibly have both of us, you know--unless he's

willing to migrate over to that Mormon colony at Red-Deer. And even

there, I understand, they're not doing it now."

"I'm afraid this is something much too serious to joke about," Lady

Alicia informed me.

"But it strikes me as essentially humorous," I told her.

"I'm afraid," she countered, "that it's apt to prove essentially

tragic."

"But he happens to be _my_ husband," I observed.

"Only in form, I fancy, if he cares for some one else," was her

ladyship's deliberate reply.

"Then he has acknowledged that--that you've captured him?" I inquired,

slowly but surely awakening to the sheer audacity of the lady in the

buckskin gauntlets.

"Isn't that rather--er--primitive?" inquired Lady Allie, paler than

ever.

"If you mean coming and squabbling over another woman's husband, I'd

call it distinctly prehistoric," I said with a dangerous little red

light dancing before my eyes. "It's so original that it's aboriginal.

But I'm still at a loss to know just what your motive is, or what you

want."

"I want an end to this intolerable situation," my visitor averred.

"Intolerable to whom?" I inquired.

"To me, to Duncan, and to _you_, if you are the right sort of woman,"

was Lady Alicia's retort. And still again I was impressed by the

colossal egoism of the woman confronting me, the woman ready to ride

rough-shod over the world, for all her sparkling veneer of civilization,

as long, as she might reach her own selfish ends.

"Since you mention Duncan, I'd like to ask if you're speaking now as

his cousin, or as his mistress?"

Lady Alicia's stare locked with mine. She was making a sacrificial

effort, I could see, to remain calm.

"I'm speaking as some one who is slightly interested in his happiness,

and his future," was her coldly intoned reply.

"And has my husband acknowledged that his happiness and his future

remain in your hands?" I asked.

"I should hate to see him waste his life in a hole like this," said

Lady Alicia, not quite answering my question.

"Have you brought any great improvement to it?" I parried. Yet even as

I spoke I stood impressed by the thought that it was, after all, more

than primitive. It was paleolithic, two prehistoric she-things in

combat for their cave-man.

"That is not what I came here to discuss," she replied, with a tug at

one of her gauntlets.

"I suppose it would be nearer the mark to say, since you began by

being so plain-spoken, that you came here to ask me to give you my

husband," I retorted as quietly as I could, not because I preferred

the soft pedal, but because I nursed a strong suspicion that

Struthers' attentive ear was just below the nearest window-sill.

Lady Alicia smiled forbearingly, almost pityingly.

"Any such donation, I'm afraid, is no longer your prerogative," she

languidly remarked, once more mistress of herself. "What I'm more

interested in is your giving your husband his liberty."

I felt like saying that this was precisely what I had been giving him.

But it left too wide an opening. So I ventured, instead: "I've never

heard my husband express a desire for his liberty."

"He's too honorable for that," remarked my enemy.

"Then it's an odd kind of honor," I icily remarked, "that allows you

to come here and bicker over a situation that is so distinctly

personal."

"Pardon me, but I'm not bickering. And I'm not rising to any heights

of courage which would be impossible to your husband. It's consoling,

however, to know how matters stand. And Duncan will probably act

according to his own inclinations."

That declaration would have been more inflammatory, I think, if one

small truth hadn't gradually come home to me. In some way, and for

some reason, Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland was not so sure of herself

as she was pretending to be. She was not so sure of her position, I

began to see, or she would never have thrown restraint to the winds

and come to me on any such mission.

"Then that counts me out!" I remarked, with a forlorn attempt at being

facetious. "If he's going to do as he likes, I don't see that you or I

have much to say in the matter. But before he does finally place his

happiness in your hands, I rather think I'd like to have a talk with

him."

"That remains with Duncan, of course," she admitted, in a strictly

qualified tone of triumph, as though she were secretly worrying over a

conquest too incredibly facile.

"He knows, of course, that you came to talk this over with me?" I

suggested, as though it were an after-thought.

"He had nothing to do with my coming," asserted Lady Alicia.

"Then it was your own idea?" I asked.

"Entirely," she admitted.

"Then what did you hope to gain?" I demanded.

"I wasn't considering my own feelings," imperially acknowledged her

ladyship.

"That was very noble of you," I admitted, "especially when you bear in

mind that you weren't considering mine, either! And what's more, Lady

Newland, I may as well tell you right here, and right now, that you

can't get anything out of it. I gave up my home to you, the home I'd

helped make by the work of my own hands. And I gave up the hope of

bringing up my children as they ought to be brought up. I even gave up

my dignity and my happiness, in the hope that things could be made to

come out straight. But I'm not going to give up my husband. Remember

that, I'm not going to give him up. I don't care what he says or

feels, at this particular moment; I'm not going to give him up to make

a mess of what's left of the rest of his life. He may not know what's

ahead of him, _but I do_! And now that you're shown me just what you

are, and just what you're ready to do, I intend to take a hand in

this. I intend to fight you to the last ditch, and to the last drop of

the hat! And if that sounds primitive, as you've already suggested,

it'll pay you to remember that you're out here in a primitive country

where we're apt to do our fighting in a mighty primitive way!"

It was a very grand speech, but it would have been more impressive, I

think, if I hadn't been suddenly startled by a glimpse of Whinstane

Sandy's rock-ribbed face peering from the bunk-house window at almost

the same moment that I distinctly saw the tip of Struthers' sage-green

coiffure above the nearest sill of the shack. And it would have been a

grander speech if I'd stood quite sure as to precisely what it meant

and what I intended to do. Yet it seemed sufficiently climactic for my

visitor, who, after a queenly and combative stare into what must have

looked like an ecstatically excited Fourth-of-July face, turned

imperially about and swung open the door of her motor-car. Then she

stepped up to the car-seat, as slowly and deliberately as a sovereign

stepping up to her throne.

"It may not be so simple as it seems," she announced with great

dignity, as she proceeded to start her car. And the same dignity might

have attended her entire departure, but in the excitement she

apparently flooded her carbureter, and the starter refused to work,

and she pushed and spun and re-throttled and pushed until she was

quite red in the face. And when the car finally did get under way, the

running-gear became slightly involved with my broken wash-tub and it

was not until the latter was completely and ruthlessly demolished that

the automobile found its right-of-way undisputed and anything like

dignity returned to the situation.

I stood there, with the long-handled preserving spoon still in my

hand, staring after Lady Alicia and the dust that arose from her

car-wheels. I stood there in a sort of trance, with all the valor gone

out of my bones and that foolish declamation of mine still ringing in

my ears.

I began to think of all the clever things I might have said to Lady

Alicia Elizabeth Newland. But the more I thought it over the more

desolated I became in spirit, so that by the time I meandered back to

the shack I had a face as long as a fiddle. And there I was confronted

by a bristling and voluble Struthers, who acknowledged that she'd

heard what she'd heard, and could no longer keep her lips sealed,

whether it was her place to speak or not, and that her ladyship was

not all that she ought to be, not by any manner of means, or she would

never have left England and hidden herself away in this wilderness of

a colony.

I had been rather preoccupied with my own thoughts, and paying scant

attention to the clattering-tongued Struthers, up to this point. But

the intimation that Lady Allie was not in the West for the sake of her

health brought me up short. And Struthers, when I challenged that

statement, promptly announced that the lady in question was no more in

search of health than a tom-cat's in search of water and no more

interested in ranching than an ox is interested in astronomy, seeing

as she'd 'a' been co-respondent in the Allerby and Crewe-Buller

divorce case if she'd stayed where the law could have laid a hand on

her, and standing more shamed than ever when Baron Crewe-Buller shut

himself up in his shooting-lodge and blew his brains out three weeks

before her ladyship had sailed for America, and the papers that full

of the scandal it made it unpleasant for a self-respecting lady's maid

to meet her friends of a morning in Finsbury Park. And as for these

newer goings-on, Struthers had seen what was happening right under her

nose, she had, long before she had the chance to say so openly by word

of mouth, but now that the fat was in the fire she wasn't the kind to

sit by and see those she should be loyal to led about by the nose. And

so forth. And so forth! For just what else the irate Struthers had to

unload from her turbulent breast I never did know, since at that

opportune moment Dinkie awakened and proceeded to page his parent with

all the strength of his impatient young lungs.

By the time I'd attended to Dinkie and finished my sadly neglected

marmalade--for humans must eat, whatever happens--I'd made an effort to

get some sort of order back into my shattered world. Yet it was about

Duncan more than any one else that my thoughts kept clustering and

centering. He seemed, at the moment, oddly beyond either pity or blame.

I thought of him as a victim of his own weakness, as the prey of a

predaceous and unscrupulous woman who had intrigued and would continue

to intrigue against his happiness, a woman away from her own world, a

self-complacent and sensual privateer who for a passing whim, for a

momentary appeasement of her exile, stood ready to sacrifice the last

of his self-respect. She was self-complacent, but she was also a woman

with an unmistakable physical appeal. She was undeniably attractive, as

far as appearances went, and added to that attractiveness was a

dangerous immediacy of attack, a touch of outlawry, which only too

often wins before resistance can be organized. And Dinky-Dunk, I kept

reminding myself, was at that dangerous mid-channel period of a man's

life where youth and age commingle, where the monotonous middle-years

slip their shackles over his shoulders and remind him that his days of

dalliance are ebbing away. He awakens to the fact that romance is being

left behind, that the amorous adventure which once meant so much to him

must soon belong to the past, that he must settle down to his jog-trot

of family life. It's the age, I suppose, when any spirited man is

tempted to kick up with a good-by convulsion or two of romantic

adventure, as blind as it is brief and passionate, sadly like the

contortions of a rooster with its head cut off.

I tried, as I sat down and struggled to think things out, to withhold

all blame and bitterness. Then I tried to think of life without

Dinky-Dunk. I attempted to picture my daily existence with somebody

else in the place that my Diddums had once filled. But I couldn't do

it. I couldn't forget the old days. I couldn't forget the wide path of

life that we'd traveled together, and that he was the father of my

children--my children who will always need him!--and that he and he

alone had been my torch-bearer into the tangled wilderness of passion.

Then I tried to think of life alone, of going solitary through the

rest of my days--and I knew that my Maker had left me too warm-blooded

and too dependent on the companionship of a mate ever to turn back to

single harness. I couldn't live without a man. He might be a sorry

mix-up of good and bad, but I, the Eternal Female, would crave him as

a mate. Most women, I knew, were averse to acknowledging such things;

but life has compelled me to be candid with myself. The tragic part of

it all seems that there should and could be only one man. I had been

right when I had only too carelessly called myself a neck-or-nothing

woman.

It wasn't until later that any definite thought of injustice to me at

Dinky-Dunk's hands entered my head, since my attitude toward

Dinky-Dunk seemed to remain oddly maternal, the attitude of the mother

intent on extenuating her own. I even wrung a ghostly sort of

consolation out of remembering that it was not a young and dewy girl

who had imposed herself on his romantic imagination, for youth and

innocence and chivalric obligation would have brought a much more

dangerous fire to fight. But Lady Alicia, with all her carefully

achieved charm, could scarcely lay claim to either youth or the other

thing. Early in the morning, I knew, those level dissecting eyes of

hers would look hard, and before her hair was up she'd look a little

faded, and there'd be moments of stress and strain when her naively

insolent drawl would jar on the nerves, like the talk of a spoiled

child too intent on holding the attention of a visitor averse to

precocity. And her disdain of the practical would degenerate into

untidiness, and her clinging-ivyness, if it clung too much, would

probably remind a man in his reactionary moments of _ennui_ that there

are subtler pursuits than being a wall, even though it's a sustaining

wall.

And somewhere in her make-up was a strain of cruelty or she would

never have come to me the way she did, and struck at me with an open

claw. That cruelty, quite naturally, could never have been paraded

before my poor old Dinky-Dunk's eyes. It would be, later on, after

disillusionment and boredom. Then, and then only, it would dare to

show its ugly head. So instead of feeling sorry for myself, I began to

feel sorry for my Diddums, even though he was trying to switch me off

like an electric-light. And all of a sudden I came to a decision.

I decided to write to Dinky-Dunk. That, I felt, would be safer than

trying to see him. For in a letter I could say what I wanted to

without being stopped or side-tracked. There would be no danger of

accusations and recriminations, of anger leading to extremes, of

injured pride standing in the path of honesty. It would be better than

talking. And what was more, it could be done at once, for the

mysterious impression that time was precious, that something ominous

was in the air, had taken hold of me.

So I wrote to Dinky-Dunk. I did it on two crazy-looking pages torn out

of the back of his old ranch ledger. I did it without giving much

thought to precisely what I said or exactly how I phrased it,

depending on my heart more than my brain to guide me in the way I

should go. For I knew, in the marrow of my bones, that it was my last

shot, my forlornest ultimatum, since in it went packed the last shred

of my pride.

"Dear Dinky-Dunk," I wrote, "I hardly know how to begin, but I surely

don't need to begin by saying we haven't been hitting it off very well

of late. We seem to have made rather a mess of things, and I suppose

it's partly my fault, and the fault of that stupid pride which keeps us

tongue-tied when we should be honest and open with each other. But I've

been feeling lately that we're both skirting a cut-bank with our eyes

blindfolded, and I've faced an incident, trivial in itself but

momentous in its possibilities, which persuades me that things can't go

on as they are. There's too much at stake to let either ruffled nerves

or false modesty--or whatever you want to call it--come between you and

the very unhappy woman who still is your wife. It's time, I think, when

we both ought to look everything squarely in the face, for, after all,

we've only one life to live, and if you're happy, at this moment, if

you're completely and tranquilly happy as I write this, then I've

banked wrong, tragically wrong, on what I thought you were. For I

_have_ banked on you, Dinky-Dunk, banked about all my life and

happiness--and it's too late to change, even if I wanted to. I'm alone

in the world, and in a lonely part of the world, with three small

children to look after, and that as much as anything, I suppose, drives

me to plain speaking and compels me to clear thinking. But even as I

write these words to you, I realize that it isn't really a matter of

thought or speech. It's a matter of feeling. And the one thing I feel

is that I need you and want you; that no one, that nothing, can ever

take your place.... I thought I could write a great deal more. But I

find I can't. I seem to have said everything. It _is_ everything,

really. For I love you, Dinky-Dunk, more than everything in life.

Perhaps I haven't shown it very much, of late, but it's there, trying

to hide its silly old ostrich-head behind a pebble of hurt pride. So

let's turn the page and start over. Let's start with a clean slate,

before we lose the chance. Come back to me. I'm very unhappy. I find it

hard to write. It's only that big ache in my heart that allows me to

write at all. And I've left a lot of things unsaid, that I ought to

have said, and intended to say, but this will have to be enough. If

there's nothing that speaks up to you, from between these lines, then

there's nothing that can hold together, I'm afraid, what's left of your

life and mine. Think this over, Dinky-Dunk, and answer the way your

heart dictates. But please don't keep me waiting too long, for until I

get that answer I'll be like a hen on a hot griddle or Mary Queen of

Scots on the morning before she lost her head, if that's more

dignified."

The hardest part of all that letter, I found, was the ending of it. It

took me a long time to decide just what to sign myself, just how to

pilot my pen between the rocks of candor and dignity. So I ended up by

signing it "Chaddie" and nothing more, for already the fires of

emotion had cooled and a perplexed little reaction of indifferency had

set in. It was only a surface-stir, but it was those surface-stirs, I

remembered, which played such a lamentably important part in life.

When Whinstane Sandy came in at noon for his dinner, a full quarter of

an hour ahead of Peter, I had his meal all ready for him by the time

he had watered and fed his team. I cut that meal short, in fact, by

handing him my carefully sealed letter and telling him I wanted him to

take it straight over to Casa Grande.

I knew by his face as I helped him hitch Water-Light to the

buckboard--for Whinnie's foot makes it hard for him to ride

horseback--that he nursed a pretty respectable inkling of the

situation. He offered no comments, and he even seemed averse to having

his eye meet mine, but he obviously knew what he knew.

He was off with a rattle of wheels and a drift of trail-dust even

before Peter and his cool amending eyes arrived at the shack to "stoke

up" as he expresses it. I tried to make Peter believe that nothing was

wrong, and cavorted about with Bobs, and was able to laugh when Dinkie

got some of the new marmalade in his hair, and explained how we'd have

to take our mower-knives over to Teetzel's to have them ground, and did

my best to direct silent reproofs at the tight-lipped and tragic-eyed

Struthers, who moved about like a head-mourner not unconscious of her

family obligations. But Peter, I suspect, sniffed something untoward in

the air, for after a long study of my face--which made me color a

little, in spite of myself--he became about as abstracted and

solemn-eyed as Struthers herself.

To my dying day I shall never forget that wait for Whinnie to come back.

It threatened to become an endless one. I felt like Bluebeard's wife up

in the watch tower--no, it was her Sister Anne, wasn't it, who anxiously

mounted the tower to search for the first sign of deliverance? At any

rate I felt like Luck--now before the Relief, or a prisoner waiting for

the jury to file in, or a gambler standing over an invisible

roulette-table and his last throw, wondering into what groove the little

ivory ball was to run. And when Whinnie finally appeared his seamed old

face wore such a look of dour satisfaction that for a weak flutter or

two of the heart I thought he'd brought Dinky-Dunk straight back with

him.

But that hope didn't live long.

"Your maun's awa'," said Whinnie, with quite unnecessary curtness, as

he held my own letter out to me.

"He's away?" I echoed in a voice that was just a wee bit trembly, as I

took the note from Whinnie, "what do you mean by away?"

"He left three hours ago for Chicago," Whinstane Sandy retorted, still

with that grim look of triumph in his gloomy old eyes.

"But what could be taking him to Chicago?" I rather weakly inquired.

"'Twas to see about buyin' some blooded stock for the ranch. At least,

so her ladyship informed me. But that's nae more than one of her lies,

I'm thinkin'."

"What did she say, Whinnie?" I demanded, doing my best to keep cool.

"Naethin'," was Whinnie's grim retort. "'Twas me did the sayin'!"

"What did you say?" I asked, disturbed by the none too gentle look on

his face.

"What was needed to be said," that old sour-dough with the lack-luster

eyes quietly informed me.

"What did you say?" I repeated, with a quavery feeling just under my

floating ribs, alarmed at the after-light of audacity that still

rested on his face, like wine-glow on a rocky mountain-tip.

"I said," Whinstane Sandy informed me with his old shoulders thrust

back and his stubby forefinger pointed to within a few inches of my

nose, "I said that I kenned her and her kind well, havin' watched the

likes o' her ridden out o' Dawson City on a rail more times than once.

I said that she was naethin' but a wanton"--only this was _not_ the

word Whinnie used--"a wanton o' Babylon and a temptress o' men and a

corrupter o' homes out o' her time and place, bein' naught but a soft

shinin' thing that was a mockery to the guid God who made her and a

blight to the face o' the open prairie that she was foulin' with her

presence. I said that she'd brought shame and sorrow to a home that

had been filled with happiness until she crept into it like the

serpent o' hell she was, and seein' she'd come into a lonely land

where the people have the trick o' tryin' their own cases after their

own way and takin' when need be justice into their own hands, she'd

have one week, one week o' seven days and no more, to gather up what

belonged to her and take herself back to the cities o' shame where

she'd find more o' her kind. And if she was not disposed to hearken a

friendly and timely word such as I was givin' her, I said, she'd see

herself taken out o' her home, and her hoorish body stripped to the

skin, and then tarred and feathered, and ridden on the cap-rail of a

corral-gate out of a settlement that had small taste for her company!"

"Whinnie!" I gasped, sitting down out of sheer weakness, "you didn't

say that?"

"I said it," was Whinnie's laconic retort.

"But what right had you to--"

He cut me short with a grunt that was almost disrespectful.

"I not only said it," he triumphantly affirmed, "but what's more to my

likin', I made her believe it, leavin' her with the mockin' laugh dead

in her eyes and her face as white as yon table-cover, white to the

lips!"

_Sunday the Twenty-seventh_

I've been just a little mystified, to-day, by Whinstane Sandy's

movements. As soon as breakfast was over and his chores were done he

was off on the trail. I kept my eye on him as he went, to satisfy

myself that he was not heading for Casa Grande, where no good could

possibly come of his visitations.

For I've been most emphatic to Whinstane Sandy in the matter of his

delightful little lynch-law program. There shall be no tarring and

feathering of women by any man in my employ. That may have been

possible in the Klondike in the days of the gold-rush, but it's not

possible in this country and this day of grace--except in the movies.

And life is not so simple that you can ride its problems away on the

cap-rail from a corral. It's unfortunate that that absurd old

sour-dough, for all his good intentions, ever got in touch with Lady

Alicia. I have, in fact, strictly forbidden him to repeat his visit to

Casa Grande, under any circumstances.

But a number of things combine to persuade me that he's not being as

passive as he pretends. He's even sufficiently forgotten his earlier

hostility toward Peter to engage in long and guarded conversation with

that gentleman, as the two of them made a pretense of bolting the new

anchor-timbers to the heel of the windmill tower. So at supper

to-night I summoned up sufficient courage to ask Peter what he knew

about the situation.

He replied that he knew more than he wanted to, and more than he

relished. That reply proving eminently unsatisfactory, I further

inquired what he thought of Lady Alicia. He somewhat startled and

shocked me by retorting that according to his own personal way of

thinking she ought to be spanked until she glowed.

I was disappointed in Peter about this. I had always thought of him as

on a higher plane than poor old Whinnie. But he was equally atavistic,

once prejudice had taken possession of him, for what he suggested must

be regarded as not one whit more refined than tar and feathers. As for

myself, I'd like to choke her, only I haven't the moral courage to

admit it to anybody.

_Thursday the First_

Lady Alicia has announced, I learn through a Struthers quite pop-eyed

with indignation, that it's Peter and I who possibly ought to be

tarred and feathered, if our puritanical community is deciding to go

in for that sort of thing! It is to laugh.

Her ladyship, I also learn, has purchased about all the small-arms

ammunition in Buckhorn and toted the same back to Casa Grande in her

car. There, in unobstructed view of the passers-by, she has set up a

target, on which, by the hour together, she coolly and patiently

practises sharpshooting with both rifle and revolver.

I admire that woman's spunk. And whatever you may do, you can't

succeed in bullying the English. They have too much of the bull-dog

breed in their bones. They're always at their best, Peter declares,

when they're fighting. "But from an Englishwoman trying to be

kittenish," he fervently added, "good Lord, deliver us all!"

And that started us talking about the English. Peter, of course, is too

tolerant to despise his cousins across the Pond, but he pregnantly

reminded me that Lady Allie had asked him what sort of town Saskatchewan

was and he had retorted by inquiring if she was fond of Yonkers,

whereupon she'd looked puzzled and acknowledged that she'd never eaten

one. For Peter and Lady Allie, it seems, had had a set-to about American

map-names, which her ladyship had described as both silly and unsayable,

especially the Indian ones, while Peter had grimly proclaimed that any

people who called Seven-Oaks _Snooks_ and Belvoir _Beever_ and Ruthven

_Rivven_ and Wrottesley _Roxly_ and Marylebone _Marrabun_ and

Wrensfordsley _Wrensley_ had no right to kick about American

pronunciations.

But Peter is stimulating, even though he does stimulate you into

opposition. So I found myself defending the English, and especially

the Englishman, for too many of them had made me happy in their lovely

old homes and too many of their sons, aeons and aeons ago, had tried

to hold my hand.

"Your Englishman," I proclaimed to Peter, "always acts as though he

quite disapproves of you and yet he'll go to any amount of trouble to

do things to make you happy or comfortable. Then he conceals his

graciousness by being curt about it. Then, when he's at his crankiest,

he's apt to startle you by saying the divinest things point-blank in

your face, and as likely as not, after treating you as he would a

rather backward child of whom he rigidly disapproves, he'll make love

to you and do it with a fine old Anglo-Saxon directness. He hates

swank, of course, for he's a truffle-hound who prefers digging out his

own delicacies. And it's ten to one, if a woman simply sits tight and

listens close and says nothing, that he'll say something about her

unrivaled powers of conversation!"

_Sunday the Fourth_

Peter, as we sat out beside the corral on an empty packing-case

to-night after supper, said that civilization was a curse. "Look what

it's doing to your noble Red Man right here in your midst! There was a

time, when a brave died, they handsomely killed that dead brave's

favorite horse, feeling he would course the plains of Heaven in peace.

Now, I find, they have their doubts, and they pick out a dying old

bone-yard whose day is over, or an outlaw that nobody can break and

ride. And form without faith is a mockery. It's the same with us

whites. Here we are, us two, with--"

But I stopped Peter. I had no wish to slide on rubber-ice just for the

sake of seeing it bend.

"Can you imagine anything lovelier," I remarked as a derailer, "than

the prairie at this time of the year, and this time of day?"

Peter followed my eye out over the undulating and uncounted acres of

sage-green grain with an eternity of opal light behind them.

"Think of LaVerendrye, who was their Columbus," he meditated aloud.

"Going on and on, day by day, week by week, wondering what was beyond

that world of plain and slough and coulee and everlasting green! And

they tell me there's four hundred million arable acres of it. I wonder

if old Verendrye ever had an inkling of what Whittier felt later on:

'I hear the tread of pioneers,

Of cities yet to be--

The first low wash of waves where soon

Shall roll a human sea.'"

Then Peter went on to say that Bryant had given him an entirely false

idea of the prairie, since from the Bryant poem he'd expected to see

grass up to his armpits. And he'd been disappointed, too, by the

scarcity of birds and flowers.

But I couldn't let that complaint go by unchallenged. I told him of

our range-lilies and foxglove and buffalo-beans and yellow crowfoot

and wild sunflowers and prairie-roses and crocuses and even violets in

some sections. "And the prairie-grasses, Peter--don't forget the

prairie-grasses," I concluded, perplexed for a moment by the rather

grim smile that crept up into his rather solemn old Peter-Panish face.

"I'm not likely to," he remarked.

For to-morrow, I remembered, Peter is going off to cut hay. He has

been speaking of it as going into the wilderness for meditation. But

what he's really doing is taking a team and his tent and supplies and

staying with that hay until it's cut, cut and "_collected_," to use

the word which the naive Lady Allie introduced into these parts.

I have a suspicion that it is the wagging of tongues that's sending

Peter out into his wilderness. But I've been busy getting his grub-box

ready and I can at least see that he fares well. For whatever happens,

we must have hay. And before long, since we're to go in more and more

for live stock, we must have a silo at Alabama Ranch. Now that the

open range is a thing of the past, in this part of the country at

least, the silo is the natural solution of the cattle-feed problem. It

means we can double our stock, which is rather like getting another

farm for nothing, especially as the peas and oats we can grow for

ensilage purposes give such enormous yields on this soil of ours.

_Tuesday the Sixth_

For the second time the unexpected has happened. Lady Alicia has gone.

She's off, bag and baggage, and has left the redoubtable Sing Lo in

charge of Casa Grande.

Her ladyship waited until one full day after the time-limit imposed

upon her by Whinstane Sandy in that barbarous armistice of his, and

then, having saved her face, joined the Broadhursts of Montreal on a

trip to Banff, where she'll be more in touch with her kind and her

countrymen. From there, I understand, she intends visiting the Marquis

of Anglesey ranch at Wallachie.

I don't know what she intends doing about her property, but it seems

to me it doesn't show any great interest in either her crop or her

cousin, to decamp at this particular time. Struthers protests that

she's a born gambler, and can't live without bridge and American

poker. Banff, accordingly, ought to give her what she's pining for....

But I'm too busy to worry about Lady Allie. The Big Drama of the year

is opening on this sun-steeped plain of plenty, for harvest-time will

soon be here and we've got to be ready for it. We're on the go from

six in the morning until sun-down. We're bringing in Peter's crop of

hay with the tractor, hauling three wagon-loads at a time. I make the

double trip, getting back just in time to feed my babies and then

hiking out again. That means we're all hitting on every cylinder. I've

no time for either worries or wishes, though Peter once remarked that

life is only as deep as its desires, and that the measure of our

existence lies in the extent of its wants. That may be true, in a way,

but I haven't time to philosophize over it. Hard work can be more than

a narcotic. It's almost an anesthetic. And soil, I've been thinking,

should be the symbol of life here, as it is with the peasants of

Poland. I feel that I'm getting thinner, but I've an appetite that I'm

ashamed of, in secret.

Dinky-Dunk, by the way, is not back yet, and there's been no word from

him. Struthers is resolute in her belief that he's in hiding somewhere

about the mountain-slopes of Banff. But I am just as resolute in my

scorn for all such suspicions. And yet, and yet,--if I wasn't so busy

I'd be tempted to hold solemn days of feasting and supplication that

Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland might wade out beyond her depth in the

pellucid waters of Lake Louise.

_Friday the Sixteenth_

Peter surprised me yesterday by going in to Buckhorn and bringing out

a machinist to work on the windmill tower. By mid-afternoon they had

it ready for hoisting and rebolting to its new anchor-posts. So just

before supper the team and the block-and-tackle were hitched on to

that attenuated steel skeleton, Whinnie took one guide rope and I took

the other, and our little Eiffel Tower slowly lifted itself up into

the sky.

Peter, when it was all over, and the last nut tightened up, walked

about with the triumphant smile of a Master-Builder who beholds his

work completed. So I said "Hello, _Halvard Solness_!" as I stepped

over to where he stood.

And he was bright enough to catch it on the wing, for he quoted back

to me, still staring up at the tower-head: "From this day forward I

will be a free builder."

Whereupon I carelessly retorted, "Oh, there's some parts of Ibsen that

I despise."

But something in Peter's tone and his preoccupation during supper both

worried and perplexed me. So as soon as I could get away from the

shack I went out to the windmill tower again. And the small platform

at the end of the sloping little iron ladder looked so tempting and

high above the world that I started up the galvanized rungs.

When I was half-way up I stopped and looked down. It made me dizzy,

for prairie life gives you few chances of getting above the flat floor

of your flat old world. But I was determined to conquer that feeling,

and by keeping my eyes turned up toward the windmill head I was able

to reach the little platform at the top and sit there with my feet

hanging over and my right arm linked through one of the steel

standards.

I suppose, as windmills go, it wasn't so miraculously high, but it was

amazing how even that moderate altitude where I found myself could

alter one's view-point. I felt like a sailor in a crow's-nest, like a

sentinel on a watch-tower, like an eagle poised giddily above the

world. And such a wonderful and wide-flung world it was, spreading out

beneath me in mottled patches of grape-leaf green and yellow and gold,

with a burgundian riot of color along the western sky-line where the

last orange rind of the sun had just slipped down out of sight.

As I stared down at the roof of our shack it looked small and pitiful,

tragically meager to house the tangled human destinies it was housing.

And the fields where we'd labored and sweated took on a foreign and

ghostly coloring, as though they were oblongs on the face of an alien

world, a world with mystery and beauty and unfathomable pathos about

it.

I was sitting there, with my heels swinging out in space and an oddly

consoling sense of calmness in my heart, when Peter came out of the

shack and started to cross toward the corral. I couldn't resist the

temptation to toss my old straw hat down at him.

He stopped short as it fell within twenty paces of him, like a meteor

out of the sky. Then he turned and stared up at me. The next minute I

saw him knock out his little briar pipe, put it away in his pocket,

and cross over to the tower.

I could feel the small vibrations of the steel structure on which I

sat poised, as he mounted the ladder toward me. And it felt for all

the world like sitting on the brink of Heaven, like a blessed damozel

the second, watching a sister-soul coming up to join you in your

beatitude.

"I say, isn't this taking a chance?" asked Peter, a little worried and

a little out of breath, as he clambered up beside me.

"It's glorious!" I retorted, with a nod toward the slowly paling

sky-line.

That far and lonely horizon looked as though a fire of molten gold

burned behind the thinnest of mauve and saffron and purple curtains, a

fire that was too subdued to be actual flame, but more an unearthly

and ethereal radiance, luring the vision on and on until it brought an

odd little sense of desolation to the heart and made me glad to

remember that Peter was swinging his lanky legs there at my side out

over empty space.

"I find," he observed, "that this tower was sold to a tenderfoot, by

the foot. That's why it went over. It was too highfalutin! It was

thirty feet taller than it had any need to be."

Then he dropped back into silence.

I finally became conscious of the fact that Peter, instead of staring

at the sunset, was staring at me. And I remembered that my hair was

half down, trailing across my nose, and that three distinctly new

freckles had shown themselves that week on the bridge of that same

nose.

"O God, but you're lovely!" he said in a half-smothered and shamefaced

sort of whisper.

"_Verboten!_" I reminded him. "And not so much the cussing, Peter, as

the useless compliments."

He said nothing to that, but once more sat staring out over the

twilight prairie for quite a long time. When he spoke again it was in

a quieter and much more serious tone.

"I suppose I may as well tell you," he said without looking at me,

"that I've come into a pretty clear understanding of the situation

here at Alabama Ranch."

"It's kind of a mix-up, isn't it?" I suggested, with an attempt at

lightness.

Peter nodded his head.

"I've been wondering how long you're going to wait," he observed,

apparently as much to himself as to me.

"Wait for what?" I inquired.

"For what you call your mix-up to untangle," was his answer.

"There's nothing for me to do but to wait," I reminded him.

He shook his head in dissent.

"You can't waste your life, you know, doing that," he quietly

protested.

"What else can I do?" I asked, disturbed a little by the absence of

color from his face, apparent even in that uncertain light.

"Nothing's suggested itself, I suppose?" he ventured, after a silence.

"Nothing that prompts me into any immediate action," I told him. "You

see, Peter, I'm rather anchored by three little hostages down in that

little shack there!"

That left him silent for another long and brooding minute or two.

"I suppose you've wondered," he finally said, "why I've stuck around

here as long as I have?"

I nodded, not caring to trust myself to words, and then, realizing I

was doing the wrong thing, I shook my head.

"It's because, from the morning you found me in that mud-hole, I've

just wanted to be near you, to hear your voice when you spoke, to see

the curve of your lips and the light come and go in your eyes when you

laugh," were the words that came ever so slowly from Peter. "I've

wanted that so much that I've let about everything else in life go

hang. Yet in a way, and in my own world, I'm a man of some little

importance. I've been cursed with enough money, of course, to move

about as I wish, and loaf as I like. But that sort of life isn't

really living. I'm not in the habit, though, of wanting the things I

can't have. So what strikes me as the tragic part of it all is that I

couldn't have met and known you when you were as free as I am now. In

a way, you _are_ free, or you ought to be. You're a woman, I think,

with arrears of life to make up. You've struck me, from the very

first, as too alive, too sensitive, too responsive to things, to get

the fullest measure out of life by remaining here on the prairie, in

what are, after all, really pioneer conditions. You've known the other

kind of life, as well as I have, and it will always be calling to you.

And if that call means anything to you, and the--the change we've

spoken of is on its way, or for some unexpected reason has to come,

I'm--well, I'm going to take the bit in my teeth right here and tell

you that I love you more than you imagine and a good deal more, I

suppose, than the law allows!"

He pushed my hand aside when I held it up to stop him.

"I may as well say it, for this is as good a time and place as we'll

ever have, and I can't go around with my teeth shut on the truth any

longer. I know you've got your three little tots down there, and I

love 'em about as much as you do. And it would seem like giving a

little meaning and purpose to life to know that I had the chance of

doing what I could to make you and to make them happy. I've--"

But I couldn't let him go on.

"It's no use, Peter," I cried with a little choke in my voice which I

couldn't control. "It's no earthly use. I've known you liked me, and

it's given me a warm little feeling down in one corner of my heart.

But I could never allow it to be more than a corner. I like you,

Peter, and I like you a lot. You're wonderful. In some ways you're the

most adorable man I've ever known in all my life. That's a dangerous

thing to say, but it's the truth and I may as well say it. It even

hurts a little to remember that I've traded on your chivalry, though

that's the one thing in life you _can_ trade on without reproof or

demand for repayment. But as I told you before, I'm one of those

neck-or-nothing women, one of those single-track women, who can't have

their tides of traffic going two ways at once. And if I'm in a mix-up,

or a maelstrom, or whatever you want to call it, I'm in it. That's

where I belong. It would never, never do to drag an innocent outsider

into that mixed-up mess of life, simply because I imagined it could

make me a little more comfortable to have him there."

Peter sat thinking over what I'd said. There were no heroics, no

chest-pounding, no suggestion of romantically blighted lives and

broken hearts.

"That means, of course, that I'll have to climb out," Peter finally

and very prosaically remarked.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it's so apt to leave one of us sailing under false colors,"

was his somewhat oblique way of explaining the situation. "I might

have hung on until something happened, I suppose, if I hadn't shown my

hand. And I hadn't quite the right to show my hand, when you take

everything into consideration. But you can't always do what you intend

to. And life's a little bigger than deportment, anyway, so what's the

use of fussing over it? There's just one thing, though, I want to say,

before we pull down the shutters again. I want you to feel that if

anything does happen, if by any mischance things should take a turn

for the worse, or you're worried in any way about the outcome of all

this"--he indulged in a quiet but comprehensive hand-wave which

embraced the entire ranch that lay in the gray light at our feet--"I

want you to feel that I'd be mighty happy to think you'd turn to me

for--for help."

It was getting just a little too serious again, I felt, and I decided

in a bit of a panic to pilot things back to shallower water.

"But you _have_ helped, Peter," I protested. "Look at all that hay you

cut, and the windmill here, and the orange marmalade that'll make me

think of you every morning!"

He leaned a little closer and regarded me with a quiet and wistful

eye. But I refused to look at him.

"That's nothing to what I'd like to do, if you gave me the chance," he

observed, settling back against the tower-standard again.

"I know, Peter," I told him, "And it's nice of you to say it. But the

nicest thing of all is your prodigious unselfishness, the unselfishness

that's leaving this talk of ours kind of--well, kind of hallowed, and

something we'll not be unhappy in remembering, when it could have so

easily turned into something selfishly mean and ugly and sordid. That's

where you're _big_. And that's what I'll always love you for!"

"Let's go down," said Peter, all of a sudden. "It's getting cold."

I sat staring down at the world to which we had to return. It seemed a

long way off. And the ladder that led down to it seemed a cobwebby and

uncertain path for a lady whose heart was still slipping a beat now

and then. Peter apparently read the perplexity on my face.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll go down one rung ahead of you. Even if

you did slip, then, I'll be there to hold you up. Come on."

We started down, with honest old Peter's long arms clinging to the

ladder on either side of me and my feet following his, step by step,

as we went like a newfangled sort of quadruped down the narrow steel

rungs.

We were within thirty feet of the ground when I made ever so slight a

misstep and brought Peter up short. The next moment he'd caught me up

bodily in his right arm, and to steady myself I let my arms slip about

his neck. I held on there, tight, even after I knew what I was doing,

and let my cheek rest against the bristly side of his head as we went

slowly down to the bottom of the tower.

It wasn't necessary, my holding my arms about Peter's neck. It wasn't

any more necessary than it was for him to pick me up and carry me the

rest of the way down. It wasn't true-to-the-line fair play, even, when

you come to think of it in cold blood, and it wasn't by any manner of

means just what sedately married ladies should do.

But, if the terrible truth must be told, _it was nice_. I think both

our hearts were a little hungry for the love which didn't happen to be

coming our way, which the law of man and his Maker alike prohibited.

So we saved our dignity and our self-respect, oddly enough, by

resorting to the shallowest of subterfuges. And I don't care much if

it wasn't true-to-the-line ethics. I liked the feel of Peter's arm

around me, holding me that way, and I hope he liked that long and

semi-respectable hug I gave him, and that now and then, later on, in

the emptier days of his life, he'll remember it pleasantly, and

without a bit of bitterness in his heart.

For Alabama Ranch, of course, is going to lose Peter as soon as he can

get away.

_Tuesday the Twenty-fourth_

Peter is no longer with us. He went yesterday, much to the open grief

of an adoring and heart-broken Struthers. I stood in the doorway as he

drove off, pretending to mop my eyes with my hankie and then making a

show of wringing the brine out of it. He laughed at this bit of

play-acting, but it was rather a melancholy laugh. Struthers, however,

was quite snappy for the rest of the morning, having apparently

construed my innocent pantomime as a burlesque of her tendency to

sniffle a little.

I never quite knew how much we'd miss Peter until he was gone, and

gone for good. Even Dinkie was strangely moody and downcast, and

showed his depression by a waywardness of spirit which reached its

crowning misdemeanor by poking a bean into his ear.

This seemed a trivial enough incident, at first. But the heat and

moisture of that little pocket of flesh caused the bean to swell, and

soon had Dinkie crying with pain. So I renewed my efforts to get that

bean out of the child's ear, for by this time he was really suffering.

But I didn't succeed. There was no way of getting behind it, or

getting a hold on it. And poor Dinkie bawled bitterly, ignorant of why

this pain should be inflicted on him and outraged that his own mother

should add to it by probing about the already swollen side of his

head.

I was, in fact, getting a bit panicky, and speculating on how long it

would take to get Dinkie in to Buckhorn and a doctor, when Struthers

remembered about a pair of toilet tweezers she'd once possessed

herself of, for pulling out an over-punctual gray-hair or two. Even

then I had to resort to heroic measures, tying the screaming child's

hands tight to his side with a bath-towel and having the tremulous

Struthers hold his poor little head flat against the kitchen table.

It was about as painful, I suppose, as extracting a tooth, but I

finally got a grip on that swollen legume and pulled it from its

inflamed pocket of flesh. I felt as relieved and triumphant as an

obstetrician after a hard case, and meekly handed over to Dinkie

anything his Royal Highness desired, even to his fifth cookie and the

entire contents of my sewing-basket, which under ordinary circumstances

is strictly taboo. But once the ear-passage was clear the pain went

away, and Dinkie, at the end of a couple of hours, was himself again.

But Peter has left a hole in our lives. I keep feeling that he's

merely out on the land and will be coming in with that quiet and

remote smile of his and talking like mad through a meal that I always

had an incentive for making a little more tempting than the ordinary

grub-rustling of a clodhopper.

The only person about Alabama Ranch who seems undisturbed by Peter's

departure is Whinstane Sandy. He reminds me of a decrepit but

robustious old rooster repossessing himself of a chicken-run after the

decapitation of an arrogant and envied rival. He has with a dour sort

of blitheness connected up the windmill pump, in his spare time, and

run a pipe in through the kitchen wall and rigged up a sink, out of a

galvanized pig-trough. It may not be lovely to the eye, but it will

save many a step about this shack of ours. And the steps count, now

that the season's work is breaking over us like a Jersey surf!

_Thursday the Twenty-sixth_

I've got Struthers in jumpers, and she's learning how to handle a

team. Whinnie laughed at her legs, and said they made him think

a-muckle o' a heron. But men are scarce in this section, and it looks

as though Alabama Ranch was going to have a real wheat crop. Whinnie

boasts that we're three weeks ahead of Casa Grande, which, they tell

me, is taking on a neglected look.

I've had no message from my Dinky-Dunk, and no news of him. All day

long, at the back of my brain, a nervous little mouse of anxiety keeps

nibbling and nibbling away. Last night, when she was helping me get

the Twins ready for bed, Struthers confided to me that she felt sure

Lady Alicia and my husband had been playmates together in England at

one time, for she's heard them talking, and laughing about things that

had happened long ago. But it's not the things that happened long ago

that are worrying me. It's the things that may be happening now.

I wonder what the fair Lady Alicia intends doing about getting her

crop off. Sing Lo will scarcely be the man to master that problem....

The Lord knows I'm busy enough, but I seem to be eternally waiting for

something. I wonder if every woman's life has a larval period like

this? I've my children and Bobs. Over my heart, all day long, should

flow a deep and steady current of love. But it's not the kind I've a

craving for. There's something missing. I've been wondering if

Dinky-Dunk, even though he were here at my side, would still find any

"kick" in my kisses. I can't understand why he never revealed to me

the fact that he and Lady Allie were playmates as children. In that

case, she must be considerably older than she looks. But old or young,

I wish she'd stayed in England with her croquet and pat-tennis and

broom-stick-cricket, instead of coming out here and majestically

announcing that nothing was to be expected of a country which had no

railway porters!

_Wednesday the First_

The departed Peter has sent back to us a Victrola and a neatly packed

box of records. Surely that was kind of him. I suppose he felt that I

needed something more than a banjo to keep my melodious soul alive. He

may be right, for sometimes during these long and hot and tiring days

I feel as though my spirit had been vitrified and macadamized. But I

haven't yet had time to unpack the music-box and get it in

working-order, though I've had a look through the records. There are

quite a number of my old favorites. I notice among them a song from

_The Bohemian Girl_. It bears the title of _Then You'll Remember Me_.

Poor old Peter! For when I play it, I know I'll always be thinking of

another man.

_Sunday the Fifth_

Life is a club from which Cupid can never be blackballed. I notice

that Struthers, who seems intent on the capture of a soul-mate, has

taken to darning Whinstane Sandy's socks for him. And Whinnie, who is

a bit of a cobbler as well as being a bit of renegade to the ranks of

the misogynists, has put new heels and soles on the number sevens

which Struthers wears at the extremities of her heron-like limbs. Thus

romance, beginning at the metatarsus, slowly but surely ascends to the

diastolic region!

_Wednesday the Eighth_

I've just had a nice little note from Peter, written from the Aldine

Club in Philadelphia, saying he'd neglected to mention something which

had been on his mind for some time. He has a slightly rundown place in

the suburbs of Pasadena, he went on to explain, and as his lazy summer

would mean he'd have to remain in the East and be an ink-coolie all

winter, the place was at my disposal if it so turned out that a winter

in California seemed desirable for me and my kiddies. It would, in

fact, be a God-send--so he protested--to have somebody dependable

lodged in that empty house, to keep the cobwebs out of the corners and

the mildew off his books and save the whole disintegrating shebang

from the general rack and ruin which usually overtakes empty mansions

of that type. He gave me the name and address of the caretaker, on

Euclid Avenue, and concluded by saying it wasn't very much of a place,

but might be endured for a winter for the sake of the climate, if I

happened to be looking for a sunnier corner of the world than Alabama

Ranch. He further announced that he'd give an arm to see little

Dinkie's face when that young outlaw stole his first ripe orange from

the big Valencia tree in the _patio_. And Peter, in a post-script,

averred that he could vouch for the flavor of the aforementioned

Valencias.

_Tuesday the Fourteenth_

Whinstane Sandy about the middle of last week brought home the

startling information that Sing Lo had sold Lady Allie's heavy

work-team to Bud O'Malley for the paltry sum of sixty dollars. He

further reported that Sing Lo had decamped, taking with him as rich a

haul as he could carry.

I was in doubt on what to do, for a while. But I eventually decided to

go in to Buckhorn and send a telegram to the owner of Casa Grande. I

felt sure, if Lady Allie was in Banff, that she'd be at the C. P. R.

hotel there, and that even if she had gone on to the Anglesey Ranch my

telegram would be forwarded to Wallachie. So I wired her: "Chinaman

left in charge has been selling ranch property. Advise me what action

you wish taken."

A two-day wait brought no reply to this, so I then telegraphed to the

hotel-manager asking for information as to her ladyship. I was anxious

for that information, I'll confess, for more personal reasons than

those arising out of the activities of Sing Lo.

When I went in for my house supplies on Friday there was a message

there from the Banff hotel-manager stating that Lady Newland had left,

ten days before, for the Empress Hotel in Victoria. So I promptly

wired that hotel, only to learn that my titled wanderer might be found

in San Francisco, at the Hotel St. Francis. So I repeated my message;

and yesterday morning Hy Teetzel, homeward bound from Buckhorn in his

tin Lizzie, brought the long-expected reply out to me. It read:

"Would advise consulting my ranch manager on the matter mentioned in

your wire," and was signed "Alicia Newland."

There was a sense of satisfaction in having located the lady, but

there was a distinctly nettling note in the tenor of that little

message. I decided, accordingly, to give her the retort courteous by

wiring back to her: "Kindly advise me of ranch manager's present

whereabouts," and at the bottom of that message inscribed, "Mrs.

Duncan Argyll McKail."

And I've been smiling a little at the telegram which has just been

sent on to me, for now that I come to review our electric intercourse

in a cooler frame of mind it looks suspiciously like back-biting over

a thousand miles of telegraph-wire. This second message from San

Francisco said: "Have no knowledge whatever of the gentleman's

movements or whereabouts."

It was, I found, both a pleasant and a puzzling bit of information,

and my earlier regrets at wasting time that I could ill spare betrayed

a tendency to evaporate. It was satisfying, and yet it was not

satisfying, for morose little doubts as to the veracity of the lady in

question kept creeping back into my mind. It also left everything

pretty much up in the air, so I've decided to take things in my own

hand and go to Casa Grande and look things over.

_Thursday the Sixteenth_

I didn't go over to Casa Grande, after all. For this morning the news

came to me that Duncan had been back since day before yesterday. And

he is undoubtedly doing anything that needs to be done.

But the lady lied, after all. That fact now is only too apparent. And

her equerry has been hurried back to look after her harried estate.

The live stock, I hear, went without water for three whole days, and

the poultry would all have been in kingdom-come if Sing Lo, in

choosing a few choice birds for his private consumption, hadn't

happened to leave the run-door unlatched....

I was foolish enough to expect, of course, that Duncan might nurse

some slight curiosity as to his family and its welfare. This will be

his third day back, and he has neither put in an appearance nor sent a

word. He's busy, of course, with that tangle to unravel--but where

there's a will there's usually a way. And hope dies hard. Yet day by

day I find less bitterness in my heart. Those earlier hot tides of

resentment have been succeeded, not by tranquillity or even

indifference, but by a colder and more judicial attitude toward things

in general. I've got a home and a family to fight for--not to mention

a baby with prickly-heat--and they must not be forgotten. I have the

consolation, too, of knowing that the fight doesn't promise to be a

losing one. I've banked on wheat, and old Mother Earth is not going to

betray me. My grain has ripened miraculously during these last few

weeks of hot dry weather. It's _too_ hot, in fact, for my harvest

threatens to come on with a rush. But we'll scramble through it, in

some way.

_Sunday the Nineteenth_

It's only three days since I wrote those last lines. But it seems a

long time back to last Thursday. So many, many things have happened

since then.

Friday morning broke very hot, and without a breath of wind. By noon

it was stifling. By mid-afternoon I felt strangely tired, and even

more strangely depressed. I even attempted to shake myself together,

arguing that my condition was purely mental, for I had remembered that

it was unmistakably Friday, a day of ill-omen to the superstitious.

I was surprised, between four and five, to see Whinstane Sandy come in

from his work and busy himself about the stables. When I asked him the

reason for this premature withdrawal he pointed toward a low and

meek-looking bank of clouds just above the southwest sky-line and

announced that we were going to have a "blow," as he called it.

I was inclined to doubt this, for the sun was still shining, there was

no trace of a breeze, and the sky straight over my head was a pellucid

pale azure. But, when I came to notice it, there was an unusual, small

stir among my chickens, the cattle were restless, and one would

occasionally hold its nose high in the air and then indulge in a

lowing sound. Even Bobs moved peevishly from place to place, plainly

disturbed by more than the flies and the heat. I had a feeling,

myself, of not being able to get enough air into my lungs, a depressed

and disturbed feeling which was nothing more than the barometer of my

body trying to tell me that the glass was falling, and falling

forebodingly.

By this time I could see Whinnie's cloud-bank rising higher above the

horizon and becoming more ragged as it mushroomed into anvil-shaped

turrets. Then a sigh or two of hot air, hotter even than the air about

us, disturbed the quietness and made the level floor of my yellowing

wheat undulate a little, like a breast that has taken a quiet breath

or two. Then faint and far-off came a sound like the leisurely firing

of big guns, becoming quicker and louder as the ragged arch of the

storm crept over the sun and marched down on us with strange twistings

and writhings and up-boilings of its tawny mane.

"Ye'd best be makin' things ready!" Whinnie called out to me. But even

before I had my windows down little eddies of dust were circling about

the shack. Then came a long and sucking sigh of wind, followed by a

hot calm too horrible to be endured, a hot calm from the stifling

center of which your spirit cried out for whatever was destined to

happen to happen at once. The next moment brought its answer to that

foolish prayer, a whining and whistling of wind that shook our little

shell of a house on its foundations, a lurid flash or two, and then

the tumult of the storm itself.

The room where I stood with my children grew suddenly and uncannily

dark. I could hear Struthers calling thinly from the kitchen door to

Whinnie, who apparently was making a belated effort to get my

chicken-run gate open and my fowls under cover. I could hear a

scattering drive of big rain-drops on the roof, solemn and soft, like

the fall of plump frogs. But by the time Whinnie was in through the

kitchen door this had changed. It had changed into a passionate and

pulsing beat of rain, whipped and lashed by the wind that shook the

timbers about us. The air, however, was cooler by this time, and it

was easier to breathe. So I found it hard to understand why Whinnie,

as he stood in the half-light by one of the windows, should wear such

a look of protest on his morose old face which was the color of a

pigskin saddle just under the stirrup-flap.

Even when I heard one solitary thump on the roof over my head, as

distinct as the thump of a hammer, I failed to understand what was

worrying my hired man. Then, after a momentary pause in the rain, the

thumps were repeated. They were repeated in a rattle which became a

clatter and soon grew into one continuous stream of sound, like a

thousand machine-guns all going off at once.

I realized then what it meant, what it was. It was hail. And it meant

that we were being "hailed out."