The Prairie Mother. Stringer Arthur

      “Then we’ve got to get it,” I insisted. “I’m ready to face the music, if you are. So let’s get right down to hard-pan. Have they—have they really cleaned you out?”

      “To the last dollar,” he replied, without looking up.

      “What did it?” I asked, remaining stubbornly and persistently ox-like in my placidity.

      “No one thing did it, Chaddie, except that I tried to bite off too much. And for the last two years, of course, the boom’s been flattening out. If our Associated Land Corporation hadn’t gone under—”

      “Then it has gone under?” I interrupted, with a catch of the breath, for I knew just how much had been staked on that venture.

      Dinky-Dunk nodded his head. “And carried me with it,” he grimly announced. “But even that wouldn’t have meant a knock-out, if the government had only kept its promise and taken over my Vancouver Island water-front.”

      That, I remembered, was to have been some sort of a shipyard. Then I remembered something else.

      “When the Twins were born,” I reminded Dunkie, “you put the ranch here at Casa Grande in my name. Does that mean we lose our home?”

      I was able to speak quietly, but I could hear the thud of my own heart-beats.

      “That’s for you to decide,” he none too happily acknowledged. Then he added, with sudden decisiveness: “No, they can’t touch anything of yours! Not a thing!”

      “But won’t that hold good with the Harris Ranch, as well?” I further inquired. “That was actually bought in my name. It was deeded to me from the first, and always has been in my name.”

      “Of course it’s yours,” he said with a hesitation that was slightly puzzling to me.

      “Then how about the cattle and things?”

      “What cattle?”

      “The cattle we’ve kept on it to escape the wild land tax? Aren’t those all legally mine?”

      It sounded rapacious, I suppose, under the circumstances. It must have seemed like looting on a battlefield. But I wasn’t thinking entirely about myself, even though poor old Dinky-Dunk evidently assumed so, from the look of sudden questioning that came into his stricken eyes.

      “Yes, they’re yours,” he almost listlessly responded.

      “Then, as I’ve already said, let’s look this thing fairly and squarely in the face. We’ve taken a gambler’s chance on a big thing, and we’ve lost. We’ve lost our pile, as they phrase it out here, but if what you say is true, we haven’t lost our home, and what is still more important, we haven’t lost our pride.”

      My husband looked down at his plate.

      “That’s gone, too,” he slowly admitted.

      “It doesn’t sound like my Dinky-Dunk, a thing like that,” I promptly admonished. But I’d spoken before I caught sight of the tragic look in his eyes as he once more looked up at me.

      “If those politicians had only kept their word, we’d have had our shipyard deal to save us,” he said, more to himself than to me. Yet that, I knew, was more an excuse than a reason.

      “And if the rabbit-dog hadn’t stopped to scratch, he might have caught the hare!” I none too mercifully quoted. My husband’s face hardened as he sat staring across the table at me.

      “I’m glad you can take it lightly enough to joke over,” he remarked, as he got up from his chair. There was a ponderous sort of bitterness in his voice, a bitterness that brought me up short. I had to fight back the surge of pity which was threatening to strangle my voice, pity for a man, once so proud of his power, standing stripped and naked in his weakness.

      “Heaven knows I don’t want to joke, Honey-Chile,” I told him. “But we’re not the first of these wild-catting westerners who’ve come a cropper. And since we haven’t robbed a bank, or—”

      “It’s just a little worse than that,” cut in Dinky-Dunk, meeting my astonished gaze with a sort of Job-like exultation in his own misery. I promptly asked him what he meant. He sat down again, before speaking.

      “I mean that I’ve lost Allie’s money along with my own,” he very slowly and distinctly said to me. And we sat there, staring at each other, for all the world like a couple of penguins on a sub-Arctic shingle.

      Allie, I remembered, was Dinky-Dunk’s English cousin, Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland, who’d made the Channel flight in a navy plane and the year before had figured in a Devonshire motor-car accident. Dinky-Dunk had a picture of her, from The Queen, up in his study somewhere, the picture of a very debonair and slender young woman on an Irish hunter. He had a still younger picture of her in a tweed skirt and spats and golf-boots, on the brick steps of a Sussex country-house, with the jaw of a bull-dog resting across her knee. It was signed and dated and in a silver frame and every time I’d found myself polishing that oblong of silver I’d done so with a wifely ruffle of temper.

      “How much was it?” I finally asked, still adhering to my rôle of the imperturbable chorus.

      “She sent out over seven thousand pounds. She wanted it invested out here.”

      “Why?”

      “Because of the new English taxes, I suppose. She said she wanted a ranch, but she left everything to me.”

      “Then it was a trust fund!”

      Dinky-Dunk bowed his head, in assent.

      “It practically amounted to that,” he acknowledged.

      “And it’s gone?”

      “Every penny of it.”

      “But, Dinky-Dunk,” I began. I didn’t need to continue, for he seemed able to read my thoughts.

      “I was counting on two full sections for Allie in the Simmond’s Valley tract. That land is worth thirty dollars an acre, unbroken, at any time. But the bank’s swept that into the bag, of course, along with the rest. The whole thing was like a stack of nine-pins—when one tumbled, it knocked the other over. I thought I could manage to save that much for her, out of the ruin. But the bank saw the land-boom was petering out. They shut off my credit, and foreclosed on the city block—and that sent the whole card-house down.”

      I had a great deal of thinking to do, during the next minute or two.

      “Then isn’t it up to us to knuckle down, Dinky-Dunk, and make good on that Lady Alicia mistake? If we get a crop this year we can—”

      But Dinky-Dunk shook his head. “A thousand bushels an acre couldn’t get me out of this mess,” he maintained.

      “Why not?”

      “Because your Lady Alicia and her English maid have already arrived in Montreal,” he quietly announced.

      “How do you know that?”

      “She wrote to me from New York. She’s had influenza, and it left her with a wheezy tube and a spot on her lungs, as she put it. Her doctor told her to go to Egypt, but she says Egypt’s impossible, just now, and if she doesn’t like our West she says she’ll amble on to Arizona, or try California for the winter.” He looked away, and smiled rather wanly. “She’s counting on the big game shooting we can give her!”

      “Grizzly, and buffalo, and that sort of thing?”

      “I suppose so!”

      “And she’s on her way out here?”

      “She’s on her way out here to inspect a ranch which doesn’t exist!”

      I sat for a full minute gaping into Dinky-Dunk’s woebegone face. And still