The Prairie Mother. Stringer Arthur

on my baby grand.

      “How about that?” he demanded, with a grim head-nod toward the piano.

      “That may help to amuse Lady Alicia,” I just as grimly retorted.

      He stared about that comfortable home which we had builded up out of our toil, stared about at it as I’ve seen emigrants stare back at the receding shores of the land they loved. Then he sat studying my face.

      “How long is it since you’ve seen the inside of the Harris shack?” he suddenly asked me.

      “Last Friday when I took the bacon and oatmeal over to Soapy and Francois and Whinstane Sandy,” I told him.

      “And what did you think of that shack?”

      “It impressed me as being sadly in need of soap and water,” I calmly admitted. “It’s like any other shack where two or three men have been batching—no better and no worse than the wickiup I came to here on my honeymoon.”

      Dinky-Dunk looked about at me quickly, as though in search of some touch of malice in that statement. He seemed bewildered, in fact, to find that I was able to smile at him.

      “But that, Chaddie, was nearly four long years ago,” he reminded me, with a morose and meditative clouding of the brow. And I knew exactly what he was thinking about.

      “I’ll know better how to go about it this time,” I announced with my stubbornest Doctor Pangless grin.

      “But there are two things you haven’t taken into consideration,” Dinky-Dunk reminded me.

      “What are they?” I demanded.

      “One is the matter of ready money.”

      “I’ve that six hundred dollars from my Chilean nitrate shares,” I proudly announced. “And Uncle Carlton said that if the Company ever gets reorganized it ought to be a paying concern.”

      Dinky-Dunk, however, didn’t seem greatly impressed with either the parade of my secret nest-egg or the promise of my solitary plunge into finance. “What’s the other?” I asked as he still sat frowning over his empty pipe.

      “The other is Lady Alicia herself,” he finally explained.

      “What can she do?”

      “She may cause complications.”

      “What kind of complications?”

      “I can’t tell until I’ve seen her,” was Dinky-Dunk’s none too definite reply.

      “Then we needn’t cross that bridge until we come to it,” I announced as I sat watching Dinky-Dunk pack the bowl of his pipe and strike a match. It seemed a trivial enough movement. Yet it was monumental in its homeliness. It was poignant with a power to transport me back to earlier and happier days, to the days when one never thought of feathering the nest of existence with the illusions of old age. A vague loneliness ate at my heart, the same as a rat eats at a cellar beam.

      I crossed over to my husband’s side and stood with one hand on his shoulder as he sat there smoking. I waited for him to reach out for my other hand. But the burden of his troubles seemed too heavy to let him remember. He smoked morosely on. He sat in a sort of self-immuring torpor, staring out over what he still regarded as the wreck of his career. So I stooped down and helped myself to a very smoky kiss before I went off up-stairs to bed. For the children, I knew, would have me awake early enough—and nursing mothers needs must sleep!

Thursday the Second

       Table of Contents

      I have won my point. Dinky-Dunk has succumbed. The migration is under way. The great trek has begun. In plain English, we’re moving.

      I rather hate to think about it. We seem so like the Children of Israel bundled out of a Promised Land, or old Adam and Eve turned out of the Garden with their little Cains and Abels. “We’re up against it, Gee-Gee,” as Dinky-Dunk grimly observed. I could see that we were, without his telling me. But I refused to acknowledge it, even to myself. And it wasn’t the first occasion. This time, thank heaven, I can at least face it with fortitude, if not with relish. I don’t like poverty. And I don’t intend to like it. And I’m not such a hypocrite as to make a pretense of liking it. But I do intend to show my Dinky-Dunk that I’m something more than a household ornament, just as I intend to show myself that I can be something more than a breeder of children. I have given my three “hostages to fortune”—and during the last few days when we’ve been living, like the infant Moses, in a series of rushes, I have awakened to the fact that they are indeed hostages. For the little tikes, no matter how you maneuver, still demand a big share of your time and energy. But one finally manages, in some way or another. Dinky-Dunk threatens to expel me from the Mothers’ Union when I work over time, and Poppsy and Pee-Wee unite in letting me know when I’ve been foolish enough to pass my fatigue-point. Yet I’ve been sloughing off some of my old-time finicky ideas about child-raising and reverting to the peasant-type of conduct which I once so abhorred in my Finnish Olga. And I can’t say that either I or my family seem to have suffered much in the process. I feel almost uncannily well and strong now, and am a wolf for work. If nothing else happened when our apple-cart went over, it at least broke the monotony of life. I’m able to wring, in fact, just a touch of relish out of all this migrational movement and stir, and Casa Grande itself is already beginning to remind me of a liner’s stateroom about the time the pilot comes aboard and the donkey-engines start to clatter up with the trunk-nets.

      For three whole days I simply ached to get at the Harris Ranch shack, just to show what I could do with it. And I realized when Dinky-Dunk and I drove over to it in the buckboard, on a rather nippy morning when it was a joy to go spanking along the prairie trail with the cold air etching rosettes on your cheek-bones, that it was a foeman well worthy of my steel. At a first inspection, indeed, it didn’t look any too promising. It didn’t exactly stand up on the prairie-floor and shout “Welcome” into your ears. There was an overturned windmill and a broken-down stable that needed a new roof, and a well that had a pump which wouldn’t work without priming. There was an untidy-looking corral, and a reel for stringing up slaughtered beeves, and an overturned Red River cart bleached as white as a buffalo skeleton. As for the wickiup itself, it was well-enough built, but lacking in windows and quite unfinished as to the interior.

      I told Dinky-Dunk I wanted two new window-frames, beaverboard for inside lining, and two gallons of paint. I have also demanded a lean-to, to serve as an extra bedroom and nursery, and a brand-new bunk-house for the hired “hands” when they happen to come along. I have also insisted on a covered veranda and sleeping porch on the south side of the shack, and fly-screens, and repairs to the chimney to stop the range from smoking. And since the cellar, which is merely timbered, will have to be both my coal-hole and my storage-room, it most assuredly will have to be cemented. I explained to Dinky-Dunk that I wanted eave-troughs on both the shack and the stable, for the sake of the soft-water, and proceeded to point out the need of a new washing-machine, and a kiddie-coop for Poppsy and Pee-Wee as soon as the weather got warm, and a fence, hog-tight and horse-high, about my half-acre of kitchen garden.

      Dinky-Dunk sat staring at me with a wry though slightly woebegone face.

      “Look here, Lady-Bird, all this sort of thing takes ‘rhino,’ which means ready money. And where’s it going to come from?”

      “I’ll use that six hundred, as long as it lasts,” I blithely retorted. “And then we’ll get credit.”

      “But my credit is gone,” Dinky-Dunk dolorously acknowledged.

      “Then what’s the matter with mine?” I demanded. I hadn’t meant to hurt him, when I said that. But I refused to be downed. And I intended to make my ranch a success.

      “It’s still quite unimpaired, I suppose,” he said in a thirty-below-zero sort of voice.

      “Goose!”