The Prairie Wife
if he tries to make his help eat at second table! At any rate, Percy and
potato-lipped Terry developed friction which ended up in every promise
of a fight, only Dinky-Dunk arrived in the nick of time and took Terry
off his harassed neighbor's hands. I told him he had rather the habit of
catching people on the bounce. But I am reserving my opinion of Terry
Dillon. We are a happy family here, and I want no trouble-makers in my
neighborhood.
I have been studying some of the New York magazines, going rather
hungrily through their advertisements where such lovely layettes are
described. My poor little Dinky-Dink's things are so plain and rough and
meager. I envy those city mothers with all those beautiful linens and
laces. But my little Spartan man-child has never known a single day's
sickness. And some day he'll show 'em!
_Thursday the Fourteenth_
When Olie came in after dinner yesterday I asked him where my husband
was. Olie, after some hesitation, admitted that he was out in the
stable. I asked just what Dinky-Dunk was doing there, for I'd noticed
that after each meal he slipped silently away. Again Olie hesitated.
Then he finally admitted that he thought maybe my lord was out there
smoking. So I went out, and there I found my poor old Dinky-Dunk sitting
on a grain-box puffing gloomily away at his old pipe. For a minute or
two he didn't see me, so I went right over to him. "What does this
mean?" I demanded.
"Why?" he rather guiltily equivocated.
"Why are you smoking out here?"
"I--er--I rather thought you might think it wouldn't be good for the
Boy!" He looked pathetic as he said that, I don't know why, though I
loved him for it. He made me think of a king who'd been dethroned, an
outsider, a man without a home. It brought a lump into my throat.
I wormed my way up close to him on the grain-box, so that he had to hold
me to keep from falling off the end. "Listen to me," I commanded. "You
are my True Love and my Kaikobad and my Man-God and my Soul-Mate! And no
baby is ever going to come between me and you!"
"You shouldn't say those awful things," he declared, but he did it only
half-heartedly.
"But I want you to sit and smoke with me, beloved, the same as you
always did," I told him. "We can leave the windows open a little and it
won't hurt Dinky-Dink, for that boy gets more ozone than any city child
that was ever wheeled out in the Mall! It can't possibly hurt him. What
hurts me is being away from you so much. And now give me a hug, a tight
one, and tell me that you still love your Lady Bird!" He gave me two,
and then two more, until Tumble-Weed turned round in his stall and
whinnied for us to behave.
_Friday the Fifteenth_
I've been keeping Terry under my eye, and I don't believe he's a
trouble-maker. His first move was to lift Babe out of the cradle, hold
him up and publicly announce that he was a darlin'. Then he pointed out
to me what a wonderful head the child had, feeling his frontal bone and
declaring he was sure to make a great scholar in his time. Dinky-Dunk,
grinning at the sober way in which I was swallowing this, pointedly
inquired of Terry whether it was Milton or Archimedes that Babe most
resembled as to skull formation. But it isn't Terry's blarney that has
made me capitulate; it's the fact that he has proved so companionable
and has slipped so quietly into his place in our little lonely circle of
lives on this ragged edge of nowhere.
And he's as clean as a cat, shaving every blessed morning with a little
old broken-handled razor which he strops on a strip of oiled bootleg.
He declares that razor to be the finest bit of steel in all the
Americas, and showed off before Olie and Olga yesterday morning by
shaving without a looking-glass, which trick he said he learned in the
army. He also gave Olie a hair-cut, which was badly needed, and on
Sunday has promised to rig up a soldering-iron and mend all my pans for
me. He looks little over twenty, but is really thirty and more, and has
been in India and Mexico and Alaska.
I caught him neatly darning his own woolen socks. Instead of betraying
shame at being detected in that effeminate pastime he proudly explained
that he'd learned to do a bit of stitching in the army. He hasn't many
possessions, but he's very neat in his arrangement of them. A good
soldier, he solemnly told me, always had to be a bit of an old maid.
"And you were a grand soldier, Terry, I know," I frankly told him. "I've
done a bit av killing in me time!" he proudly acknowledged. But as he
sat there darning his sock-heel he looked as though he couldn't kill a
field mouse. And in his idle hours he reads _Nick Carter_, a series of
paper-bound detective stories, almost worn to tatters, which he is going
through for the second or third time. These adventures, I find, he later
recounts to Olie, who is slowly but surely succumbing to the poison of
the penny-dreadful and the virus of the shilling-shocker! I even caught
Dinky-Dunk sitting up over one of these blood-curdling romances the
other night, though he laughed a little as I dragged him off to bed, at
the absurdity of the situations. Terry's eyes lighted up when he saw my
books and magazines. When I told him he could take anything he wanted,
he beamed and said it would sure be a glorious winter he'd be having,
with all that book-reading when the long nights came. But before those
long nights are over I'm going to try to pilot Terry into the channels
of respectable literature.
_Saturday the Sixteenth_
I love the milky smell of my Dinky-Dink better than the perfume of any
flower that ever grew. He's so strong now that he can almost lift
himself up by his two little hands. At least he can really and actually
give a little _pull_. Two days ago our touring-car arrived. It is a
beauty. It skims over these smooth prairie trails like a yacht. From now
on we can run into Buckhorn, do our shopping, and run out again inside
of two or three hours. We can also reach the larger towns without
trouble and it will be so much easier to gather up what we need for Casa
Grande. Dinky-Dink seems to love the car. Ten minutes after we have
started out he is always fast asleep. Olga, who holds him in the back
seat when I get tired, sits in rapt and silent bliss as we rock along at
thirty miles an hour. And no wonder, for it's the next best thing to
sailing out on the briny deep!
I can't help thinking of Terry's attitude toward Olga. He doesn't
actively dislike her, but he quietly ignores her, even more so than Olie
does. I've been wondering why neither of them has succumbed to such
physical grandeur. Perhaps it's because they're physical themselves. And
then I think her largeness oppresses Terry, for no man, whether he's
been a soldier or not, likes to be overtopped by a woman.
The one exception, of course, is Percy. But Percy is a man of
imagination. He can realize that Olga is more than a mere type. He
agrees with me that she's a sort of miracle. To Terry she's only a mute
and muscular Finnish servant-girl with an arm like a grenadier's. To
Percy she is a goddess made manifest, a superhuman body of superhuman
vigor and beauty and at the same time a body crowned with majesty and
robed in mystery. And I still incline to Percy's opinion. Olga is always
wonderful to me. Her lips are such a soft and melting red, the red of
perfect animal health. The very milkiness of her skin is an
advertisement of that queenly and all-conquering vitality which lifts
her so above the ordinary ruck of humanity. And her great ruminative
eyes are as clear and limpid as any woodland pool.
She blushes rose color sometimes when Percy comes in. I think he finds a
secret joy in sensing that reaction in anything so colossal. But he
defends himself behind that mask of cool impersonality which is the last
attribute of the mental aristocrat, no matter what his feelings may be.
His attitude toward Terry, by the way, is a remarkably companionable one
in view of the fact of their earlier contentions. They can let by-gones
be by-gones and talk and smoke and laugh together. It is Terry, if any
one, who is just a wee bit condescending. And I imagine that it is the
aura of Olga which has brought about this oddly democratizing condition
of affairs. She seems to give a new relationship to things, softening a
point here and illuminating a point there as quietly as moonlight itself
can do.
_Monday the Seventeenth_
Yesterday Olga carried home a whole pailful of mushrooms, for an Indian
summer seems to have brought on a second crop of them. They were lovely.
But she refused to eat any. I asked her why. She heaved her huge
shoulders and said she didn't know. But she does, I feel sure, and I've
been wondering why she's afraid of anything that can taste so good, once
they are creamed and heaped on a square of toast. As for me
I love 'em, I love 'em, and who shall dare
To chide me for loving that mushroom fare?
_Wednesday the Nineteenth_
I found myself singing for all I was worth as I did my work this
morning. Dinky-Dunk came and stood in the door and said it sounded like
old times. I feel strong again and have ventured to ask my lord and
master if I couldn't have the weentiest gallop on Paddy once more. But
he's made me promise to wait for a week or two. The last two or three
nights have been quite cold, and away off, miles and miles across the
prairie, we can see the glow of fires where different ranchers are
burning their straw, after the wind-stackers have blown it from the
threshing machines. Sometimes it burns all night long.
_Friday the Twenty-first_
I have this morning found out why Olga won't eat mushrooms. It was very
cold again last night, for this time of year. Percy came over, and we
had a ripping fire and popped Ontario pop-corn with Ontario maple sirup
poured over it. Olga and Olie and Terry all came in and sat about the
stove. And being absolutely happy and contented and satisfied with life
in general, we promptly fell to talking horrors, the same as a cook
stirs lemon juice into her pudding-sauce, I suppose, to keep its
sweetness from being too cloying. That revel in the by-paths of the
Poesque began with Dinky-Dunk's casual reference to the McKinnon ranch
and Percy's inquiry as to why its earlier owner had given it up. So
Dinky-Dunk recounted the story of Andrew Cochrane's death. And it was
noticeable that poor old Olie betrayed visible signs of distress at this
tale of a young ranchman being frozen to death alone in his shack in
mid-winter. So Dinky-Dunk, apparently with malice prepense, enlarged on
his theme, describing how all young Cochrane's stock had starved in
their stalls and how his collie dog which had been chained to a
kennel-box outside the shack had first drawn attention to the tragedy. A
government inspector, in riding past, had noticed the shut-up shack, had
pounded on the door, and had promptly discovered the skeleton of the dog
with a chain and collar still attached to the clean-picked neckbones.
And inside the shack he had found the dead man himself, as life-like,
because of the intense cold, as though he had fallen asleep the night
before.
It was not a pleasant story, and my efforts to picture the scene gave me
rather a bristly feeling along the pin-feather area of my anatomy. And
again undoubted signs of distress were manifest in poor Olie. The face
of that simple-souled Swede took on such a look of wondering trouble
that Dinky-Dunk deliberately and at great detail told of a ghost that
had been repeatedly seen in an abandoned wickyup a little farther west
in the province.
And that, of course, fired the Celtic soul of Terry, who told of the
sister of his Ould Counthry master who had once been taken to a