The Prairie Wife
he came in early for supper and announced that he'd have to leave for
Winnipeg right away and might even have to go on to Ottawa. So I cooked
his supper and packed his bag and held Babe up for him to kiss good-by.
But still I didn't bother him with questions, for I was afraid of bad
news. And he knew that I knew I could trust him.
He kissed me good-by in a tragically tender, or rather a tenderly tragic
sort of way, which made me wonder for a moment if he was possibly never
coming back again. So I made 'em all wait while I took one extra, for
good measure, in case I should be a grass widow for the rest of my
days.
To-night, however, I sat Terry down at the end of the table and third
degreed him to the queen's taste. The fight, as far as I can learn from
this circuitous young Irishman, is all about a right of way through our
part of the province. Dinky-Dunk, it seems, has been working for it for
over a year. And the man he called wicked names had been sent out by the
officials to report on the territory. My husband claims he was bribed by
the opposition party and turned in a report saying our district was
without water. He also proclaimed that our land--_our_ land, mark
you!--was unvaryingly poor and inferior soil! No wonder my Dinky-Dunk
had stormed! Then Terry rather disquieted me by chortlingly announcing
that they had put one over on the whole bunch. For, three days before,
he'd quietly put down twenty soil and water-test holes and carefully
filled them in again. But he'd found what he was after. And that little
army of paid knockers, he acknowledged, had been steered into the
neighborhood where the soil was deepest and the water was nearest. And
that soon showed who the liar was, for of course everything came out as
Dinky-Dunk wanted it to come out!
But this phase of it I didn't discuss with Terry, for I had no desire to
air my husband's moral obliquities before his hired man. Yet I am still
disturbed by what I have heard. Oh, Dinky-Dunk, I never imagined you
were one bit sly, even in business!
_Sunday the Eighteenth_
Olie and Terry seem convinced of the fact that Dinky-Dunk's farming has
been a success. We have saved all our wheat crop, and it's a whopper.
Terry, with his crazy Celtic enthusiasms, says that by next year they'll
be calling Dinky-Dunk the Wheat King of the West. Olga and Percy went
buggy riding this afternoon. I wish I had some sort of scales to weight
my Snoozerette. I know he's doubled in the last three weeks.
_Sunday the Twenty-fifth_
My Dinky-Dunk is home again. He looks a little tired and hollow-eyed,
but when the Boy crowed and smiled up at him his poor tired face
softened so wonderfully that it brought the tears to my eyes. I finally
persuaded him to stop petting Babe and pay a little attention to me.
After supper he opened up his extra hand-bag and hauled out the heaps of
things he'd brought Babe and me. Then I sat on his knee and held his
ears and made him blow away the smoke, every shred of it, so I could
kiss him in my own particular places.
_Tuesday the Twenty-seventh_
Dinky-Dunk has sailed off to Buckhorn to do some telegraphing he should
have done Saturday night. My suspicions about his slyness, by the way,
were quite unfounded. It was the guileless-eyed Terry who led those
railway officials out to the spot where he'd already secretly tested for
water and found signs of it. And Terry can't even understand why
Dinky-Dunk is so toweringly angry about it all!
_Wednesday the Twenty-eighth_
When Dinky-Dunk came in last night, after his drive out from Buckhorn,
there was a look on his face that rather frightened me. I backed him up
against the door, after he'd had a peep at the Boy, and said, "Let me
smell your breath, sir!" For with that strange light in his eyes I
surely thought he'd been drinking. "Lips that touch liquor," I sang,
"shall never touch mine!"
But I was mistaken. And Dinky-Dunk only laughed in a quiet inward
rumbling sort of way that was new to him. "I believe I am drunk, Boca
Chica," he solemnly confessed, "drunk as a lord!" Then he took both my
hands in his.
"D'you know what's going to happen?" he demanded. And of course I
didn't. Then he hurled it point-blank at me.
"_The railway's going to come!_"
"Come where?" I gasped.
"Come here, right across our land! It's settled. And there's no mistake
about it this time. Inside of ten months there'll be choo-choo cars
steaming past Casa Grande!"
"Skookum!" I shouted.
"And there'll be a station within a mile of where you stand! And inside
of two years this seventeen or eighteen hundred acres of land will be
worth forty dollars an acre, easily, and perhaps even fifty. And what
that means you can figure out for yourself!"
"Whoopee!" I gasped, trying in vain to figure out how much forty times
seventeen hundred was.
But that was not all. It would do away with the road haul to the
elevator, which might have taken most of the profit out of his grain
growing. To team wheat into Buckhorn would have been a terrible
discount, no matter what luck he might have with his crops. So he'd been
moving heaven and earth to get the steel to come his way. He'd pulled
wires and interviewed members and guaranteed a water-tank supply and
promised a right of way and made use of his old engineering
friends--until his battle was won. And his last fight had been against
the liar who'd sent in false reports about his district. But that was
over now, and Casa Grande will no longer be the jumping-off place of
civilization, the dot on the wilderness. It will be on the time-tables
and the mail-routes, and I know my Dinky-Dunk will be the first mayor of
the new city, if there ever is a city to be mayor of!
_Friday the Thirtieth_
Dinky-Dunk came in at noon to-day, tiptoed over to the crib to see if
the Boy was all right, and then came and put his hands on my shoulders,
looking me solemnly in the eye: "What do you suppose has happened?" he
demanded.
"Another railroad," I ventured.
He shook his head. Of course it was useless for me to try to guess. I
pushed my finger against Dinky-Dunk's Adam's apple and asked him what
the news was.
"Percival Benson Woodhouse has just calmly announced to me that, next
week, _he's going to marry Olga_," was my husband's answer.
And he wondered why I smiled.
_Sunday the First_
Little Dinky-Dink is fast asleep in his hand-carved Scandinavian cradle.
The night is cool, so we have a fire going. Big Dinky-Dunk, who has been
smoking his pipe, is sitting on one side of the table, and I am sitting
on the other. Between us lies the bundle of house-plans which have just
been mailed up to us from Philadelphia. This is the second night we've
pored over them. And we've decided what we're to do at Casa Grande.
We're to have a telephone, as soon as the railway gets through, and a
wind-mill and running water, and a new barn with a big soft-water tank
at one end, and a hot-water furnace in the new house and sleeping
porches and a butler's pantry and a laundry chute--and next winter in
California, if we want it. And Dinky-Dunk blames himself for never
having had brains enough to plant an avenue or two of poplars or
Manitoba maples about Casa Grande, for now we'll have to wait a few
years for foliage and shade. And he intends to have a playground for
little Dinky-Dink, for he agrees with me that our boy must be strong and
manly and muscular, and must not use tobacco in any form until he is
twenty at least. And Dinky-Dunk has also agreed that I shall do all the
punishing--if any punishing is ever necessary! His father, by the way,
has just announced that he wants Babe to go to McGill and then to
Oxford. But I have been insisting on Harvard, and I shall be firm about
this.
That promised to bring us to a dead-lock, so we went back to our
house-plans again, and Dinky-Dunk pointed out that the new living-room
would be bigger than all our present shack and the annex put together.
And that caused me to stare about our poor little cat-eyed cubby-hole of
a wickyup and for the first time realize that our first home was to be
wiped off the map. And nothing would ever be the same again, and even
the prairie over which I had stared in my joy and my sorrow would
always be different! A lump came in my throat. And when Olga came in and
I handed Dinky-Dink to her she could see that my lashes were wet. But
she couldn't understand.
So I slipped over to the piano and began to play. Very quietly I sang
through Herman Lohr's Irish song that begins:
In the dead av the night, acushla,
When the new big house is still ...
But before I got to the last two verses I'm afraid my voice was rather
shaky.
In the dead av the year, acushla,
When me wide new fields are brown,
I think av a wee ould house,
At the edge av an ould gray town!
I think av the rush-lit faces,
Where the room and loaf was small:
_But the new years seem the lean years,
And the ould years, best av all!_
Dinky-Dunk came and stood close beside me. "Has my Gee-Gee a big sadness
in her little prairie heart?" he asked as he slipped his arms about me.
But I was sniffling and couldn't answer him. And the cling of his
blessed big arms about me only seemed to make everything worse. So I was
bawling openly when he held up my face and helped himself to what must
have been a terribly briny kiss. But I slipped away into my bedroom, for
I'm not one of those apple-blossom women who can weep and still look
pretty. And for two blessed hours I've been sitting here, Matilda Anne,
wondering if our new life will be as happy as our old life was.... Those
old days are over and gone, and the page must be turned. And on that
last page I was about to write "_Tamam shud_." But kinglike and
imperative through the quietness of Casa Grande I hear the call of my
beloved little _tenor robusto_--and if it is the voice of hunger it is
also the voice of hope!
THE END
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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