The Prairie Wife
vowed he did, I tried to make him tell me how much. But that stumped
him. He compromised by saying he couldn't cheapen his love by defining
it in words; it was limitless. I followed him out after breakfast, with
a hunger in my heart which bacon and eggs hadn't helped a bit, and told
him that if he really loved me he could tell me how much.
He looked right in my eyes, a little pityingly, it seemed to me, and
laughed, and grew solemn again. Then he stooped down and picked up a
little blade of prairie-grass, and held it up in front of me.
"Have you any idea of how far it is from the Rockies across to the
Hudson Bay and from the Line up to the Peace River Valley?"
Of course I hadn't.
"And have you any idea of how many millions of acres of land that is,
and how many millions of blades of grass like this there are in each
acre?" he soberly demanded.
And again of course I hadn't.
"Well, this one blade of grass is the amount of love I am able to
express for you, and all those other blades in all those millions of
acres is what love itself is!"
I thought it over, just as solemnly as he had said it. I think I was
satisfied. For when my Dinky-Dunk was away off on the prairie, working
like a nailer, and I was alone in the shack, I went to his old coat
hanging there--the old coat that had some subtle aroma of
Dinky-Dunkiness itself about every inch of it--and kissed it on the
sleeve.
This afternoon as Paddy and I started for home with a pail of mushrooms
I rode face to face with my first coyote. We stood staring at each
other. My heart bounced right up into my throat, and for a moment I
wondered if I was going to be eaten by a starving timber-wolf, with
Dinky-Dunk finding my bones picked as clean as those animal-carcasses
we see in an occasional buffalo-wallow. I kept up my end of the stare,
wondering whether to advance or retreat, and it wasn't until that coyote
turned tail and scooted that my courage came back. Then Paddy and I went
after him, like the wind. But we had to give up. And at supper
Dinky-Dunk told me coyotes were too cowardly to come near a person, and
were quite harmless. He said that even when they showed their teeth, the
rest of their face was apologizing for the threat. And before supper was
over that coyote, at least I suppose it was the same coyote, was howling
at the rising full moon. I went out with Dinky-Dunk's gun, but couldn't
get near the brute. Then I came back.
"Sing, you son-of-a-gun, sing!" I called out to him from the shack door.
And that shocked my lord and master so much that he scolded me, for the
first time in his life. And when I poked his Adam's apple with my finger
he got on his dignity. He was tired, poor boy, and I should have
remembered it. And when I requested him not to stand there and stare at
me in the hieratic rigidity of an Egyptian idol I could see a little
flush of anger go over his face. He didn't say anything. But he took one
of the lamps and a three-year-old _Pall-Mall Magazine_ and shut himself
up in the bunk-house.
Then I was sorry.
I tiptoed over to the door, and found it was locked. Then I went and
got my mouth-organ and sat meekly down on the doorstep and began to
play the _Don't Be Cross_ waltz. I dragged it out plaintively, with a
_vox humana tremolo_ on the coaxing little refrain. Finally I heard a
smothered snort, and the door suddenly opened and Dinky-Dunk picked me
up, mouth-organ and all. He shook me and said I was a little devil, and
I called him a big British brute. But he was laughing and a wee bit
ashamed of his temper and was very nice to me all the rest of the
evening.
I'm getting, I find, to depend a great deal on Dinky-Dunk, and it makes
me afraid, sometimes, for the future. He seems able to slip a hand
under my heart and lift it up, exactly as though it were the chin of a
wayward child. Yet I resent his power, and keep elbowing for more
breathing-space, like a rush-hour passenger in the subway crowd.
Sometimes, too, I resent the over-solemn streak in his mental make-up.
He abominates ragtime, and I have rather a weakness for it. So once or
twice in his dour days I've found an almost Satanic delight in singing
_The Humming Coon_. And the knowledge that he'd like to forbid me
singing rag seems to give a zest to it. So I go about flashing my saber
of independence:
"Ol' Ephr'm Johnson was a deacon of de church in Tennessee,
An' of course it was ag'inst de rules t' sing ragtime melodee!"
But I am the one, I notice, who always makes up first. To-night as I was
making cocoa before we went to bed I tried to tell my Diddums there was
something positively doglike in my devotion to him. He nickered like a
pony and said he was the dog in this deal. Then he pulled me over on
his knee and said that men get short-tempered when they were tuckered
out with worry and hard work, and that probably it would be hard for
even two of the seraphim always to get along together in a two-by-four
shack, where you couldn't even have, a deadline for the sake of
dignity. It was mostly his fault, he knew, but he was going to try to
fight against it. And I experienced the unreasonable joy of an
unreasonable woman who has succeeded in putting the man she loves with
all her heart and soul in the wrong. So I could afford to be humble
myself, and make a foolish lot of fuss over him. But I shall always
fight for my elbow-room. For there are times when my Dinky-Dunk, for all
his bigness and strength, has to be taken sedately in tow, the same as a
racing automobile has to be hauled through the city streets by a dinky
little low-power hack-car!
_Saturday the Tenth_
We've had a cold spell, with heavy frosts at night, but the days are
still glorious. The overcast days are so few in the West that I've been
wondering if the optimism of the Westerners isn't really due to the
sunshine they get. Who could be gloomy under such golden skies? Every
pore of my body has a throat and is shouting out a _Tarentella Sincera_
of its own! But it isn't the weather that has keyed me up this time.
It's another wagon-load of supplies which Olie teamed out from Buckhorn
yesterday. I've got wall-paper and a new iron bed for the annex, and
galvanized wash-tubs and a crock-churn and storm-boots and enough
ticking to make ten big pillows, and unbleached linen for two dozen
slips--I love a big pillow--and I've been saving up wild-duck feathers
for weeks, the downiest feathers you ever sank your ear into, Matilda
Anne; and if pillows will do it I'm going to make this house look like a
harem! Can you imagine a household with only three pillow-slips, which
had to be jerked off in the morning, washed, dried and ironed and put
back on their three lonely little pillows before bedtime? Well, there
will be no more of that in this shack.
But the important news is that I've got a duck-gun, the duckiest
duck-gun you ever saw, and waders, and a coon-skin coat and cap and a
big leather school-bag for wearing over my shoulder on Paddy. The coat
and cap are like the ones we used to laugh at when we went up to
Montreal for the tobogganing, in the days when I was young and foolish
and willing to sacrifice comfort on the altar of outward appearances.
The coon-skins make me look like a Laplander, but they'll be mighty
comfy when the cold weather comes, for Dinky-Dunk says it drops to forty
and fifty below, sometimes.
I also got a lot of small stuff I'd written for from the mail-order
house, little feminine things a woman simply _has_ to have. But the big
thing was the duck-gun.
I no longer get heart failure when I hear the whir of a
prairie-chicken, but drop my bird before it's out of range. Poor, plump,
wounded, warm-bodied little feathery things! Some of them keep on flying
after they've been shot clean through the body, going straight on for a
couple of hundred feet, or even more, and then dropping like a stone.
How hard-hearted we soon get! It used to worry me. Now I gather 'em up
as though they were so many chips and toss them into the wagon-box; or
into my school-bag, if it's a private expedition of only Paddy and me.
And that's the way life treats us, too.
I've been practising on the gophers with my new gun, and with
Dinky-Dunk's .22 rifle. A gopher is only a little bigger than a
chipmunk, and usually pokes nothing more than his head out of his hole,
so when I got thirteen out of fifteen shots I began to feel that I was a
sharp-shooter. But don't regard this as wanton cruelty, for the gopher
is worse than a rat, and in this country the government agents supply
homesteaders with an annual allowance of free strychnine to poison them
off.
_Sunday the Eleventh_
I've made my first butter, be it recorded--but in doing so I managed to
splash the ceiling and the walls and my own woolly head, for I didn't
have sense enough to tie a wet cloth about the handle of the
churn-dasher until the damage had been done. I was too intent on getting
my butter to pay attention to details, though it took a disheartening
long time and my arms were tired out before I had finished. And when I
saw myself spattered from head to foot it reminded me of what you once
said about me and my reading, that I had the habit of coming out of a
book like a spaniel out of water, scattering ideas as I came. But there
are not many new books in my life these days. It is mostly hard work,
although I reminded Dinky-Dunk last night that while Omar intimated that
love and bread and wine were enough for any wilderness, we mustn't
forget that he also included a book of verses underneath the bough! My
lord says that by next year we can line our walls with books. But I'm
like Moses on Mount Nebo--I can see my promised land, but it seems a
terribly long way off. But this, as Dinky-Dunk would say, is not the
spirit that built Rome, and has carried me away from my butter, the
making of which cold-creamed my face until I looked as though I had snow
on my headlight. Yet there is real joy in finding those lovely yellow
granules in the bottom of your churn and then working it over and over
with a saucer in a cooking-bowl until it is one golden mass. Several
times before I'd shaken up sour cream in a sealer, but this was my first
real butter-making. I have just discovered, however, that I didn't
"wash" it enough, so that all the buttermilk wasn't worked out of my
first dairy-product. Dinky-Dunk, like the scholar and gentleman that he
is, swore that it was worth its weight in Klondike gold. And next time
I'll do better.
_Monday the Twelfth_
Golden weather again, with a clear sky and soft and balmy air! Just
before our mid-day meal Olie arrived with mail for us. We've had letters
from home! Instead of cheering me up they made me blue, for they seemed
to bring word from another world, a world so far, far away!
I decided to have a half-day in the open, so I strapped on my duck-gun
and off I went on Paddy, as soon as dinner was over and the men had
gone. We went like the wind, until both Paddy and I were tired of it.
Then I found a "soft-water" pond hidden behind a fringe of scrub-willow
and poplar. The mid-day sun had warmed it to a tempting temperature. So
I hobbled Paddy, peeled off and had a most glorious bath. I had just
soaped down with bank-mud (which is an astonishingly good solvent) and
had taken a header and was swimming about on my back, blinking up at
the blue sky, as happy as a mud-turtle in a mill-pond, when I heard
Paddy nicker. That disturbed me a little, but I felt sure there could be
nobody within miles of me. However, I swam back to where my clothes
were, sunned myself dry, and was just standing up to shake out the ends
of this short-cropped hair of mine when I saw a man's head Across the
pond, staring through the bushes at me. I don't know how or why it is,