The Prairie Wife
but I suddenly saw red. I don't remember picking up the duck-gun, and I
don't remember aiming it.
But I banged away, with both barrels, straight at that leering head--or
at least it ought to have been a leering head, whatever that may mean!
The howl that went up out of the wilderness, the next moment, could have
been heard for a mile!
It was Dinky-Dunk, and he said I might have put his eyes out with
bird-shot, if he hadn't made the quickest drop of his life. And he also
said that he'd seen me, a distinct splash of white against the green of
the prairie, three good miles away, and wasn't I ashamed of myself, and
what would I have done if he'd been Olie or old man Dixon? But he
kissed my shoulder where the gun-stock had bruised it, and helped me
dress.
Then we rode off together, four or five miles north, where Dinky-Dunk
was sure we could get a bag of duck. Which we did, thirteen altogether,
and started for home as the sun got low and the evening air grew chilly.
It was a heavenly ride. In the west a little army of thin blue clouds
was edged with blazing gold, and up between them spread great fan-like
shafts of amber light. Then came a riot of orange yellow and ashes of
roses and the palest of gold with little islands of azure in it. Then
while the dying radiance seemed to hold everything in a luminous wash of
air, the stars came out, one by one, and a soft cool wind swept across
the prairie, and the light darkened--and I was glad to have Dinky-Dunk
there at my side, or I should have had a little cry, for the twilight
prairie always makes me lonesome in a way that could never be put into
words.
I tried to explain the feeling to Dinky-Dunk. He said he understood.
"I'm a Sour-Dough, Gee-Gee, but it still gets me that way," he solemnly
confessed. He said that when he listened to beautiful music he felt the
same. And that got me thinking of grand opera, and of that _Romeo and
Juliet_ night at La Scala, in Milan, when I first met Theobald Gustav.
Then I stopped to tell Dinky-Dunk that I'd been hopelessly in love with
a tenor at thirteen and had written in my journal: "I shall die and turn
to dust still adoring him." Then I told him about my first opera,
_Rigoletto_, and hummed "_La Donna E Mobile_," which of course he
remembered himself. It took me back to Florence, and to a box at the
Pagliano, and me all in dimity and cork-screw curls, weeping deliciously
at a lady in white, whose troubles I could not quite understand. Then I
got thinking of New York and the Metropolitan, and poor old Morris's
lines:
And still with listening soul I hear
Strains hushed for many a noisy year:
The passionate chords which wake the tear,
The low-voiced love-tales dear....
Scarce changed, the same musicians play
The selfsame themes to-day;
The silvery swift sonatas ring,
The soaring voices sing!
And I could picture the old Metropolitan on a Caruso night. I could see
the Golden Horse-Shoe and the geranium-red trimmings and the satiny
white backs of the women, and smell that luxurious heavy smell of warm
air and hothouse flowers and Paris perfumery and happy human bodies and
hear the whisper of silk along the crimson stairways. I could see the
lights go down, in a sort of sigh, before the overture began, and the
scared-looking blotches of white on the musicians' scores and the other
blotches made by their dress-shirt fronts, and the violins going up and
down, up and down, as though they were one piece of machinery, and then
the heavy curtain stealing up, and the thrill as that new heaven opened
up to me, a gawky girl in her first low-cut dinner gown!
I told Dinky-Dunk I'd sat in every corner of that old house, up in the
sky-parlor with the Italian barbers, in press-seats in the second
gallery with dear old Fanny-Rain-in-the-Face, and in the Westbury's box
with the First Lady of the Land and a Spanish Princess with extremely
dirty nails. It seemed so far away, another life and another world! And
for three hours of "Manon" I'd be willing to hang like a chimpanzee from
the Metropolitan's center chandelier. I suddenly realized how much I
missed it. I could have sung to the City as poor Charpentier's "Louise"
sang to her Paris. And a coyote howled up near the trail, and the
prairie got dark, with a pale green rind of light along the northwest,
and I knew there would be a heavy frost before morning.
To-night after supper my soul and I sat down and did a bit of
bookkeeping. Dinky-Dunk, who'd been watching me out of the corner of his
eye, went to the window and said it looked like a storm. And I knew he
meant that I was the Medicine Hat it was to come from, for before he'd
got up from the table he'd explained to me that matrimony was like
motoring because it was really traveling by means of a series of
explosions. Then he tried to explain that in a few weeks the fall rush
would be over and we'd have more time for getting what we deserved out
of life. But I turned on him with sudden fierceness and declared I
wasn't going to be merely an animal. I intended to keep my soul alive,
that it was every one's duty, no matter where they were, to ennoble
their spirit by keeping in touch with the best that has ever been felt
and thought.
When I grimly got out my mouth-organ and played the _Pilgrim's Chorus_,
as well as I could remember it, Dinky-Dunk sat listening in silent
wonder. He kept up the fire, and waited until I got through. Then he
reached for the dish-pan and said, quite casually, "I'm going to help you
wash up to-night, Gee-Gee!" And so I put away the mouth-organ and washed
up. But before I went to bed I got out my little vellum edition of
Browning's _The Ring and the Book_, and read at it industriously,
doggedly, determinedly, for a solid hour. What it's all about I don't
know. Instead of ennobling my spirit it only tired my brain and ended
up in making me so mad I flung the book into the wood-box.... Dinky-Dunk
has just pinned a piece of paper on my door; it is a sentence from
Epictetus. And it says: "Better it is that great souls should live in
small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great
houses!"
_Sunday the Eighteenth_
I spent an hour to-day trying to shoot a hen-hawk that's been hovering
about the shack all afternoon. He's after my chickens, and as new-laid
eggs are worth more than Browning to a homesteader, I got out my
duck-gun. It gave me a feeling of impending evil, having that huge bird
hanging about. It reminded me there was wrong and rapine in the world. I
hated the brute. But I hid under one of the wagon-boxes and got him, in
the end. I brought him down, a tumbling flurry of wings, like Satan's
fall from Heaven. When I ran out to possess myself of his Satanic body
he was only wounded, however, and was ready to show fight. Then I saw
red again. I clubbed him with the gun-butt, going at him like fury. I
was moist with perspiration when I got through with him. He was a
monster. I nailed him with his wings out, on the bunk-house wall, and
Olie shouted and called Dinky-Dunk when they came back from rounding up
the horses, which had got away on the range. Dinky-Dunk solemnly warned
me not to run risks, as he might have taken an eye out, or torn my face
with his claws. He said he could have stuffed and mounted my hawk, if I
hadn't clubbed the poor thing almost to pieces. There's a devil in me
somewhere, I told Dinky-Dunk. But he only laughed.
_Monday the Nineteenth_
To-night Dinky-Dunk and I spent a solid hour trying to decide on a name
for the shack. I wanted to call it "Crucknacoola," which is Gaelic for
"A Little Hill of Sleep," but Dinky-Dunk brought forward the objection
that there was no hill. Then I suggested "Barnavista," since about all
we can see from the door are the stables. Then I said "The Builtmore,"
in a spirit of mockery, and then Dinky-Dunk in a spirit of irony
suggested "Casa Grande." And in the end we united on "Casa Grande." It
is marvelous how my hair grows. Olie now watches me studiously as I eat.
I can see that he is patiently patterning his table deportment after
mine. There's nothing that silent rough-mannered man wouldn't do for me.
I've got so I never notice his nose, any more than I used to notice
Uncle Carlton's receding chin. But I don't think Olie is getting enough
to eat. All his mind seems taken up with trying to remember not to drink
out of his saucer, as history sayeth George Washington himself once
did!
_Tuesday the Twentieth_
I knew that old hen-hawk meant trouble for me--and the trouble came, all
right. I'm afraid I can't tell about it very coherently, but this is how
it began: I was alone yesterday afternoon, busy in the shack, when a
Mounted Policeman rode up to the door, and, for a moment, nearly
frightened the life out of me. I just stood and stared at him, for he
was the first really, truly live man, outside Olie and my husband, I'd
seen for so long. And he looked very dashing in his scarlet jacket and
yellow facings. But I didn't have long to meditate on his color scheme,
for he calmly announced that a ranchman named McMein had been murdered
by a drunken cowboy in a wage dispute, and the murderer had been seen
heading for the Cochrane Ranch. He (the M. P.) inquired if I would
object to his searching the buildings.
Would I object? I most assuredly did not, for little chills began to
play up and down my spinal column, and I wasn't exactly in love with the
idea of having an escaped murderer crawling out of a hay-stack at
midnight and cutting my throat. The ranchman McMein had been killed on
Saturday, and the cowboy had been kept on the run for two days. As I was
being told this I tried to remember where Dinky-Dunk had stowed away his
revolver-holster and his hammerless ejector and his Colt repeater. But I
made that handsome young man in the scarlet coat come right into the
shack and begin his search by looking under the bed, and then going down
the cellar.
I stood holding the trap-door and warned him not to break my
pickle-jars. Then he came up and stood squinting thoughtfully out
through the doorway.
"Have you got a gun?" he suddenly asked me.
I showed him my duck-gun with its silver mountings, and he smiled a
little.
"Haven't you a rifle?" he demanded.
I explained that my husband had, and he still stood squinting out
through the doorway as I poked about the shack-corners and found
Dinky-Dunk's repeater. He was a very authoritative and self-assured
young man. He took the rifle from me, examined the magazine and made
sure it was loaded. Then he handed it back.
"I've got to search those buildings and stacks," he told me. "And I can
only be in one place at once. If you see a man break from under cover
anywhere, when I'm inside, _be so good as to shoot him_!"
He started off without another word, with his big army revolver in his
hand. My teeth began to do a little fox-trot all by themselves.
"Wait! Stop!" I shouted after him. "Don't go away!"
He stopped and asked me what was wrong. "I--I don't want to shoot a man!
I don't want to shoot _any_ man!" I tried to explain to him.
"You probably won't have to," was his cool response. "But it's better to
do that than have him shoot _you_, isn't it?"
Whereupon Mr. Red-Coat made straight for the hay-stacks, and I stood in
the doorway, with Dinky-Dunk's rifle in my hands and my knees shaking a
little.
I watched him as he beat about the hay-stacks. Then I got tired of
holding the heavy weapon and leaned it against the shack-wall. I watched
the red coat go in through the stable door, and felt vaguely dismayed at
the thought that its wearer was now quite out of sight.
Then my heart stopped beating. For out of a pile of straw which Olie had
dumped not a hundred feet away from the house, to line a pit for our