It wasn’t until I saw Paddy’s ear prick up like a rabbit’s that I noticed the gun-boat on the trail ahead. At least I thought it was a gun-boat, for a minute or two, until I cantered closer and saw that it was a huge gray touring-car half foundered in the prairie-mud. Beside it sat a long lean man in very muddy clothes and a rather disreputable-looking hat. He sat with a ridiculously contented look on his face, smoking a small briar pipe, and he laughed outright as I circled his mud-hole and came to a stop opposite the car with its nose poked deep down in the mire, for all the world like a rooting shote.
“Good morning, Diana,” he said, quite coolly, as he removed his battered-looking cap.
His salutation struck me as impertinent, so I returned it in the curtest of nods.
“Are you in trouble?” I asked.
“None whatever,” he airily replied, still eying me. “But my car seems to be, doesn’t it?”
“What’s wrong?” I demanded, determined that he shouldn’t elbow me out of my matter-of-factness.
He turned to his automobile and inspected it with an indifferent eye.
“I turned this old tub into a steam-engine, racing her until the water boiled, and she got even with me by blowing up an intake hose. But I’m perfectly satisfied.”
“With what?” I coldly inquired.
“With being stuck here,” he replied; He had rather a bright gray eye with greenish lights in it, and he looked rational enough. But there was something fundamentally wrong with him.
“What makes you feel that way?” I asked, though for a moment I’d been prompted to inquire if they hadn’t let him out a little too soon.
“Because I wouldn’t have seen you, who should be wearing a crescent moon on your brow, if my good friend Hyacinthe hadn’t mired herself in this mud-hole,” he had the effrontery to tell me.
“Is there anything so remarkably consolatory in that vision?” I asked, deciding that I might as well convince him he wasn’t confronting an untutored she-coolie of the prairie. Whereupon he studied me more pointedly and more impersonally than ever.
“It’s more than consolatory,” he said with an accentuating flourish of the little briar pipe. “It’s quite compensatory.”
It was rather ponderously clever, I suppose; but I was tired of both verbal quibbling and roadside gallantry.
“Do you want to get out of that hole?” I demanded. For it’s a law of the prairie-land, of course, never to side-step a stranger in distress.
“Not if it means an ending to this interview,” he told me.
It was my turn to eye him. But there wasn’t much warmth in the inspection.
“What are you trying to do?” I calmly inquired, for prairie life hadn’t exactly left me a shy and timorous gazelle in the haunts of that stalker known as Man.
“I’m trying to figure out,” he just as calmly retorted, apparently quite unimpressed by my uppity tone, “how anything as radiant and lovely as you ever got landed up here in this heaven of chilblains and coyotes.”
The hare-brained idiot was actually trying to make love to me. And I then and there decided to put a brake on his wheel of eloquence.
“And I’m still trying to figure out,” I told him, “how what impresses me as rather a third-class type of man is able to ride around in what looks like a first-class car! Unless,” and the thought came to me out of a clear sky, and when they come that way they’re inspirations and are usually true, “unless you stole it!”
He turned a solemn eye on the dejected-looking vehicle and studied it from end to end.
“If I’m that far behind Hyacinthe,” he indifferently acknowledged, “I begin to fathom the secret of my life failure. So my morning hasn’t been altogether wasted.”
“But you did steal the car?” I persisted.
“That must be a secret between us,” he said, with a distinctly guilty look about the sky-line, as though to make sure there were no sheriffs and bloodhounds on his track.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded, determined to thrash the thing out, now that it had been thrust upon me.
“Talking to the most charming woman I’ve encountered west of the Great Lakes,” he said with an ironic and yet a singularly engaging smile. But I didn’t intend him to draw a herring across the trail.
“I’d be obliged if you’d be sincere,” I told him, sitting up a little straighter on Paddy.
“I am sincere,” he protested, putting away his pipe.
“But the things you’re saying are the things the right sort of person refrains from expressing, even when he happens to be the victim of their operation.”
“Yes, that’s quite true, in drawing-rooms,” he airily amended. “But this is God’s open and untrammeled prairie.”
“Where crudeness is king,” I added.
“Where candor is worth more than convention,” he corrected, with rather a wistful look in his eye. “And where we mortals ought to be at least as urbane as that really wonderful robin-egg sky up there with the chinook arch across it.”
He wasn’t flippant any more, and I had a sense oftriumph in forcing his return to sobriety. I wanted to ask him what his name was, once we were back to earth again. But as that seemed a little too direct, I merely inquired where his home happened to be.
“I’ve just come from up North!” he said. And that, I promptly realized, was an evasive way of answering an honest question, especially as there was a California license-number on the front of his car.
“And what’s your business?” I inquired, deciding to try him out with still one more honest question.
“I’m a windmill man,” he told me, as he waded in toward his dejected-looking automobile and lifted up its hood. I took him literally, for there wasn’t anything, at the time, to make me think of Cervantes. But I’d already noticed his hands, and I felt sure they weren’t the hands of a laboring man. They were long and lean and finicky-fingered hands, the sort that could span an octave much better than they could hold a hayfork. And I decided to see him hoisted by his own petard.
“Then you’re just the man I’m looking for,” I told him. He stopped for a moment to look up from the bit of heavy rubber-hose he was winding with a stretch of rubber that looked as though it had been cut from an inner tube.
“Words such as those are honey to my ears,” he said as he went on with his work. And I saw it was necessary to yank him down to earth again.
“I’ve a broken-down windmill over on my ranch,” I told him. “And if you’re what you say you are, you ought to be able to put it in running order for me.”
“Then you’ve a ranch?” he observed, stopping in his work.
“A ranch and a husband and three children,” I told him with the well-paraded air of a tabby-cat who’s dragged her last mouse into the drawing-room. But my announcement didn’t produce the effect I’d counted on. All I could see on the face of the windmill man was a sort of mild perplexity.
“That only deepens the mystery,” he observed, apparently as much to himself as to me.
“What mystery?” I asked.
“You!” he retorted.
“What’s wrong with me?” I demanded.
“You’re so absurdly alive and audacious and sensitive and youthful-hearted, dear madam! For the life of me I can’t quite fit you into the narrow little frame you mention.”
“Is it so narrow?” I inquired, wondering why I wasn’t much more indignant at him. But instead of answering that question, he asked me another.
“Why hasn’t this husband of yours fixed the windmill?” he casually asked over his shoulder, as he resumed his tinkering on the car-engine.
“My husband’s work keeps him away from home,” I explained, promptly on the defensive.
“I thought so,” he announced, with the expression of a man who’s had a pet hypothesis unexpectedly confirmed.
“Then what made you think so?” I demanded, with a feeling that he was in some way being subtler than I could quite comprehend.
“Instinct—if you care to call it that,” he said as he stooped low over his engine. He seemed offensively busy there for a considerable length of time. I could see that he was not what in the old days I’d have called a window-dresser. And I rather liked that pretense of candor in his make-up, just as I cottoned to that melodious drawl of his, not altogether unlike Lady Alicia’s, with its untoward suggestion of power and privilege. He was a man with a mind of his own; there was no denying that. I was even compelled to remind myself that with all his coolness and suavity he was still a car-thief, or perhaps something worse. And I had no intention of sitting there and watching him pitch shut-out ball.
“What are you going to do about it?” I asked, after he’d finished his job of bailing ditch-water into his car-radiator with a little collapsible canvas bucket.
He climbed into his driving-seat, mud to the knees, before he answered me.
“I’m going to get Hyacinthe out of this hole,” was what he said. “And then I’m going to fix that windmill!”
“On what terms?” I inquired.
“What’s the matter with a month’s board and keep?” he suggested.
It rather took my breath away, but I tried not to betray the fact. Hewasa refugee, after all, and only too anxious to go into hiding for a few weeks.
“Can you milk?” I demanded, deciding to keep him in his place, from the start. And he sadly acknowledged that he wasn’t able to milk. Windmill men seldom were, he casually asserted.
“Then you’ll have to make yourself handy, in other ways,” I proclaimed as he sat appraising me from his deep-padded car-seat.
“All right,” he said, as though the whole thing were settled, on the spot. But it wasn’t so simple as it seemed.
“How about this car?” I demanded. His eye met mine; and I made note of the fact that he was compelled to look away.
“I suppose we’ll have to hide it somewhere,” he finally acknowledged.
“And how’ll you hide a car of that size on the open prairie?” I inquired.
“Couldn’t we bury it?” he asked with child-like simplicity.
“It’s pretty well that way now, isn’t it? But I saw it three miles off,” I reminded him.
“Couldn’t we pile a load of prairie-hay over it?”he suggested next, with the natural cunning of the criminal. “Then they’d never suspect.”
“Suspect what?” I asked.
“Suspect where we got it,” he explained.
“Kindly do not include me in any of your activities of this nature,” I said with all the dignity that Paddy would permit of, for he was getting restless by this time.
“But you’ve included yourself in the secret,” he tried to argue, with a show of injured feelings. “And surely, after you’ve wormed that out of me, you’re not going to deliver a poor devil over to—”
“You can have perfect confidence in me,” I interrupted, trying to be stately but only succeeding, I’m afraid, in being stiff. And he nodded and laughed in a companionable andlaisser-fairesort of way as he started his engine and took command of the wheel.
Then began a battle which I had to watch from a distance because Paddy evinced no love for that purring and whining thing of steel as it rumbled and roared and thrashed and churned up the mud at its flying heels. It made the muskeg look like a gargantuan cake-batter, in which it seemed to float as dignified and imperturbable as a schooner in a canal-lock. But the man at the wheel kept his temper, and reversed, and writhed forward, and reversed again. He even waved at me, in a grim sort of gaiety, as he rested his engine and then went back to the struggle.He kept engaging and releasing his clutch until he was able to impart a slight rocking movement to the car. And again the big motor roared and churned up the mud and again Paddy took to prancing and pirouetting like a two-year-old. But this time the spinning rear wheels appeared to get a trace of traction, flimsy as it was, for the throbbing gray mass moved forward a little, subsided again, and once more nosed a few inches ahead. Then the engine whined in a still higher key, and slowly but surely that mud-covered mass emerged from the swale that had sought to engulf and possess it, emerged slowly and awkwardly, like a dinosauros emerging from its primeval ooze.
The man in the car stepped down from his driving-seat, once he was sure of firm ground under his wheels again, and walked slowly and wistfully about his resurrected devil-wagon.
“The wages of sin is mud,” he said as I trotted up to him. “And how much better it would have been, O Singing Pine-Tree, if I’d never taken that car!”
The poor chap was undoubtedly a little wrong in the head, but likable withal, and not ill-favored in appearance, and a man that one should try to make allowances for.
“It would have been much better,” I agreed, wondering how long it would be before the Mounted Policewould be tracking him down and turning him to making brooms in the prison-factory at Welrina.
“Now, if you’ll kindly trot ahead,” he announced as he relighted his little briar pipe, “and show me the trail to the ranch of the blighted windmill, I’ll idle along behind you.”
I resented the placidity with which he was accepting a situation that should have called for considerable meekness on his part. And I sat there for a silent moment or two on Paddy, to make that resentment quite obvious to him.
“What’s your name?” I asked, the same as I’d ask the name of any new help that arrived at Alabama Ranch.
“Peter Ketley,” he said, for once both direct and sober-eyed.
“All right, Peter,” I said, as condescendingly as I was able. “Just follow along, and I’ll show you where the bunk-house is.”
It was his grin, I suppose, that irritated me. So I started off on Paddy and went like the wind. I don’t know whether he called it idling or not, but once or twice when I glanced back at him that touring-car was bounding like a reindeer over some of the rougher places in the trail, and I rather fancy it got some of the mud shaken off its running-gear before it pulled up behind the upper stable at Alabama Ranch.
“You ride like aritt-meister,” he said, with an approvingly good-natured wag of the head, as he came up as close as Paddy would permit.
“Danke-schön!” I rather listlessly retorted, “And if you leave the car here, close beside this hay-stack, it’ll probably not be seen until after dinner. Then some time this afternoon, if the coast is clear, you can get it covered up.”
I was a little sorry, the next moment, that I’d harped still again on an act which must have become painful for him to remember, since I could see his face work and his eye betray a tendency to evade mine. But he thanked me, and explained that he was entirely in my hands.
Such being the case, I was more excited than I’d have been willing to admit when I led him into the shack. Frontier life had long since taught me not to depend too much on appearances, but the right sort of people, the people who out here are called “good leather,” would remain the right sort of people in even the roughest wickiup. We may have been merely ranchers, but I didn’t want Peter, whatever his morals, to think that we ate our food raw off the bone and made fire by rubbing sticks together.
Yet he must have come pretty close to believing that, unimpeachable as his manners remained, for Whinnie had burned the roast of veal to a charry mass, the Twins were crying like mad, and Dinkie hadpainted himself and most of the dining-room table with Worcestershire sauce. I showed Peter where he could wash up and where he could find a whisk to remove the dried mud from his person. Then I hurriedly appeased my complaining bairns, opened a can of beans to take the place of Whinnie’s boiled potatoes, which most unmistakably tasted of yellow soap, and supplemented what looked dishearteningly like a Dixon dinner with my last carefully treasured jar of raspberry preserve.
Whinstane Sandy, it is true, remained as glum and silent as a glacier through all that meal. But my new man, Peter, talked easily and uninterruptedly. And he talked amazingly well. He talked about mountain goats, and the Morgan rose-jars in the Metropolitan, and why he disliked George Moore, and the difference between English and American slang, and why English women always wear the wrong sort of hats, and the poetry in Indian names if we only had the brains to understand ’em, and how the wheat I’d manufactured my home-made bread out of was made up of cellulose and germ and endosperm, and how the alcohol and carbonic acid gas of the fermented yeast affected the gluten, and how the woman who could make bread like that ought to have a specially designed decoration pinned on her apron-front. Then he played “Paddy-cake, paddy-cake, Baker’s man,” with Dinkie, who took to him at once, and when Icame back from getting the extra cot ready in the bunk-house, my infant prodigy was on the new hired man’s back, circling the dinner-table and shouting “Gid-dap, ’ossie, gid-dap!” as he went, a proceeding which left the seamed old face of Whinstane Sandy about as blithe as a coffin-lid. So I coldly informed the newcomer that I’d show him where he could put his things, if he had any, before we went out to look over the windmill. And Peter rather astonished me by lugging back from the motor-car so discreetly left in the rear a huge suit-case of pliable pigskin that looked like a steamer-trunk with carrying-handles attached to it, a laprobe lined with beaver, a llama-wool sweater made like a Norfolk-jacket, a chamois-lined ulster, a couple of plaid woolen rugs, and a lunch-kit in a neatly embossed leather case.
“Quite a bit of loot, isn’t it?” he said, a little red in the face from the effort of portaging so pretentious a load.
That word “loot” stuck in my craw. It was a painful reminder of something that I’d been trying very hard to forget.
“Did it come with the car?” I demanded.
“Yes, it came with the car,” he was compelled to acknowledge. “But it would be exhausting, don’t you see, to have to tunnel through a hay-stack every time I wanted a hair-brush!”
I icily agreed that it would, scenting tacit reproof in that mildly-put observation of his. But I didn’t propose to be trifled with. I calmly led Mr. Peter Ketley out to where the overturned windmill tower lay like a museum skeleton along its bed of weeds and asked him just what tools he’d need. It was a simple question, predicating a simple answer. Yet he didn’t seem able to reply to it. He scratched his close-clipped pate and said he’d have to look things over and study it out. Windmills were tricky things, one kind demanding this sort of treatment and another kind demanding that.
“You’ll have no trouble, of course, in raising the tower?” I asked, looking him square in the eye. More than once I’d seen these windmill towers of galvanized steel girders put up on the prairie, and I had a very good idea of how the thing was done. They were assembled lying on the ground, and then a heavy plank was bolted to the bottom side of the tower base. This plank was held in place by two big stakes. Then a block and tackle was attached to the upper part of the tower, with the running-rope looped over a tripod of poles, to act as a fulcrum, so that when a team of horses was attached to the tackle the tower pivoted on its base and slowly rose in the air, steadied by a couple of guy-ropes held out at right angles to it.
“Oh, no trouble at all,” replied the expert quite airily.But I noticed that his eye held an especially abstracted and preoccupied expression.
“Just how is it done?” I innocently inquired.
“Well, that all depends,” he sapiently observed. Then, apparently nettled by my obviously superior smile, he straightened up and said: “I want you to leave this entirely to me. It’s my problem, and you’ve no right to be worried over it. It’ll take study, of course, and it’ll take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. But before I leave you, madam, your tower will be up.”
“I hope you’re not giving yourself a life sentence,” I remarked as I turned and left him.
I knew that he was looking after me as I went, but I gave no outer sign of that inner knowledge. I was equally conscious of his movements, through the shack window, when he possessed himself of a hay-fork and with more than one backward look over his shoulder circled out to where his car still stood. He tooled it still closer up beside the hay-stack, which he mounted, and then calmly and cold-bloodedly buried under a huge mound of sun-cured prairie-grass that relic of a past crime which he seemed only too willing to obliterate.
But he was callous, I could see, for once that telltale car was out of sight, he appeared much more interested in the water-blisters on his hands than the stain on his character. I could even see him inspecthis fingers, from time to time, as he tried to round off the top of his very badly made stack, and test the joints by opening and closing them, as though not quite sure they were still in working order. And when the stack-making was finished and he returned to the windmill, circling about the fallen tower and examining its mechanism and stepping off its dimensions, I noticed that he kept feeling the small of his back and glancing toward the stack in what seemed an attitude of resentment.
When Whinnie came in with one of the teams, after his day a-field, I noticed that Peter approached him blithely and attempted to draw him into secret consultation. But Whinnie, as far as I could see, had no palate for converse with suspicious-looking strangers. He walked several times, in fact, about that mysterious new hay-stack, and moved shackward more dour and silent than ever. So that evening the worthy Peter was a bit silent and self-contained, retiring early, though I strongly suspected, and still suspect, that he’d locked himself in the bunk-house to remove unobserved all the labels from his underwear.
In the morning his appearance was not that of a man at peace with his own soul. He even asked me if he might have a horse and rig to go in to the nearest town for some new parts which he’d need for the windmill. And he further inquired if I’d mind him bringing back a tent to sleep in.
“Did you find the bunk-house uncomfortable?” I asked, noticing again the heavy look about his eyes.
“It’s not the bunk-house,” he admitted. “It’s that old Caledonian saw-mill with the rock-ribbed face.”
“What’s the matter with Whinnie?” I demanded, with a quick touch of resentment. And Peter looked up in astonishment.
“Do you mean you’ve never heard him—and your shack not sixty paces away?”
“Heard him what?” I asked.
“Heard him snore,” explained Peter, with a sigh.
“Are you sure?” I inquired, remembering the mornings when I’d had occasion to waken Whinnie, always to find him sleeping as silent and placid as one of my own babies.
“I had eight hours of it in which to dissipate any doubts,” he pointedly explained.
This mystified me, but to object to the tent, of course, would have been picayune. I had just the faintest of suspicions, however, that the fair Peter might never return from Buckhorn, though I tried to solace myself with the thought that the motor-car and the beaver-lined lap-robe would at least remain with me. But my fears were groundless. Before supper-time Peter was back in high spirits, with the needed new parts for the windmill, and an outfit of blue denim apparel for himself, and a little red sweater for Dinkie, and an armful of magazines for myself.
Whinnie, as he stood watching Peter’s return, clearly betrayed the disappointment which that return involved. He said nothing, but when he saw my eye upon him he gazed dourly toward his approaching rival and tapped a weather-beaten brow with one stubby finger. He meant, of course, that Peter was a little locoed.
But Peter is not. He is remarkably clear-headed and quick-thoughted, and if there’s any madness about him it’s a madness with a deep-laid method. The one thing that annoys me is that he keeps me so continuously and yet so obliquely under observation. He pretends to be studying out my windmill, but he is really trying to study out its owner. Whinnie, I know, won’t help him much. And I refuse to rise to his gaudiest flies. So he’s still puzzling over what he regards as an anomaly, a farmerette who knows the difference between De Bussey and a side-delivery horse-rake, a mother of three children who can ride a pinto and play a banjo, a clodhopper in petticoats who can talk about Ragusa and Toarmina and the summer races at Piping Rock. But it’s a relief to converse about something besides summer-fallowing and breaking and seed-wheat and tractor-oil and cows’ teats. And it’s a stroke of luck to capture a farm-hand who can freshen you up on foreign opera at the same time that he campaigns against the domestic weed!
Thursday the Eleventh
We are a peaceful and humdrum family, very different from the westerners of the romantic movies. If we were the cinema kind of ranchers Pee-Wee would be cutting his teeth on a six-shooter, little Dinkie would be off rustling cattle, Poppsy would be away holding up the Transcontinental Limited, and Mummsie would be wearing chaps, toting a gun, and pretending to the sheriff that her jail-breaking brother wasnothidden in the cellar!
Whereas, we are a good deal like the easterners who till the soil and try to make a home for themselves and their children, only we are without a great many of their conveniences, even though we do beat them out in the matter of soil. But breaking sod isn’t so picturesque as breaking laws, and a plow-handle isn’t so thrilling to the eye as a shooting-iron, so it’s mostly the blood-and-thunder type of westerners, from the ranch with the cow-brand name, who goes ki-yi-ing through picture and story, advertising us as an aggregation of train-robbers and road-agents and sheriff-rabbits. And it’s a type that makes me tired.
The open range, let it be remembered, is gone, and the cowboy is going after it. Even the broncho, theytell me, is destined to disappear. It seems hard to think that the mustang will be no more, the mustang which Dinky-Dunk once told me was the descendant of the three hundred Arab and Spanish horses which Cortez first carried across the Atlantic to Mexico. For we, the newcomers, mesh the open range with our barb-wire, and bring in what Mrs. Eagle-Moccasin called our “stink-wagon” to turn the grass upside down and grow wheat-berries where the buffalo once wallowed. But sometimes, even in this newfangled work-a-day world, I find a fresh spirit of romance, quite as glamorous, if one has only the eye to see it, as the romance of the past. In one generation, almost, we are making a home-land out of a wilderness, we are conjuring up cities and threading the continent with steel, we are feeding the world on the best and cleanest wheat known to hungry man. And on these clear and opaline mornings when I see the prairie-floor waving with its harvest to be, and hear the clack and stutter of the tractor breaking sod on the outer quarter and leaving behind it the serried furrows of umber, I feel there is something primal and poetic in the picture, something mysteriously moving and epic....
The weather has turned quite warm again, with glorious spring days of winy and heart-tugging sunlight and cool and starry nights. In my spare time I’ve been helping Whinnie get in my “truck” garden, and Peter, who has reluctantly forsaken the windmilland learned to run the tractor, is breaking sod and summer-fallowing for me. For there is always another season to think of, and I don’t want the tin-can of failure tied to my spirit’s tail. As I say, the days slip by. Morning comes, fresh as a new-minted nickel, we mount the treadmill, and somebody rolls the big red ball off the table and it’s night again. But open-air work leaves me healthy, my children grow a-pace, and I should be most happy.
But I’m not.
I’m so homesick for something which I can’t quite define that it gives me a misty sort of ache just under the fifth rib. It’s just three weeks now since Dinky-Dunk has ventured over from Casa Grande. If this aloofness continues, he’ll soon need to be formally introduced to his own offspring when he sees them.
Now that I have Peter out working on the land, I can safely give a little more time to my household. But meals are still more or less a scramble. Peter has ventured the opinion that he might get a Chinaman for me, if he could have a week off to root out the right sort of Chink. But I prefer that Peter sticks to his tractor, much as I need help in the house.
My new hired man is still a good deal of a mystery to me, just as I seem to remain a good deal of a mystery to him. I’ve been asking myself just why it is that Peter is so easy to get along with, and why, in some indescribable way, he has added to the color oflife since coming to Alabama Ranch. It’s mostly, I think, because he’s supplied me with the one thing I had sorely missed, without being quite conscious of it. He has been able to give me mental companionship, at a time when my mind was starving for an idea or two beyond the daily drudgery of farm-work. He has given a fillip to existence, loath as I am to acknowledge it. He’s served to knock the moss off my soul by more or less indirectly reminding me that all work and no play could make Chaddie McKail a very dull girl indeed.
I was rather afraid, at one time, that he was going to spoil it all by making love to me, after the manner of young Bud Dyruff, from the Cowen Ranch, who, because I waded bare-kneed into a warm little slough-end when the horses were having their noonday meal, assumed that I could be persuaded to wade with equal celerity into indiscriminate affection. That rudimentary and ingenuous youth, in fact, became more and more offensive in his approaches, until finally I turned on him. “Are you trying to make love to me?” I demanded. “The surest thing you know,” he said with a rather moonish smile. “Then let me tell you something,” I hissed out at him, with my nose within six inches of his, “I’m a high-strung hell-cat, I am. I’m a bob-cat, and I’m not aching to be pawed by you or any other hare-brained he-mutt. So now, right from this minute, keep your distance! Is that clear? Keepyour distance, or I’ll break your head in with this neck-yoke!”
Poor Bud! That rather blighted the flower of Bud’s tender young romance, and to this day he effects a wide detour when he happens to meet me on the trail or in the byways of Buckhorn.
But Peter Ketley is not of the Bud Dyruff type. He is more complex, and, accordingly, more disturbing. For I can see admiration in his eye, even though he no longer expresses it by word of mouth. And there is something tonic to any woman in knowing that a man admires her. In my case, in fact, it’s so tonic that I’ve ordered some benzoin and cucumber-cream, and think a little more about how I’m doing my hair, and argue with myself that it’s a woman’s own fault if she runs to seed before she’s seen thirty. I may be the mother of three children, but I still have a hankering after personal power—and that comes to women through personal attractiveness, disquieting as it may be to have to admit it. We can’t be big strong men and conquer through force, but our frivolous little bodies can house the triumphant weaknesses which make men forget their strength.
Sunday the Fourteenth
I’ve had a talk with Peter. It simplyhadto come, for we couldn’t continue to play-act and evade realities. The time arrived for getting down to brass tacks. And even now the brass tacks aren’t as clear-cut as I’d like them to be.
But Peter is not and never was a car-thief. That beetle-headed suspicion has passed slowly but surely away, like a snow-man confronted by a too affectionate sun. It slipped away from me little by little, and began losing its lines, not so much when I found that Peter carried a bill-fold and a well-thumbed copy ofMarius The Epicureanand walked about in undergarments that were expensive enough for aprima donna, but more because I found myself face to face with a Peter-Panish sort of honorableness that was not to be dissembled. So I cornered Peter and put him through his paces.
I began by telling him that I didn’t seem to know a great deal about him.
“The closed makimono,” he cryptically retorted, “is the symbol of wisdom.”
I was ashamed to ask just what that meant, so I tried another tack.
“Folks are thrown pretty intimately together, in this frontier life, like worms in a bait-tin. So they naturally need to know what they’re tangled up with.”
Peter, at that, began to look unhappy.
“Would you mind telling me what brought you to this part of the country?” I asked.
“Would you mind telling me what broughtyouto this part of the country?” countered Peter.
“My husband,” I curtly retorted. And that chilled him perceptibly. But he saw that I was not to be shuttled aside.
“I was interested,” he explained with a shrug of finality, “in the nesting-ground of the Canada goose!”
“Then you came to the right point,” I promptly retorted. “ForIam it!”
But he didn’t smile, as I’d expected him to do. He seemed to feel that something approaching seriousness was expected of that talk.
“I really came because I was more interested in one of your earliest settlers,” he went on. “This settler, I might add, came to your province some three million years ago and is now being exhumed from one of the cut-banks of the Red Deer River. He belongs to the Mesozoic order of archisaurian gentlemen known asDinosauria, and there’s about a car-load of him. This interest in one of your cretaceous dinosaur skeletons would imply, of course, that I’m wedded to science. And Iam, though to nothing else. I’m as free as thewind, dear lady, or I wouldn’t be holidaying here with a tractor-plow that makes my legs ache and a prairie Penelope, who, for some reason or other, has the power of making my heart ache.”
“Verboten!” I promptly interjected.
Peter saluted and then sighed.
“There are things up here even more interesting than your Edmonton formation,” he remarked. “But I was born a Quaker, you see, and I can’t get rid of my self-control!”
“I like you for that,” I rather depressed him by saying. “For I find that one accepts you, Peter, as one accepts a climate. You’re intimate in your very remoteness.”
Peter looked at me out of a rueful yet ruminative eye. But Whinnie came forth and grimly announced that the Twins were going it. So I had to turn shackward.
“You really ought to get that car out,” I called over my shoulder to him, with a head-nod toward the hay-stack. And he nodded absently back at me.
Thursday the—I Can’t Remember
Dinky-Dunk rode over to-day when Peter was bolting some new wire stuts on the windmill tower and I was busy dry-picking two polygamous old roosters which Whinnie had beheaded for me. My husband attempted an offhand and happy-go-lucky air which, I very soon saw, was merely a mask to hide his embarrassment. He even flushed up to the ears when little Dinkie drew back for a moment or two, as any child might who didn’t recognize his own father, though he later solicitously tiptoed to the sleeping-porch where the Twins were having their nap, and remarked that they were growing prodigiously.
It was all rather absurd. But when one member of this life-partnership business is stiff with constraint, you can’t expect the other member to fall on his neck and weep. And Dinky-Dunk, for all his nonchalance, looked worried and hollow-eyed. He was in the saddle again, and headed back for Casa Grande, when he caught sight of Peter at work on the windmill. So he loped over to my hired man and had a talk with him. What they talked about I couldn’t tell, of course, but it seemed a casual and friendly enough conversation. Peter, in his blue-jeans,dirt-marked and oil-stained, and with a wrench in his hand, looked like an I. W. W. agitator who’d fallen on evil days.
I felt tempted to sally forth and reprove Dinky-Dunk for wasting the time of my hired help. But that, I remembered in time, might be treading on rather thin ice, or, what would be even worse, might seem like snooping. And speaking of snooping, reminds me that a few nights ago I listened carefully at the open window of the bunk-house where Whinstane Sandy was deep in repose. Not a sound, not a trace of a snore, arose from Whinnie’s cot.
So my suspicions were confirmed. That old sourdough had deliberately lain awake and tried to trumpet my second man from the precincts which Whinnie felt he’d already preempted. He had attempted to snore poor Peter off the map and away from Alabama Ranch!
Saturday the Thirtieth
The sedatest lives, I suppose, have their occasional Big Surprises. Life, at any rate, has just treated me to one. Lady Alicia Newland’s English maid, known as Struthers, arrived at Alabama Ranch yesterday afternoon and asked if I’d take her in. She’d had some words, she said, with her mistress, and didn’t propose to be treated like the scum of the earth by anybody.
So the inevitable has come about. America, the liberalizer, has touched the worthy Struthers with her wand of democracy and transformed her from a silent machine of service into a Vesuvian female with a mind and a voice of her own.
I told Struthers, who was still a bit quavery and excited, to sit down and we’d talk the matter over, for rustling maids, in a land where they’re as scarce as hen’s teeth, is a much graver crime than rustling cattle. Yet if Lady Allie had taken my husband away from me, I didn’t see why, in the name of poetic justice, I shouldn’t appropriate her hand-maid.
And Struthers, I found, was quite definite as to her intentions. She is an expert needle-woman, can do plain cooking, and having been a nurse-maid inher younger days, is quite capable of looking after children, even American children. I winced at that, naturally, and winced still harder when she stipulated that she must have four o’clock tea every afternoon, and every alternate Sunday morning off for the purpose of “saging” her hair, which was a new one on me. But I weighed the pros and cons, very deliberately, and discussed her predicament very candidly, and the result is that Struthers is now duly installed at Alabama Ranch. Already, in fact, that efficient hand of hers has left its mark on the shack. Her muffins this morning were above reproach and to-morrow we’re to have Spotted Dog pudding. But already, I notice, she is casting sidelong glances in the direction of poor Peter, to whom, this evening at supper, she deliberately and unquestionably donated the fairest and fluffiest quarter of the lemon pie. I have no intention of pumping the lady, but I can see that there are certain matters pertaining to Casa Grande which she is not averse to easing her mind of. I am not quite sure, in fact, that I could find it possible to lend an ear to the gossipings of a servant. And yet—and yet, there are a few things I’d like to find out. And dignity may still be slaughtered on the altar of curiosity.
Sunday the Sixth
Now that I’ve had a breathing-spell, I’ve been sitting back and mentally taking stock. The showers of last week have brought the needed moisture for our wheat, which is looking splendid. Our oats are not quite so promising, but everything will depend upon the season. The season, in fact, holds our fate and our fortune in its lap. Those ninety days that include June and July and August are the days when the northwest farmer is forever on tiptoe watching the weather. It’s his time of trial, his period of crisis, when our triple foes of Drought and Hail and Fire may at any moment creep upon him. It keeps one on thequi vive, making life a gamble, giving the zest of the uncertain to existence, and leaving no room for boredom. It’s the big drama which even dwarfs the once momentous emotions of love and hate and jealousy. For when the Big Rush is on, I’ve noticed, husbands are apt to neglect their wives, and lovers forget their sweethearts, and neighbors their enmities. Let the world go hang, but before and above everything else,save your crop!
Yet, as I was saying, I’ve been taking stock. It’s clear that I should have more cattle. And if all goeswell, I want a bank-barn, the same as they have in the East, with cement flooring and modern stalling. And I’ve got to comb over my herd, and get rid of the boarders and hatracks, and acquire a blooded bull for Alabama Ranch, to improve the strain. Two of my milkers must go for beef, as well as several scrub springers which it would be false economy to hold. I’ve also got to do something about my hogs. They are neither “easy feeders” nor good bacon types. With them, too, I want a good sire, a pure-bred Yorkshire or Berkshire. And I must have cement troughs and some movable fencing, so that my young shoats may have pasture-crop. For there is money in pigs, and no undue labor, provided you have them properly fenced.
My chickens, which have been pretty well caring for themselves, have done as well as could be expected. I’ve tried to get early hatchings from my brooders, for pullets help out with winter eggs when prices are high, laying double what a yearling does during the cold months. My yellow-beaks and two-year-olds I shall kill off as we’re able to eat them, for an old hen is a useless and profitless possession and I begin to understand why lordly man has appropriated that phrase as a term of contempt for certain of my sex. I’m trading in my eggs—and likewise my butter—at Buckhorn, selling the Number One grade and holding back the Number Twos for home consumption. Thereis an amazing quantity of Number Twos, because of “stolen nests” and the lack of proper coops and runs. But we seem to get away with them all. Dinkie now loves them and would eat more than one at a time if I’d let him.
The gluttony of the normal healthy three-year-old child, by the way, is something incredible. Dinkie reminds me more and more of a robin in cherry-time. He stuffs sometimes, until his little tummy is as tight as a drum, and I verily believe he could eat his own weight in chocolate blanc-mange, if I’d let him. Eating, with him, is now a serious business, demanding no interruptions or distractions. Once he’s decently filled, however, his greediness takes the form of exterior application. He then rejoices to plaster as much as he can in his hair and ears and on his face, until he looks like a cross between a hod-carrier and a Fiji-Islander. And grown men, I’ve concluded, are very much the same with their appetite of love. They come to you with a brave showing of hunger, but when you’ve given until no more remains to be given, they become finicky and capricious, and lose their interest in the homely old porridge-bowl which looked all loveliness to them before they had made it theirs....
This afternoon, tired of scheming and conceiting for the future, I had a longing to be frivolous and care-free. So I got out the old rusty-rimmed banjo,tuned her up, and sat on an overturned milk-bucket, with Dinkie and Bobs and Poppsy and Pee-Wee for an audience.
I was leaning back with my knees crossed, strumming outTurkey in the Strawwhen Peter walked up and sat down between Bobs and Dinkie. So I gave himThe Whistling Coon, while the Twins lay there positively pop-eyed with delight, and he joined in with me onDixie, singing in a light and somewhat throaty baritone. Then we swung on toThere’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea, which must always be sung to a church-tune, and still later to that dolorous ballad,Oh, Bury Me Not on the Lone Prair-hee!Then we tried a whistling duet with banjo accompaniment, pretty well murdering the Tinker’s Song fromRobin Hooduntil Whinstane Sandy, who was taking his Sabbath bath in the bunk-house, loudly opened the window and stared out with a dourly reproving countenance, which said as plain as words: “This is nae the day for whustlin’, folks!”
But little Dinkie, obviously excited by the music, shouted “A-more! A-more!” so we went on, disregarding Whinnie and the bunk-house window and Struthers’ acrid stare from the shack-door. I was in the middle of Fay Templeton’s lovely oldRosie, You Are My Posey, when Lady Alicia rode up, as spick and span as though she’d just pranced off Rotten Row. And as I’d no intention of showing the white feather toher ladyship, I kept right on to the end. Then I looked up and waved the banjo at her where she sat stock-still on her mount. There was an enigmatic look on her face, but she laughed and waved back, whereupon Peter got up, and helped her dismount as she threw her reins over the pony’s head.
I noticed that her eye rested very intently on Peter’s face as I introduced him, and he in turn seemed to size the stately newcomer up in one of those lightning-flash appraisals of his. Then Lady Allie joined our circle, and confessed that she’d been homesick for a sight of the kiddies, especially Dinkie, whom she took on her knee and regarded with an oddly wistful and abstracted manner.
My hired man, I noticed, was in no way intimidated by a title in our midst, but wagered that Lady Allie’s voice would be a contralto and suggested that we all tryOn the Road to Mandalaytogether. But Lady Allie acknowledged that she had neither a voice nor an ear, and would prefer listening. We couldn’t remember the words, however, and the song wasn’t much of a success. I think the damper came when Struthers stepped out into full view, encased in my big bungalow-apron of butcher’s linen. Lady Alicia, after the manner of the English, saw her without seeing her. There wasn’t the flicker of an eyelash, or a moment’s loss of poise. But it seemed too much like a Banquo at the feast to go on with our banjo-strumming,and I attempted to bridge the hiatus by none too gracefully inquiring how things were getting along over at Casa Grande. Lady Allie’s contemplative eye, I noticed, searched my face to see if there were any secondary significances to that bland inquiry.
“Everything seems to be going nicely,” she acknowledged. Then she rather took the wind out of my sails by adding: “But I really came over to see if you wouldn’t dine with me to-morrow at seven. Bring the children, of course. And if Mr.—er—Ketley can come along, it will be even more delightful.”
Still again I didn’t intend to be stumped by her ladyship, so I said that I’d be charmed, without one second of hesitation, and Peter, with an assumption of vast gravity, agreed to come along if he didn’t have to wear a stiff collar and a boiled shirt. And he continued to rag Lady Allie in a manner which seemed to leave her a little bewildered. But she didn’t altogether dislike it, I could see, for Peter has the power of getting away with that sort of thing.