Chapter 16

The bottom has fallen out of my world. I sit here, telling myself to be calm. But it's not easy to sit quiet when you face the very worst that all life could confront you with. _My Dinkie has run away._

My boy has left me, has left his home, has vanished like smoke into the Unknown. He is gone and I have no trace of him.

I find it hard to write. Yet I _must_ write, for the mere expression of what I feel tends to ease the ache. It helps to keep me sane. And already I realize I was wrong when I wrote "the very worst that all life could confront you with." For my laddie, after all, is not dead. He must still be alive. And while there's life, there's hope.

I got back from Banff yesterday morning about nine, and Hilton was there with the car to meet me, as I had told him to be. I was anxious to know at once if everything was all right, but I found it hard to put a question so personal before that impersonal-eyed Englishman. So I strove to give my interrogation an air of the casual by offhandedly inquiring: "How's Rowdy, Hilton?"

"Dead, ma'am," was his prompt reply.

This rather took my breath away.

"Do you mean to say that Rowdy is _dead_?" I insisted, noticing Poppsy's color change as she listened.

"Killed, ma'am," said the laconic Hilton.

"By whom?" I demanded.

"Mr. Murchison, ma'am," was the answer.

"How?" I asked, feeling my vague dislike for that particular name sharpen up to something dangerously like hatred.

"He always comes up the drive a bit fast-like, ma'am. He hit the pup, and that was the end of him!"

"Does Dinkie know?" was my first question, after that.

"He _saw_ it, ma'am," admitted my car-driver.

"Saw what?"

"Saw Mr. Murchison throw the dog over the wall into the brush!"

"What did he say?"

"He swore a bit, ma'am, and then laughed," admitted Hilton, after a pause.

"Dinkie laughed?" I cried, incredulous.

"No; Mr. Murchison, ma'am," explained Hilton.

"What did Dinkie say?" I insisted. And again the man on the driving-seat remained silent a moment or two.

"It was what he _did_, ma'am," he finally remarked.

"What did he do?" I demanded.

"Ran into the house, ma'am, and snatched the icepick off the kitchen table. Then he went to the big car like a mad 'un, he did. Pounded holes in every blessed tire with his pick!"

"And then what?" I asked, with my heart up in my throat.

Hilton waited until he had taken a crowded corner before answering.

"Then he found the dead dog, ma'am, and bathed it, and borrowed the garden spade from me. Then he took it somewheres back in the ravine and buried it. I gave him the tool-box off the old roadster, to put what was left of the pup in."

"And then?" I prompted, with a quaver in my voice I couldn't control.

"He met Mr. Murchison coming out and he called him w'at I'd not like to repeat, ma'am, until Mr. McKail stepped out to see what was wrong, and interfered."

"_How_ did he interfere?" was my next question.

"By taking the lad into the house, ma'am," was my witness's retarded reply.

"Then what happened?" I exacted.

I waited, knowing what was coming, but I dreaded to hear it.

"He gave him a threshing, ma'am," I heard Hilton's voice saying, far away, as though it came to me over a long-distance telephone on a wet night.

I sat rigid as we mounted American Hill. I sat rigid as we swerved in through the ridiculous manor-like gate and up the winding drive and in under the ugly new porte-cochere. I didn't even wait for Poppsy as I got out of the car. I didn't even speak to Tokudo as he ran mincingly to take my things. I walked straight to the breakfast-room where I saw my husband sitting at the end of the oblong white table, stirring a cup of coffee with a spoon.

"Where's Dinkie?" I asked, trying to keep my voice low but not quite succeeding.

Duncan looked up at me with a coldly meditative eye.

"Where he usually is at this time of day," he finally answered.

"Where?" I repeated.

"At school, of course," admitted my husband as he reached out for a piece of buttered toast. He was making a pretense at being very tranquil-minded. But his hand, I noticed, wasn't so steady as it might have been.

"Is he all right?" I demanded, with my voice rising in spite of myself.

"Considerably better, I imagine, than he has been for some time," was the deliberate answer from the man with the bloodshot eyes at the end of the table.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked. And any one of intelligence, I suppose, could see I was making that question a challenge.

"I mean that since you saw him last he's had a damned good whaling," said Duncan, with his jaw squared, so that he reminded me of a King-Lud bulldog.

I paid no attention to Tokudo, who came into the room to repeat that his master was wanted at the telephone.

"Do you mean you struck that child?" I demanded, leaning on the table and looking straight into his eyes, which met mine quite unabashed, and with an air of mockery about them.

My husband nodded as he pushed back his chair.

"He got a good one," he asserted as he rose to his feet and rather leisurely brushed a crumb or two from his vest-front. He could even afford to smile as he said it. My expression, I suppose, would have made any man smile. But there was something maddening in his mockery, at such a moment. There was something gratuitously cruel in his parade of unconcern. Yet, oddly enough, as I looked at his slightly blotched face I couldn't help remembering that that was the face I had once kissed and held close against my cheek, had _wanted_ to hold against my cheek. And now I hated it.

I had to wait and cast about for words of hatred strong enough to carry the arrows of enmity which nothing could stop me from delivering. But while I waited Tokudo announced for the third time that my husband was wanted at the telephone. And a very simple thing happened. My husband answered his call.

I saw Duncan turn and walk out of the room. I could hear his steps in the hallway, loud on the waxed hardwood and low on the rugs. I could hear his deliberated chest-tones as he talked over the wire, talked quietly and earnestly, talked me and my hatred out of his head and out of his world. And I realized, as I sat there at the table-end with my gloves twisted up under my hands and my heart even more twisted up under my ribs, that it was all useless, that it was all futile. He was beyond the reach of my resentment. We were in different worlds, forevermore.

I was still sitting there when he looked in at the door, with his hat and coat on, on his way out. I could feel him there, without directly seeing him. And I could feel, too, that he wanted to say something. But I declined to lift my head, and I could hear the door close as he went out to the waiting car.

I sat there for a long time, thinking about my Dinkie. Twice I almost surrendered to the impulse to telephone to Lossie Brown. But I knew it would be no easy matter to get in touch with her. And in two hours it would be twelve, and any minute after that my boy would be home again. I tried to cross-examine Tokudo, but I could get nothing out of that tight-lipped Jap. I watched the clock. I noticed Hilton, when he got back, raking blood-stains off the gravel of the driveway. I wandered about, like a lost turkey-hen, trying to dramatize my meeting with Dinkie, doing my best to cooper together some incident which might keep our first minute or two together from being too hard on my poor kiddie. I heard the twelve o'clock whistles, at last, and then the Westminster-chimes of the over-ornate clock in the library announce that noon had come. And still the minutes dragged on.

And when the tension was becoming almost unbearable I heard a step on the gravel and my heart started to pound.

But instead of Dinkie, it was Lossie, Lossie with smiling lips and inquiring brown eyes and splashes of rose in her cheeks from rapid walking.

"Where's Dinkie?" I asked.

She stopped short, still smiling.

"That's exactly what I was going to ask?" I heard her saying. Then her smile faded as she searched my face. "There's--there's nothing happened, has there?"

I groped my way to a pillar of the porte-cochere and leaned against it.

"Didn't Dinkie come to school this morning?" I asked as the earth wavered under my feet.

"No," acknowledged Lossie, still searching my face. And a frown of perplexity came into her own.

I knew then what had happened. I knew it even before I went up to Dinkie's room and started my frantic search through his things. I could see that a number of his more treasured small possessions were gone. I delved forlornly about, hoping that he might have left some hidden message for me. But I could find nothing. I sat looking at his books and broken toys, at the still open copy of _The Count of Monte Cristo_ which he must have been poring over only the night before, at his neatly folded underclothes and the little row of gravel-worn shoes. They took on an air of pathos, an atmosphere of the memorial. Yet, oddly enough, it was Lossie, and Lossie alone, who broke into tears. The more she cried, in fact, the calmer I found myself becoming, though all the while that dead weight of misery was hanging like lead from my heart.

I went at once to the telephone and called up Duncan's office. He was still there, though I had to wait several minutes before I could get in touch with him.

I had thought, at first, that he would be offhandedly skeptical at the message which I was sending him over the wire, the message that my boy had run away. He might even be flippantly indifferent, and remind me that much worse things could have happened.

But I knew at once that he was genuinely alarmed at the news which I'd given him. It apparently staggered him for a moment. Then he said in his curt telephonic chest-tones, "I'll be up at the house, at once."

He came, before I'd even completed a second and more careful search. His face was cold and non-committal enough, but his color was gone and there was a look that was almost one of contrition in his troubled eyes, which seemed unwilling to meet mine. He questioned Lossie and cross-examined Hilton and Tokudo, and then called up the Chief of Police. Then he telephoned to the different railway stations, and carried Lossie off in the car to the McArthurs', to interview Benny, and came back an hour later with that vague look of frustration still on his face.

He sat down to luncheon, but he ate very little. He was silent for quite a long time.

"Your boy's all right," he said in a much softer voice than I had expected from him. "He's big enough to look after himself. And we'll be on his trail before nightfall. He can't go far."

"No; he can't go far," I echoed, trying to fortify myself with the knowledge that he must have taken little more than a dollar from the gilded cast-iron elephant which he used as a bank.

"I don't want this to get in the papers," explained my husband. "It's--it's all so ridiculous. I've put Kearney and two of his men on the job. He's a private detective, and he'll keep busy until he gets the boy back."

Duncan got up from the table, rather heavily. He stood hesitating a moment and then stepped closer to my chair.

"I know it's hard," he said as he put a hand on my shoulder. "But it'll be all right. We'll get your boy back for you."

I didn't speak, because I knew that if I spoke I'd break down and make an idiot of myself. My husband waited, apparently expecting me to say something. Then he took his hand away.

"I'll get busy with the car," he said with a forced matter-of-factness, "and let you know when there's any news. I've wired Buckhorn and sent word to Casa Grande--and we ought to get some news from there."

But there was no news. The afternoon dragged away and the house seemed like a tomb. And at five o'clock I did what I had wanted to do for six long hours. I sent off a forty-seven word telegram to Peter Ketley, telling him what had happened....

Duncan came back, at seven o'clock, to get one of the new photographs of Dinkie and Lossie for identification purposes. They had rounded up a small boy at Morley and Kearney was motoring out to investigate. We'd know by midnight....

It is well after midnight, and Duncan has just had a phone-message from Morley. The little chap they had rounded up was a Barnado boy fired with a sudden ambition to join his uncle in the gold-fields of Australia. Somewhere, in the blackness of this big night, my homeless Dinkie is wandering unguarded and alone.

_Friday the Twenty-Ninth_

I have had no word from Peter.... I've had no news to end the ache that pins me like a spear-head to the wall of hopelessness. Duncan, I know, is doing all he can. But there is so little to do. And this world of ours, after all, is such a terrifyingly big one.

_Saturday the Thirtieth_

I was called to the phone before breakfast this morning and it was the blessed voice of Peter I heard from the other end of the wire. My telegram had got out to him from Buckhorn a day late. But he had no definite news for me. He was quite fixed in his belief, however, that Dinkie would be bobbing up at his old home in a day or two.

"The boy will travel this way," he assured me. "He's bound to do that. It's as natural as water running down-hill!"

Duncan asked me whom I'd been talking to, and I had to tell him. His face clouded and the familiar quick look of resentment came into his eyes.

"I can't see what that Quaker's got to do with this question," he barked out. But I held my peace.

_Sunday the First_

I have found a message from my Dinkie. I came across it this morning, by accident. It was in my sewing-basket, the basket made of birch-bark and stained porcupine quills and lined with doe-skin, which I'd once bought from a Reservation squaw in Buckhorn with a tiny papoose on her back. Duncan had upbraided me for passing out my last five-dollar bill to that hungry Nitchie, but the poor woman needed it.

My fingers were shaking as I unfolded the note. And written there in the script I knew so well I read:

"Darligest Mummsey:

I am going away. But dont worry about me for I will be alright. I couldn't stay Mummsey after what hapened. Some day I will come back to you. But I'm not as bad as all that. I'll love you always as much as ever. I can take care for myself so don't worry, please. And please feed my two rabits reglar and tell Benny I'll save his jacknife and rember every day I'm rembering you. X X X X X X X

Your aff'cte son,

DINKIE."

It seemed like a voice from the dead, it was bittersweet consolation, and, in a way, it stood redemption of Dinkie himself. I'd been upbraiding him, in my secret heart of hearts, for his silence to his mother. That's a streak of his father in him, had been my first thought, that unthinking cruelty which didn't take count of the anguish of others. But he hadn't forgotten me. Whatever happens, I have at least this assuaging secret message from my son. And some day he'll come back to me. "Ye winna leave me for a', laddie?" I keep saying, in the language of old Whinstane Sandy. And my mind goes back, almost six years at a bound, to the time he was lost on the prairie. That time, I tell myself, God was good to me. And surely He will be good to me again!

_Tuesday the Third_

We still have no single word of our laddie.... They all tell me not to worry. But how can a mother keep from worrying? I had rather an awful nightmare last night, dreaming that Dinkie was trying to climb the stone wall about our place. He kept falling back with bleeding fingers, and he kept calling and calling for his mother. Without being quite awake I went down to the door in my night-gown, and opened it, and called out into the darkness: "Is anybody there? Is it you, Dinkie?"

My husband came down and led me back to bed, with rather a frightened look on his face.

They tell me not to worry, but I've been up in Dinkie's room turning over his things and wondering if he's dead, or if he's fallen into the hands of cruel people who would ill-use a child. Or perhaps he has been stolen by Indians, and will come back to me with a morose and sullen mind, and with scars on his body....

_Thursday the Fifth_

What a terrible thing is loneliness. The floors of Hell, I'm sure, are paved with lonesome hearts. Day by day I wait and long for my laddie. Always, at the back of my brain, is that big want. Day by day I brood about him and night by night I dream of him. I turn over his old playthings and his books, and my throat gets tight. I stare at the faded old snap-shots of him, and my heart turns to lead. I imagine I hear his voice, just outside the door, or just beyond a bend in the road, and a two-bladed sword of pain pushes slowly through my breast-bone. Dear old Lossie comes twice a day, and does her best to cheer me up. And Gershom has offered to give up his school and join in the search. Peter Ketley, he tells me, has been on the road for a week, in a car covered with mud and clothes that have never come off.

_Friday the Sixth_

There is no news of my Dinkie. And _that_, I remind myself, is the only matter that counts.

Lois Murchison drove up to-day in her hateful big car. She did not find me a very agreeable hostess, I'm afraid, but curled up like a nonchalant green snake in one of my armchairs and started to smoke and talk. She asked where Duncan was and I had to explain that he'd been called out to the mines on imperative business. And that started her going on the mines. Duncan, she said, should clean up half a million before he was through with that deal. He had been very successful.

"But don't you feel, my dear," she went on with quiet venom in her voice, "that a great deal of his success has depended on that bandy-legged little she-secretary of his?"

"Is she that wonderful?" I asked, trying to seem less at sea than I was.

"She's certainly wonderful to him!" announced the woman known as Slinkie. And having driven that poisoned dart well into the flesh, she was content to drop her cigarette-end into the ash-receiver, reach for her blue-fox furs, and announce that she'd have to be toddling on to the hair-dresser's.

Lois Murchison's implication, at that moment, didn't bother me much, for I had bigger troubles to occupy my thoughts. But the more I dwell on it, the more I find myself disturbed in spirit. I resent the idea of being upset by a wicked-tongued woman. She has, however, raised a ghost which will have to be laid. To-morrow I intend to go down to my husband's office and see his secretary, "to inspect the whaup," as Whinnie would express it, for I find myself becoming more and more interested in her wonderfulness.... Peter sent me a hurried line or two to-day, telling me to sit tight as he thought he'd have news for me before the week was out.

I suspect him of trying to trick me into some forlorn new lease of hope. But I have pinned my faith to Peter--and I know he would not trifle with anything so sacred as mother-love.

_Saturday the Seventh_

There is no news of my Dinkie.... But there is news of another nature.

Between ten and eleven this morning I had Hilton motor me down to Duncan's office in Eighth Avenue. It struck me as odd, at first, that I had never been there before. But Duncan, I remembered, had never asked me, the domestic fly, to step into his spider's parlor of commerce. And I found a ridiculous timidity creeping over me as I went up in the elevator, and found the door-number, and saw myself confronted by a cadaverous urchin in horn-rimmed specs, who thrust a paper-covered novel behind his chair-back and asked me what I wanted. So I asked him if this was Mr. McKail's office.

"Sure," he said in the established vernacular of the West.

"What is your name, little boy?" I inquired, with the sternest brand of condescension I could command.

The young monkey drew himself up at that and flushed angrily. "Oh, I don't know as I'm so little," he observed, regarding me with a narrowing eye as I stepped unbidden beyond the sacred portals.

"Where will I find Mr. McKail's secretary?" I asked, noticing the door in the stained-wood partition with "Private" on its frosted glass. The youth nodded his head toward the door in question and crossed to a desk where he proceeded languidly to affix postage-stamps to a small pile of envelopes.

I hesitated for a moment, as though there was something epochal in the air, as though I was making a step which might mean a great deal to me. And then I stepped over to the door and opened it.

I saw a young woman seated at a flat-topped desk, with a gold-banded fountain-pen in her fingers, checking over a column of figures. She checked carefully on to the end of her column, and then she raised her head and looked at me.

Her face stood out with singular distinctness, in the strong side-light from the office-window. And the woman seated at the flat-topped desk was Alsina Teeswater.

I don't know how long I stood there without speaking. But I could see the color slowly mount and recede on Alsina Teeswater's face. She put down her fountain-pen, with much deliberation, and sat upright in her chair, with her barricaded eyes every moment of the time on my face.

"So this has started again?" I finally said, in little more than a whisper.

I could see the girl's lips harden. I could see her fortifying herself behind an entrenchment of quietly marshaled belligerency.

"It has never stopped, Mrs. McKail," she said in an equally low voice, but with the courage of utter desperation.

It took some time, apparently, for that declaration to filter through to my brain. Everything seemed suddenly out of focus; and it was hard to readjust vision to the newer order of things. But I was calmer, under the circumstances, than I expected to be.

"I'm glad I understand," I finally admitted.

The woman at the desk seemed puzzled. Then she looked from me to her column of figures and from her column of figures to the huddled roofs and walls of the city and the greening foot-hills and the solemn white crowns of the Rockies behind them.

"Are you quite sure, Mrs. McKail, that you do understand?" she asked at last, with just a touch of challenge in the question.

"Isn't it quite simple now?" I demanded.

She found the courage to face me again.

"I don't think this sort of thing is ever simple," she replied, with much more emotion than I had expected of her.

"But it's at least clear how it must end," I found the courage to point out to her.

"Is that clear to _you_?" demanded the woman who was stepping into my shoes. It seemed odd, at the moment, that I should feel vaguely sorry for her.

"Perhaps you might make it clearer," I prompted.

"I'd rather Duncan did that," she replied, using my husband's first name, obviously, without knowing she had done so.

"Wouldn't it be fairer--for the two of us--now? Wouldn't it be cleaner?" I rather tremulously asked of her.

She nodded and stared down at the sheet covered with small columns of figures.

"I don't know whether you know it or not," she said with a studied sort of quietness, "but last week Mr. McKail began making arrangements to establish a residence in Nevada. He will have to live there, of course, for at least six months, perhaps even longer."

I could feel this sinking in, like water going through blotting-paper. The woman at the desk must have misinterpreted my silence, for she was moved to say, in a heavier effort at self-defense, "He _knew_, of course, that you cared for some one else."