Chapter 17

I looked at her, as though she were a thousand miles away. I stood there impressed by the utter inadequacy of speech. And the thing that puzzled me was that there was an air of honesty about the woman. She still so desperately clung to her self-respect that she wanted me to understand both her predicament and her motives. I could hear her explaining that my husband had no intention of going to Reno, but would live in Virginia City, where he was taking up some actual mining interests. Such things were not pleasant, of course. But this one could be put through without difficulty. Mr. McKail had been assured of that.

I tried to pull myself together, wondering why I should so suddenly feel like a marked woman, a pariah of the prairies, as friendless and alone as a leper. Then I thought of my children. And that cleared my head, like a wind sweeping clean a smoky room.

"But a case has to be made out," I began. "It would have to be proved that I----"

"There will be no difficulty on that point, Mrs. McKail," went on the other woman as I came to a stop. "Provided the suit is not opposed."

The significance of that quietly uttered phrase did not escape me. Our glances met and locked.

"There are the children," I reminded her. And she looked a very commercialized young lady as she sat confronting me across her many columns of figures.

"There should be no difficulty there--_provided_ the suit is not opposed," she repeated with the air of a physician confronted by a hypochondriacal patient.

"The children are mine," I rather foolishly proclaimed, with my first touch of passion.

"The children are yours," she admitted. And about her hung an air of authority, of cool reserve, which I couldn't help resenting.

"That is very generous of you," I admitted, not without ironic intent.

She smiled rather sadly as she sat looking at me.

"It's something that doesn't rest with either of us," she said with the suspicion of a quaver in her voice. And _she_, I suddenly remembered, might some day sit eating her pot of honey on a grave. I realized, too, that very little was to be gained by prolonging that strangest of interviews. I wanted quietude in which to think things over. I wanted to go back to my cell like a prisoner and brood over my sentence....

And I have thought things over. I at last see the light. From this day forward there shall be no vacillating. I am going back to Casa Grande.

I have always hated this house; I have always hated everything about the place, without having the courage to admit it. I have done my part, I have made my effort, and it was a wasted effort. I wasn't even given a chance. And now I shall gather my things together and go back to my home, to the only home that remains to me. I shall still have my kiddies. I shall have my Poppsy and--But sharp as an arrow-head the memory of my lost boy strikes into my heart. My Dinkie is gone. I no longer have him to make what is left of my life endurable....

It is raining to-night, I notice, steadily and dismally. It is a dark night, outside, for lost children....

Duncan has just come home, wet and muddy, and gone up to his room. The gray-faced solemnity with which he strode past me makes me feel sure that he has been conversing with his lady-love. But what difference does it make? What difference does _anything_ make? In the matter of women, I have just remembered, what may be one man's meat is another man's poison. But I can't understand these reversible people, like house-rugs, who can pretend to love two ways at once.... I only know one man, in all the wide world, who has not shattered my faith in his kind. He is one of those neck-or-nothing men who never change.

There are many ranchers, out in this country, who keep what they call a blizzard-line. It's a rope that stretches in winter from their house-door to their shed or their stable, a rope that keeps them from getting lost when a blizzard is raging. Peter, I know, has been my blizzard-line. And in some way, please God, he will yet lead me back to warmth. He is himself out there in the cold, accepting it, all the time, with the same quiet fortitude that a Polar bear might. But he will thole through, in the end. For with all his roughness he can be unexpectedly adroit. Whinstane Sandy once told me something he had learned about Polar bears in his old Yukon days: with all their heaviness, they can go where a dog daren't venture. If need be, they can flatten out and slide over a sheet of ice too thin to support a running dog. And the drift-ice may be widening, but I refuse to give up my hope of hope. "Let the mother go," as the Good Book says, "that it may be well with thee!" ...

I have just remembered that I tried to shoot my husband once. He may make use of _that_, when he gets down to Virginia City. It might, in fact, help things along very materially. And Susie's eyes will probably pop out, when she reads it in a San Francisco paper....

I've thought of so many clever things I should have said to Alsina Teeswater. As I look back, I find it was the other lady who did about all the talking. There were old ulcerations to be cleared away, of course, and I let her talk about the same as you let a dentist work with his fingers in your mouth.... But now I must go up and make sure my Poppsy is safely tucked in. I have just opened the door and looked out. It is storming wretchedly. God pity any little boys who are abroad on such a night!

_Two Hours Later_

It is well past midnight. But there is no sleep this night for Chaddie McKail. I am too happy to sleep. I am too happy to act sane. For my boy is safe. _Peter has found my Dinkie!_

I was called to the telephone, a little after eleven, but couldn't hear well on the up-stairs extension, so I went to the instrument down-stairs, where the operator told me it was long-distance, from Buckhorn. So I listened, with my heart in my mouth. But all I could get was a buzz and crackle and an occasional ghostly word. It was the storm, I suppose. Then I heard Peter's voice, thin and faint and far away, but most unmistakably Peter's voice.

"Can you hear me now?" he said, like a man speaking from the bottom of the sea.

"Yes," I called back. "What is it?"

"Get ready for good news," said that thin but valorous voice that seemed to be speaking from the tip-top mountains of Mars. But the crackling and burring cut us off again. Then something must have happened to the line, or we must have been switched to a better circuit. For, the next moment, Peter's voice seemed almost in the next room. It seemed to come closer at a bound, like a shore-line when you look at it through a telescope.

"Is that any better?" he asked through his miles and miles of rain-swept blackness.

"Yes, I can hear you plainly now," I told him.

"Ah, yes, that _is_ better," he acknowledged. "And everything else is, too, my dear. For I've found your Dinkie and----"

"You've found Dinkie?" I gasped.

"I have, thank God. And he's safe and sound!"

"Where?" I demanded.

"Fast asleep at Alabama Ranch."

"Is he all right?"

"As fit as a fiddle--all he wants is sleep."

"_Oh, Peter!_" It was foolish. But it was all I could say for a full minute. For my boy was alive, and safe. My laddie had been found by Peter--by good old Peter, who never, in the time of need, was known to fail me.

"Where are you now?" I asked, when reason was once more on her throne.

"At Buckhorn," answered Peter.

"And you went all that way through the mud and rain, just to tell me?" I said.

"I had to, or I'd blow up!" acknowledged Peter. "And now I'd like to know what you want me to do."

"I want you to come and get me, Peter," I said slowly and distinctly over the wire.

There was a silence of several seconds.

"Do you understand what that means?" he finally demanded. His voice, I noticed, had become suddenly solemn.

"Yes, Peter, I understand," I told him. "Please come and get me!" And again the silence was so prolonged that I had to cut in and ask: "Are you there?"

And Peter's voice answered "Yes."

"Then you'll come?" I exacted, determined to burn all my bridges behind me.

"I'll be there on Monday," said Peter, with quiet decision. "I'll be there with Tithonus and Tumble-Weed and the old prairie-schooner. And we'll all trek home together!"

"_Skookum!_" I said with altogether unbecoming levity.

I patted the telephone instrument as I hung up the receiver. Then I sat staring at it in a brown study.

Then I went careening up-stairs and woke Poppsy out of a sound sleep and hugged her until her bones were ready to crack and told her that our Dinkie had been found again. And Poppsy, not being quite able to get it through her sleepy little head, promptly began to bawl. But there was little to bawl over, once she was thoroughly awake. And then I went careening down to the telephone again, and called up Lossie's boarding-house, and had her landlady root the poor girl out of bed, and heard _her_ break down and have a little cry when I told her our Dinkie had been found. And the first thing she asked me, when she was able to talk again, was if Gershom Binks had been told of the good news. And I had to acknowledge that I hadn't even _thought_ of poor old Gershom, but that Peter Ketley would surely have passed the good word on to Casa Grande, for Peter always seemed to think of the right thing.

And then I remembered about Duncan. For Duncan, whatever he may have been, was still the boy's father. And he must be told. It was my duty to tell him. So once more I climbed the stairs, but this time more slowly. I had to wait a full minute before I found the courage, I don't know why, to knock on Duncan's bedroom door.

I knocked twice before any answer came.

"What is it?" asked the familiar sleepy _bass_--and I realized what gulfs yawned between us when my husband on one side of that closed door could be lying lost in slumber and I on the other side of it could find life doing such unparalleled things to me. I felt for him as a girl home, tired from her first dance, feels for a young brother asleep beside a Noah's Ark.

"What is it?" I heard Duncan's voice repeating from the bed.

"It's me," I rather weakly proclaimed.

"What has happened?" was the question that came after a moment's silence.

I leaned with my face against the painted door-panel. It was smooth and cool and pleasant to press one's skin against.

"They've found Dinkie," I said. I could hear the squeak of springs as my husband sat up in bed.

"Is he all right?"

"Yes, he's all right," I said with a great sigh. And I listened for an answering sigh from the other side of the door.

But instead of that Duncan's voice asked: "Where is he?"

"At Alabama Ranch," I said, without realizing what that acknowledgment meant. And again a brief period of silence intervened.

"Who found him?" asked my husband, in a hardened voice.

"Peter Ketley," I said, in as collected a voice as I could manage. And this time the significance of the silence did not escape me.

"Then your cup of happiness ought to be full," I heard the voice on the other side of the door remark with heavy deliberateness. I stood there with my face leaning against the cool panel.

"It is," I said with a quiet audacity which surprised me almost as much as it must have surprised the man on the bed a million miles away from me.

_Sunday the Eighth_

How different is life from what the fictioneers would paint it! How hopelessly mixed-up and macaronic, how undignified in what ought to be its big moments and how pompous in so many of its pettinesses!

I told my husband to-day that Poppsy and I were going back to Casa Grande. And that, surely, ought to have been the Big Moment in the career of an unloved invertebrate. But the situation declined to take off, as the airmen say.

"I guess that means it's about time we got unscrambled," the man I had once married and lived with quietly remarked.

"Wasn't that your intention?" I just as quietly inquired.

"It's what I've had forced on me," he retorted, with a protective hardening of the Holbein-Astronomer jaw-line.

"I'm sorry," was all I could find to say.

He turned to the window and stared out at his big white iron fountain set in his terraced lawn behind his endless cobble-stone walls. I couldn't tell, of course, what he was thinking about. But I myself was thinking of the past, the irrecoverable past, the irredeemable past, the singing years of my womanly youth that seemed to be sealed in a lowered coffin on which the sheltering earth would soon be heaped, on which the first clods were already dropping with hollow sounds. We each seemed afraid to look the other full in the eyes. So we armored ourselves, as poor mortals must do, in the helmets of pretended diffidence and the breast-plates of impersonality.

"How are you going back?" my husband finally inquired. Whatever ghosts it had been necessary to lay, I could see, he had by this time laid. He no longer needed to stare out at the white iron fountain of which he was so proud.

"I've sent for the prairie-schooner," I told him.

His flush of anger rather startled me.

"Doesn't that impress you as rather cheaply theatrical?" he demanded.

"I fancy it will be very comfortable," I told him, without looking up. I'd apparently been attributing to him feelings which, after all, were not so desolating as I might have wished.

"Every one to his own taste," he observed as he called rather sharply to Tokudo to bring him his humidor. Then he took out a cigar and lighted it and ordered the car. And that was the lee and the long of it. That was the way we faced our Great Divide, our forked trail that veered off East and West into infinity!

_Thursday the Eleventh_

The trek is over. And it was not one of triumph. For we find ourselves, sometimes, in deeper water than we imagine. Then we have to choke and gasp for a while before we can get our breath back.

Peter, in the first place, didn't appear with the prairie-schooner. He left that to come later in the day, with Whinnie and Struthers. He appeared quite early Monday morning, with fire in his eye, and with a demand to see the master of the house. Heaven knows what he had heard, or how he had heard it. But the two men were having it hot and heavy when I felt it was about time for me to step into the room. To be quite frank, I had not expected any such outburst from Duncan. I knew his feelings were not involved, and where you have a vacuum it is impossible, of course, to have an explosion. I interpreted his resentment as a show of opposition to save his face. But I was wrong. And I was wrong about Peter. That mild-eyed man is no plaster saint. He can fight, if he's goaded into it, and fight like a bulldog. He was saying a few plain truths to Duncan, when I stepped into the room, a few plain truths which took the color out of the Dour Man's face and made him shake with anger.

"For two cents," Duncan was rather childishly shouting at him, "I'd fill you full of lead!"

"Try it!" said Peter, who wasn't any too steady himself. "Try it, and you'd at least end up with doing something in the open!"

Duncan studied him, like a prize-fighter studying his waiting opponent.

"You're a cheap actor," he finally announced. "This sort of thing isn't settled that way, and you know it."

"And it's not going to be settled the way you intended," announced Peter Ketley.

"What do you know about my intentions?" demanded Duncan.

"Much more than you imagine," retorted Peter. "I've got your record, McKail, and I've had it for three years. I've stood by, until now; but the time has come when I'm going to have a hand in this thing. And you're not going to get your freedom by dragging this woman's name through a divorce-court. If there's any dragging to be done, it's your carcass that's going to be tied to the tail-board!"

Duncan stood studying him with a face cheese-colored with hate.

"Aren't you rather double-crossing yourself?" he mocked.

"I'm not thinking about myself," said Peter.

"Then what's prompting all the heroics?" demanded Duncan.

"For two years and more, McKail," Peter cried out as he stepped closer to the other man, "you've given this woman a pretty good working idea of hell. And I've seen enough of it. It's going to end. It's got to end. But it's not going to end the way you've so neatly figured out!"

"Then how do you propose to end it?" Duncan demanded, with a sort of second-wind of composure. But his face was still colorless.

"You'll see when the time comes," retorted Peter.

"You may have rather a long wait," taunted Duncan.

"I have waited a number of years," answered the other man, with a dignity which sent a small thrill up and down my spine. "And I can wait a number of years more if I have to."

"We all knew, of course, that you were waiting," sneered my husband.

Peter turned to fling back an answer to that, but I stepped between them. I was tired of being haggled over, like marked-down goods on a bargain-counter. I was tired of being a passive agent before forces that seemed stripping me of my last shred of dignity. I was tired of the shoddiness of the entire shoddy situation.

And I told them so. I told them I'd no intention of being bargained over, and that I'd had rather enough of men for the rest of my natural life, and if Duncan wanted his freedom he was at liberty to take it without the slightest opposition from me. And I said a number of other things, which I have no wish either to remember or record. But it resulted in Duncan staring at me in a resurrection-plant sort of way, and in Peter rather dolorously taking his departure. I wanted to call him back, but I couldn't carpenter together any satisfactory excuse for his coming back, and I couldn't see any use in it.

So instead of journeying happily homeward in the cavernous old prairie-schooner, I felt a bit ridiculous as Tokudo impassively carried our belongings out to the canvas-covered wagon and Poppsy and I climbed aboard. The good citizens of American Hill stared after us as we rumbled down through the neatly boulevarded streets, and I felt suspiciously like a gypsy-queen who'd been politely requested by the local constabulary to move on.

It wasn't until we reached the open country that my spirits revived. Then the prairie seemed to reach out its hand to me and give me peace. We camped, that first night, in the sheltering arm of a little coulee threaded by a tiny stream. We cooked bacon and eggs and coffee while Whinnie out-spanned his team and put up his tent.

I sat on an oat-sack, after supper, with Poppsy between my knees, watching the evening stars come out. They were worlds, I remembered, some of them worlds perhaps with sorrowing men and women on them. And they seemed very lonely and far-away worlds, until I heard the drowsy voice of my Poppsy say up through the dusk: "In two days more, Mummy, we'll be back to Dinkie, won't we?"

And there was much, I remembered, for which a mother should be thankful.

_Sunday the Fourteenth_

_Dark, and true, and tender is the North._ Heaven bless the rhymster who first penned those words. Spring is stealing hack to the prairie, and our world is a world of beauty. The sky to-day is windrowed with flat-bottomed cumulus-clouds, tier beyond tier above a level plane of light, marking off the infinite distance like receding mile-stones on a world turned over on its back. Occasionally the outstretched head of a wild duck, pumping north with a black throb of wings, melts away to a speck in the opaline air. Back among the muskeg reeds the waders are courting and chattering, and early this morning I heard the plaintive winnowing call-note of the Wilson snipe, and later the _punk-e-lunk_ love-cry of a bittern to his mate. There's an eagle planing in lazy circles high in the air, even now, putting a soft-pedal on the noise of the coots and grebes as he circles over their rush-lined cabarets. And somewhere out on the range a bull is lowing. It is the season of love and the season of happiness. Dinkie and Poppsy and I are going out to gather prairie-crocuses. They are thick now in the prairie-sod, soft blue and lavender and sometimes mauve. We must dance to the vernal saraband while we can: Spring is so short in this norland country of ours. It comes late. But as Peter says, A late spring never deceives....

I thought I had offended Peter for life. But when he appeared late this afternoon and I asked him why he had kept away from me, he said these first few days naturally belonged to Dinkie and he'd been busy studying marsh-birds. He looked rather rumpled and muddy, and impressed me as a man sadly in need of a woman to look after his things.

"Let's ride," said Peter. "I want to talk to you."

I was afraid of that talk, but I was more afraid something might happen to interfere with it. So I changed into my old riding-duds and put on my weather-stained old sombrero and we saddled Buntie and Laughing-Gas and went loping off over the sun-washed prairie with our shadows behind us.

We rode a long way before Peter said anything. I wanted to be happy, but I wasn't quite able to be. I tried to think of neither the past nor the future, but there were too many ghosts of other days loping along the trail beside us.

"What are you going to do?" Peter finally inquired.

"About what?" I temporized as he pulled up beside me.

"About everything," he ungenerously responded.

"I don't know what to do, Peter," I had to acknowledge. "I'm like a barrel without hoops. I want to stick together, but one more thump will surely send me to pieces!"

"Then why not get the hoops around?" suggested Peter.

"But where will I get the hoops?" I asked.

"Here," he said. He was, I noticed, holding out his arms. And I laughed, even though my heart was heavy.

"Men have been a great disappointment to me, Peter," I said with a shake of my sombrero.

"Try me," suggested Peter.

But still again I had to shake my head.

"That wouldn't be fair, Peter," I told him. "I can't spoil your life to see what's left of my own patched up."

"Then you're going to spoil two of 'em!" he promptly asserted.

"But I don't believe in that sort of thing," I did my best to explain to him. "I've had my innings, and _I'm out_. I've a one-way heart, the same as a one-way street. I don't think there's anything in the world more odious than promiscuity. That's a big word, but it stands for an even bigger offense against God. I've always said I intended to be a single-track woman."

"But your track's blown up," contended Peter.

"Then I'll have to lay me a new one," I said with a fine show of assurance.

"And do you know where it will lead?" he demanded,

"Where?" I asked.

"Straight to me," he said as he studied me with eyes that were so quiet and kind I could feel a flutter of my heart-wings.

But still again I shook my head.

"That would be bringing you nothing but a withered up old has-been," I said with a mock-wail of misery.

And Peter actually laughed at that.

"It'll be a good ten years before you've even grown up," he retorted. "And another twenty years before you've really settled down!"

"You're saying I'll never have sense," I objected. "And I know you're right."

"That's what I love about you," averred Peter.

"What you love about me?" I demanded.

"Yes," he said with his patient old smile, "your imperishable youthfulness, your eternal never-ending eternity-defying golden-tinted girlishness!"

A flute began to play in my heart. And I knew that like Ulysses's men I would have to close my ears to it. But it's easier to row past an island than to run away from your own heart.