The Prairie Mother Part 3

"Why?"

"Because of the new English taxes, I suppose. She said she wanted a ranch, but she left everything to me."

"Then it was a trust fund!"

d.i.n.ky-Dunk bowed his head, in a.s.sent.

"It practically amounted to that," he acknowledged.

"And it's gone?"

"Every penny of it."

"But, d.i.n.ky-Dunk," I began. I didn't need to continue, for he seemed able to read my thoughts.

"I was counting on two full sections for Allie in the Simmond's Valley tract. That land is worth thirty dollars an acre, unbroken, at any time. But the bank's swept that into the bag, of course, along with the rest. The whole thing was like a stack of nine-pins--when one tumbled, it knocked the other over. I thought I could manage to save that much for her, out of the ruin. But the bank saw the land-boom was petering out. They shut off my credit, and foreclosed on the city block--and that sent the whole card-house down."

I had a great deal of thinking to do, during the next minute or two.

"Then isn't it up to us to knuckle down, d.i.n.ky-Dunk, and make good on that Lady Alicia mistake? If we get a crop this year we can--"

But d.i.n.ky-Dunk shook his head. "A thousand bushels an acre couldn't get me out of this mess," he maintained.

"Why not?"

"Because your Lady Alicia and her English maid have already arrived in Montreal," he quietly announced.

"How do you know that?"

"She wrote to me from New York. She's had influenza, and it left her with a wheezy tube and a spot on her lungs, as she put it. Her doctor told her to go to Egypt, but she says Egypt's impossible, just now, and if she doesn't like our West she says she'll amble on to Arizona, or try California for the winter." He looked away, and smiled rather wanly. "She's counting on the big game shooting we can give her!"

"Grizzly, and buffalo, and that sort of thing?"

"I suppose so!"

"And she's on her way out here?"

"She's on her way out here to inspect a ranch which doesn't exist!"

I sat for a full minute gaping into d.i.n.ky-Dunk's woebegone face. And still again I had considerable thinking to do.

"Then we'll _make_ it exist," I finally announced. But d.i.n.ky-Dunk, staring gloomily off into s.p.a.ce, wasn't even interested. They had stunned the spirit out of him. He wasn't himself. They'd put him where even a well-turned Scotch scone couldn't appeal to him.

"Listen," I solemnly admonished. "If this Cousin Allie of yours is coming out here for a ranch, she's got to be presented with one."

"It sounds easy!" he said, not without mockery.

"And apparently the only way we can see that she's given her money's worth is to hand Casa Grande over to her. Surely if she takes this, bag and baggage, she ought to be half-satisfied."

d.i.n.ky-Dunk looked up at me as though I were a.s.sailing him with the ravings of a mad-woman. He knew how proud I had always been of that prairie home of ours.

"Casa Grande is yours--yours and the kiddies," he reminded me. "You've at least got that, and G.o.d knows you'll need it now, more than ever, G.o.d knows I've at least kept my hands off _that_!"

"But don't you see it can't be ours, it can't be a home, when there's a debt of honor between us and every acre of it."

"You're in no way involved in that debt," cried out my lord and master, with a trace of the old battling light in his eyes.

"I'm so involved in it that I'm going to give up the glory of a two-story house with hardwood floors and a windmill and a laundry chute and a real bathroom, before that English cousin of yours can find out the difference between a spring-lamb and a jack-rabbit!" I resolutely informed him. "And I'm going to do it without a whimper. Do you know what we're going to do, O lord and master? We're going to take our kiddies and our chattels and our precious selves over to that Harris Ranch, and there we're going to begin over again just as we did nearly four years ago!" d.i.n.ky-Dunk tried to stop me, but I warned him aside. "Don't think I'm doing anything romantic. I'm doing something so practical that the more I think of it the more I see it's the only thing possible."

He sat looking at me as though he had forgotten what my features were like and was, just discovering that my nose, after all, hadn't really been put on straight. Then the old battling light grew stronger than ever in his eyes.

"It's _not_ going to be the only thing possible," he declared. "And I'm not going to make _you_ pay for my mistakes. Not on your life! I could have swung the farm lands, all right, even though they did have me with my back to the wall, if only the city stuff hadn't gone dead--so dead that to-day you couldn't even give it away. I'm not an embezzler. Allie sent me out that money to take a chance with, and by taking a double chance I honestly thought I could get her double returns. As you say, it was a gambler's chance. But the cards broke against me. The thing that hurts is that I've probably just about cleaned the girl out."

"How do you know that?" I asked, wondering why I was finding it so hard to sympathize with that denuded and deluded English cousin.

"Because I know what's happened to about all of the older families and estates over there," retorted d.i.n.ky-Dunk. "The government has pretty well picked them clean."

"Could I see your Cousin Allie's letters?"

"What good would it do?" asked the dour man across the table from me.

"The fat's in the fire, and we've got to face the consequences."

"And that's exactly what I've been trying to tell you, you foolish old calvanistic autocrat! We've got to face the consequences, and the only way to do it is to do it the way I've said."

d.i.n.ky-Dunk's face softened a little, and he seemed almost ready to smile. But he very quickly clouded up again, just as my own heart clouded up. For I knew, notwithstanding my willingness to deny it, that I was once more acting on impulse, very much as I'd acted on impulse four long years ago in that residuary old horse-hansom in Central Park when I agreed to marry Duncan Argyll McKail before I was even in love with him. But, like most women, I was willing to let Reason step down off the bridge and have Intuition pilot me through the more troubled waters of a life-crisis. For I knew that I was doing the right thing, even though it seemed absurd, even though at first sight it seemed too prodigious a sacrifice, just as I'd done the right thing when in the face of tribal reasoning and logic I'd gone kiting off to a prairie-ranch and a wickiup with a leaky roof. It was a tumble, but it was a tumble into a pansy-bed. And I was thinking that luck would surely be with me a second time, though thought skidded, like a tire on a wet pavement, every time I tried to foresee what this newer change would mean to me and mine.

"You're not going to face another three years of drudgery and shack-dirt," declared d.i.n.ky-Dunk, following, oddly enough, my own line of thought. "You went through that once, and once was enough. It's not fair. It's not reasonable. It's not even thinkable. You weren't made for that sort of thing, and--"

"Listen to me," I broke in, doing my best to speak calmly and quietly.

"Those three years were really the happiest three years of all my life.

I love to remember them, for they mean so much more than all the others.

There were a lot of the frills and fixin's of life that we had to do without. But those three years brought us closer together, d.i.n.ky-Dunk, than we have ever been since we moved into this big house and got on bowing terms again with luxury. I don't know whether you've given it much thought or not, husband o' mine, but during the last year or two there's been a change taking place in us. You've been worried and busy and forever on the wing, and there have been days when I've felt you were almost a stranger to me, as though I'd got to be a sort of accident in your life. Remember, Honey-Chile, I'm not blaming you; I'm only pointing out certain obvious truths, now the time for a little honest talk seems to have cropped up. You were up to your ears in a fight, in a tremendously big fight, for success and money; and you were doing it more for me and d.i.n.kie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee than for yourself. You couldn't help remembering that I'd been a city girl and imagining that prairie-life was a sort of penance I was undergoing before pa.s.sing on to the joys of paradise in an apartment-hotel with a mail-chute outside the door and the sound of the Elevated outside the windows. And you were terribly wrong in all that, for there have been days and days, d.i.n.ky-Dunk, when I've been homesick for that old slabsided ranch-shack and the glory of seeing you come in ruddy and hungry and happy for the ham and eggs and bread I'd cooked with my own hands. It seemed to bring us so gloriously close together. It seemed so homy and happy-go-lucky and soul-satisfying in its completeness, and we weren't forever fretting about bank-balances and taxes and over-drafts. I was just a rancher's wife then--and I can't help feeling that all along there was something in that simple life we didn't value enough. We were just rubes and hicks and clodhoppers and hay-t.o.s.s.e.rs in those days, and we weren't staying awake nights worrying about land-speculations and water-fronts and trying to make ourselves millionaires when we might have been making ourselves more at peace with our own souls. And now that our card-house of high finance has gone to smash, I realize more than ever that I've got to be at peace with my own soul and on speaking terms with my own husband. And if this strikes you as an exceptionally long-winded sermon, my beloved, it's merely to make plain to you that I haven't surrendered to any sudden wave of emotionalism when I talk about migrating over to that Harris Ranch. It's nothing more than good old hard-headed, practical self-preservation, for I wouldn't care to live without you, d.i.n.ky-Dunk, any more than I imagine you'd care to live without your own self-respect."

I sat back, after what I suppose was the longest speech I ever made in my life, and studied my lord and master's face. It was not an easy map to decipher, for man, after all, is a pretty complex animal and even in his more elemental moments is played upon by pretty complex forces.

And if there was humility on that lean and rock-ribbed countenance of my soul-mate there was also antagonism, and mixed up with the antagonism was a sprinkling of startled wonder, and tangled up with the wonder was a slightly perplexed brand of contrition, and interwoven with that again was a suggestion of allegiance revived, as though he had forgotten that he possessed a wife who had a heart and mind of her own, who was even worth sticking to when the rest of the world was threatening to give him the cold shoulder. He felt abstractedly down in his coat pocket for his pipe, which is always a helpful sign.

"It's big and fine of you, Chaddie, to put it that way," he began, rather awkwardly, and with just a touch of color coming to his rather gray-looking cheek-bones. "But can't you see that now it's the children we've got to think of?"

"I _have_ thought of them," I quietly announced. As though any mother, on prairie or in metropolis, didn't think of them first and last and in-between-whiles! "And that's what simplifies the situation. I want them to have a fair chance. I'd rather they--"

"It's not quite that criminal," cut in d.i.n.ky-Dunk, with almost an angry flush creeping up toward his forehead.

"I'm only taking your own word for that," I reminded him, deliberately steeling my heart against the tides of compa.s.sion that were trying to dissolve it. "And I'm only taking what is, after all, the easiest course out of the situation."

d.i.n.ky-Dunk's color receded, leaving his face even more than ever the color of old cheese, for all the tan of wind and sun which customarily tinted it, like afterglow on a stubbled hillside.

"But Lady Alicia herself still has something to say about all this,"

he reminded me.