The Prairie Child Part 22

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 d.i.n.kie. 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 j.a.p. 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 d.i.n.kie, 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 d.i.n.kie, it was Lossie, Lossie with smiling lips and inquiring brown eyes and splashes of rose in her cheeks from rapid walking.

"Where's d.i.n.kie?" 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 d.i.n.kie 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 d.i.n.kie'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 d.i.n.kie 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 d.i.n.kie 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.

_Sat.u.r.day 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 d.i.n.kie would be bobbing up at his old home in a day or two.

"The boy will travel this way," he a.s.sured 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 d.i.n.kie. 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 pa.s.sing 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,

d.i.n.kIE."