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 350 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 351 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. 352

“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 353 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.”

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––” 354

“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 355 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 356 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 357 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!