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!