Two weeks have slipped by. Two weeks have gone, and left no record of their going. But a prairie home is a terribly busy one, at times, and it’s idleness that leads to the ink-pot. I’m still trying to make the best of a none too promising situation, and I’ll thole through, as Whinstane Sandy puts it. After breakfast this morning, in fact, when Pauline Augusta was swept by one of those little gales of lonesomeness to which children and women are so mysteriously subjected, she climbed up into my lap and I rocked her on my shoulder as I might have rocked a baby. Dinky-Dunk wandered in and inspected that performance with a slightly satiric eye. So, resenting his expression, I promptly began to sing:

Dinky-Dunk, when the significance of this lilted 126 flippancy of mine had sunk home, regarded me with a narrowed and none too friendly eye.

“Feeling a bit larkier than usual this morning, aren’t you?” he inquired with what was merely a pretense at carelessness.

It was merely a pretense, I know, because we’d been over the old ground the night before, and the excursion hadn’t added greatly to the happiness of either of us. Duncan, in fact, had rather horrified me by actually asking if I thought there was a chance of his borrowing eleven thousand dollars from Peter Ketley.

“We can’t all trade on that man’s generosity!” I cried, without giving much thought to the manner in which I was expressing myself.

“Oh, that’s the way you feel about it!” retorted my husband. And I could see his face harden into Scotch granite. I could also see the look of perplexity in my small son’s eyes as he stood studying his father.

“Is there anything abnormal in my feeling the way I do?” I parried, resenting the beetling brow of the Dour Man.

“Not if you regard him as your personal and particular fairy god-father,” retorted my husband.

“I’ve no more reason for regarding him as that,” 127 I said as calmly as I could, “than I have for regarding him as a professional money-lender.”

Duncan must have seen from my face that it would be dangerous to go much further. So he merely shrugged a flippant shoulder.

“They tell me he’s got more money than he knows what to do with,” he said with a heavy jocularity which couldn’t quite rise.

“Then lightening his burdens is a form of charity we can scarcely afford to indulge in,” I none too graciously remarked. And I saw my husband’s face harden again.

“Well, I’ve got to have ready money and I’ve got to have it before the year’s out,” was his retort. He told me, when the air had cleared a little, that he’d have to open an office in Calgary as soon as harvesting was over. There was already too much at stake to take chances. Then he asked me if there were any circumstances under which I’d be willing to sell Casa Grande. And I told him, quite promptly and quite definitely, that there was none.

“Then how about the old Harris Ranch?” he finally inquired.

“But why should we sell that?” I asked. Alabama Ranch, I knew, was in my name, and I had always regarded it as a sort of nest-egg for the children. 128 It was something put by for a rainy day, something to fall back on, if ill-luck ever overtook us again.

“Because I can double and treble every dollar we get out of it, inside of a year,” averred Dinky-Dunk.

“But how am I to know that?” I contended, hating to seem hard and selfish and narrow in the teeth of an ambitious man’s enterprise.

“You’d have to take my word for it,” retorted my husband.

“But we’ve more than ourselves to consider,” I contended, knowing he’d merely scoff at that harping on the old string of the children.

“That’s why I intend to get out of this rut!” he cried with unexpected bitterness. And a few minutes later he made the suggestion that he’d deed Casa Grande entirely over to me if I’d consent to the sale of Alabama Ranch and give him a chance to swing the bigger plans he intended to swing.

The suggestion rather took my breath away. My rustic soul, I suppose, is stupidly averse to change. But I realize that when you travel in double-harness you can’t forever pull back on your team-mate. So I’ve asked Dinky-Dunk to give me a few days to think the thing over.