I’ve had a talk with Peter. It simply had to come, for we couldn’t continue to play-act and evade realities. The time arrived for getting down to brass tacks. And even now the brass tacks aren’t as clear-cut as I’d like them to be.

But Peter is not and never was a car-thief. That beetle-headed suspicion has passed slowly but surely away, like a snow-man confronted by a too affectionate sun. It slipped away from me little by little, and began losing its lines, not so much when I found that Peter carried a bill-fold and a well-thumbed copy of Marius The Epicurean and walked about in undergarments that were expensive enough for a prima donna, but more because I found myself face to face with a Peter-Panish sort of honorableness that was not to be dissembled. So I cornered Peter and put him through his paces.

I began by telling him that I didn’t seem to know a great deal about him.

“The closed makimono,” he cryptically retorted, “is the symbol of wisdom.”

I was ashamed to ask just what that meant, so I tried another tack.

“Folks are thrown pretty intimately together, in this frontier life, like worms in a bait-tin. So they naturally need to know what they’re tangled up with.”

Peter, at that, began to look unhappy.

“Would you mind telling me what brought you to this part of the country?” I asked.

“Would you mind telling me what brought you to this part of the country?” countered Peter.

“My husband,” I curtly retorted. And that chilled him perceptibly. But he saw that I was not to be shuttled aside.

“I was interested,” he explained with a shrug of finality, “in the nesting-ground of the Canada goose!”

“Then you came to the right point,” I promptly retorted. “For I am it!”

But he didn’t smile, as I’d expected him to do. He seemed to feel that something approaching seriousness was expected of that talk.

“I really came because I was more interested in one of your earliest settlers,” he went on. “This settler, I might add, came to your province some three million years ago and is now being exhumed from one of the cut-banks of the Red Deer River. He belongs to the Mesozoic order of archisaurian gentlemen known as Dinosauria, and there’s about a car-load of him. This interest in one of your cretaceous dinosaur skeletons would imply, of course, that I’m wedded to science. And I am, though to nothing else. I’m as free as the wind, dear lady, or I wouldn’t be holidaying here with a tractor-plow that makes my legs ache and a prairie Penelope, who, for some reason or other, has the power of making my heart ache.”

“Verboten!” I promptly interjected.

Peter saluted and then sighed.

“There are things up here even more interesting than your Edmonton formation,” he remarked. “But I was born a Quaker, you see, and I can’t get rid of my self-control!”

“I like you for that,” I rather depressed him by saying. “For I find that one accepts you, Peter, as one accepts a climate. You’re intimate in your very remoteness.”

Peter looked at me out of a rueful yet ruminative eye. But Whinnie came forth and grimly announced that the Twins were going it. So I had to turn shackward.

“You really ought to get that car out,” I called over my shoulder to him, with a head-nod toward the hay-stack. And he nodded absently back at me.