I may as well begin at the beginning, I suppose, so as to get the whole thing straight. And it started with Whinstane Sandy, who broke the wheel off the spring-wagon and the third commandment at one and the same time. So I harnessed Slip-Along up to the buckboard, and put the Twins in their two little crow’s-nests and started out to help get my load out of that bogged trail, leaving Dinkie behind with Iroquois Annie.

There was a chill in the air and I was glad of my old coonskin coat. It was almost two hours before Whinnie and I got the spring-wagon out of its mud-bath, and the load on again, and a willow fence-post lashed under the drooping axle-end to sustain it on its journey back to Alabama Ranch. The sun was low, by this time, so I couldn’t wait for Whinnie and the team, but drove on ahead with the Twins.

I was glad to see the smoke going up from my lonely little shack-chimney, for I was mud-splashed and tired and hungry, and the thought of fire and home and supper gave me a comfy feeling just under the tip of the left ventricle. I suppose it was the long evening shadows and the chill of the air that made the shack look so unutterably lonely as I drove up to it. Or perhaps it was because I stared in vain for some sign of life. At any rate, I didn’t stop to unhitch Slip-Along, but gathered up my Twins and made for the door, and nearly stumbled on my nose over the broom-end boot-wiper which hadn’t proved such a boon as I’d expected.

I found Iroquois Annie in front of my home-made dressing-table mirror, with my last year’s summer hat on her head and a look of placid admiration on her face. The shack seemed very quiet. It seemed so disturbingly quiet that I even forgot about the hat.

“Where’s Dinkie?” I demanded, as I deposited the Twins in their swing-box.

“He play somew’ere roun’,” announced Ikkie, secreting the purloined head-gear and circling away from the forbidden dressing-table.

“But where?” I asked, with exceptional sharpness, for my eye had already traversed the most of that shack and had encountered no sign of him.

That sloe-eyed breed didn’t know just where, and apparently didn’t care. He was playing somewhere outside, with three or four old wooden decoy-ducks. That was all she seemed to know. But I didn’t stop to question her. I ran to the door and looked out. Then my heart began going down like an elevator, for I could see nothing of the child. So I made the rounds of the shack again, calling “Dinkie!” as I went.

Then I looked through the bunk-house, and even tried the cellar. Then I went to the rainwater tub, with my heart up in my throat. He wasn’t there, of course. So I made a flying circle of the out-buildings. But still I got no trace of him.

I was panting when I got back to the shack, where Iroquois Annie was fussing stolidly over the stove-fire. I caught her by the snake-like braid of her hair, though I didn’t know I was doing it, at the moment, and swung her about so that my face confronted hers.

“Where’s my boy?” I demanded in a sort of shout of mingled terror and rage and dread. “Where is he, you empty-eyed idiot? Where is he?”

But that half-breed, of course, couldn’t tell me. And a wave of sick fear swept over me. My Dinkie was not there. He was nowhere to be found. He was lost—lost on the prairie. And I was shouting all this at Ikkie, without being quite conscious of what I was doing.

“And remember,” I hissed out at her, in a voice that didn’t sound like my own as I swung her about by her suddenly parting waist, “if anything has happened to that child, I’ll kill you! Do you understand, I’ll kill you as surely as you’re standing in those shoes!”

I went over the shack, room by room, for still the third time. Then I went over the bunk-house and the other buildings, and every corner of the truck-garden, calling as I went.

But still there was no answer to my calls. And I had to face the steel-cold knowledge that my child was lost. That little toddler, scarcely more than a baby, had wandered away on the open prairie.

For one moment of warming relief I thought of Bobs. I remembered what a dog is sometimes able to do in such predicaments. But I also remembered that Bobs was still out on the trail with Whinnie. So I circled off on the undulating floor of the prairie, calling “Dinkie” every minute or two and staring into the distance until my eyes ached, hoping to see some moving dot in the midst of all that silence and stillness.

“My boy is lost,” I kept saying to myself, in sobbing little whimpers, with my heart getting more and more like a ball of lead. And there could only be an hour or two of daylight left. If he wasn’t found before night came on—I shut the thought out of my heart, and started back for the shack, in a white heat of desperation.

“If you want to live,” I said to the now craven and shrinking Ikkie, “you get in that buckboard and make for Casa Grande. Drive there as fast as you can. Tell my husband that our boy, that my boy, is lost on the prairie. Tell him to get help, and come, come quick. And stop at the Teetzel ranch on your way. Tell them to send men on horses, and lanterns! But move, woman, move!”

Ikkie went, with Slip-Along making the buckboard skid on the uneven trail as though he were playing a game of crack-the-whip with that frightened Indian. And I just as promptly took up my search again, forgetting about the Twins, forgetting about being tired, forgetting everything.

Half-way between the fenced-in hay-stacks and the corral-gate I found a battered decoy-duck with a string tied to its neck. It was one of a set that Francois and Whinstane Sandy had whittled out over a year ago. It was at least a clue. Dinkie must have dropped it there.

It sent me scuttling back among the hay-stacks, going over the ground there, foot by foot and calling as I went, until my voice had an eerie sound in the cold air that took on more and more of a razor-edge as the sun and the last of its warmth went over the rim of the world. It seemed an empty world, a plain of ugly desolation, unfriendly and pitiless in its vastness. Even the soft green of the wheatlands took on a look like verdigris, as though it were something malignant and poisonous. And farther out there were muskegs, and beyond the three-wire fence, which would stand no bar to a wandering child, there were range-cattle, half-wild cattle that resented the approach of anything but a man on horseback. And somewhere in those darkening regions of peril my Dinky-Dink was lost.

I took up the search again, with the barometer of hope falling lower and lower. But I told myself that I must be systematic, that I must not keep covering the same ground, that I must make the most of what was left of the daylight. So I blocked out imaginary squares and kept running and calling until I was out of breath, then resting with my hand against my heart, and running on again. But I could find no trace of him.

He was such a little tot, I kept telling myself. He was not warmly dressed, and night was coming on. It would be a cold night, with several degrees of frost. He would be alone, on that wide and empty prairie, with terror in his heart, chilled to the bone, wailing for his mother, wailing until he was able to wail no more. Already the light was going, I realized with mounting waves of desperation, and no child, dressed as Dinkie was dressed, could live through the night. Even the coyotes would realize his helplessness and come and pick his bones clean.

I kept thinking of Bobs, more than of anything else, and wondering why Whinnie was so slow in getting back with his broken wagon, and worrying over when the men would come. I told myself to be calm, to be brave, and the next moment was busy picturing a little dead body with a tear-washed face. But I went on, calling as I went. Then suddenly I thought of praying.

“O God, it wouldn’t be fair, to take that little mite away from me,” I kept saying aloud. “O God, be good to me in this, be merciful, and lead me to him! Bring him back before it is too late! Bring him back, and do with me what You wish, but have pity on that poor little toddler! What You want of me, I will do, but don’t, O God, don’t take my boy away from me!”

I made promises to God, foolish, desperate, infantile promises; trying to placate Him in His might with my resolutions for better things, trying to strike bargains, at the last moment, with the Master of Life and Death—even protesting that I’d forgive Dinky-Dunk for anything and everything he might have done, and that it was the Evil One speaking through my lips when I said I’d surely kill Iroquois Annie.

Then I heard the signal-shots of a gun, and turned back toward the shack, which looked small and squat on the floor of the paling prairie. I couldn’t run, for running was beyond me now. I heard Bobs barking, and the Twins crying, and I saw Whinnie. I thought for one fond and foolish moment, as I hurried toward the house, that they’d found my Dinkie. But it was a false hope. Whinnie had been frightened at the empty shack and the wailing babies, and had thought something might have happened to me. So he had taken my duck-gun and fired those signal-shots.

He leaned against the muddy wagon-wheel and said “Guid God! Guid God!” over and over again, when I told him Dinkie was lost. Then he flung down the gun and drew his twisted old body up, peering through the twilight at my face.

I suppose it frightened him a little.

“Dinna fear, lassie, dinna fear,” he said. He said it in such a deep and placid voice that it carried consolation to my spirit, and brought a shadow of conviction trailing along behind it. “We’ll find him. I say it before the livin’ God, we’ll find him!”

But that little candle of hope went out in the cold air, for I could see that night was coming closer, cold and dark and silent. I forgot about Whinnie, and didn’t even notice which direction he took when he strode off on his lame foot. But I called Bobs to me, and tried to quiet his whimpering, and talked to him, and told him Dinkie was lost, the little Dinkie we all loved, and implored him to go and find my boy for me.

But the poor dumb creature didn’t seem to understand me, for he cringed and trembled and showed a tendency to creep off to the stable and hide there, as though the weight of this great evil which had befallen his house lay on him and him alone. And I was trying to coax the whimpering Bobs back to the shack-steps when Dinky-Dunk himself came galloping up through the uncertain light, with Lady Alicia a few hundred yards behind him.

“Have you found him?” my husband asked, quick and curt. But there was a pale greenish-yellow tint to his face that made me think of Rocquefort cheese.

“No,” I told him. I tried to speak calmly, determined not to break down and make a scene there before Lady Alicia, who’d reined up, stock-still, and sat staring in front of her, without a spoken word.

I could see Dinky-Dunk’s mouth harden.

“Have you any clue—any hint?” he asked, and I could catch the quaver in his voice as he spoke.

“Not a thing,” I told him, remembering that we were losing time. “He simply wandered off, when that Indian girl wasn’t looking. He didn’t even have a cap or a coat on.”

I heard Lady Alicia, who had slipped down out of the saddle, make a little sound as I said this. It was half a gasp and half a groan of protest. For one brief moment Dinky-Dunk stared at her, almost accusingly, I thought. Then he swung his horse savagely about, and called out over our heads. Other horsemen, I found, had come loping up in the ghostly twilight where we stood. I could see the breath from their mounts’ nostrils, white in the frosty air.

“You, Teetzel, and you, O’Malley,” called my husband, in an oddly authoritative and barking voice, “and you on the roan there, swing twenty paces out from one another and circle the shack. Then widen the circle, each turn. There’s no use calling, for the boy’ll be down. He’ll be done out. But don’t speak until you see something. And for the love of God, watch close. He’s not three yet, remember. He couldn’t have got far away!”

I should have found something reassuring in those quick and purposeful words of command, but they only served to bring the horror of the situation closer home to me. They brought before me more graphically than ever the thought that I’d been trying to get out of my head, the picture of a huddled small body, with a tear-washed face, growing colder and colder, until the solitary little flame of life went completely out in the midst of that star-strewn darkness. Only too willingly, I knew, I would have covered that chilling body with the warmth of my own, though wild horses rode over me until the end of time. I tried to picture life without Dinkie. I tried to imagine my home without that bright and friendly little face, without the patter of those restless little feet, without the sound of those beleaguering little coos of child-love with which he used to burrow his head into the hollow of my shoulder.

It was too much for me. I had to lean against the wagon-wheel and gulp. It was Lady Alicia, emerging from the shack, who brought me back to the world about me. I could just see her as she stood beside me, for night had fallen by this time, night nearly as black as the blackness of my own heart.

“Look here,” she said almost gruffly. “Whatever happens, you’ve got to have something to drink. I’ve got a kettle on, and I’m going back to make tea, or a pot of coffee, or whatever I can find.”

“Tea?” I echoed, as the engines of indignation raced in my shaken body. “Tea? It sounds pretty, doesn’t it, sitting down to a pink tea, when there’s a human being dying somewhere out in that darkness!”

My bitterness, however, had no visible effect on Lady Alicia.

“Perhaps coffee would be better,” she coolly amended. “And those babies of yours are crying their heads off in there, and I don’t seem to be able to do anything to stop them. I rather fancy they’re in need of feeding, aren’t they?”

It was then and then only that I remembered about my poor neglected Twins. I groped my way in through the darkness, quite calm again, and sat down and unbuttoned my waist and nursed Poppsy, and then took up the indignant and wailing Pee-Wee, vaguely wondering if the milk in my breast wouldn’t prove poison to them and if all my blood hadn’t turned to acid.

I was still nursing Pee-Wee when Bud Teetzel came into the shack and asked how many lanterns we had about the place. There was a sullen look on his face, and his eyes refused to meet mine. So I knew his search had not succeeded.

Then young O’Malley came in and asked for matches, and I knew even before he spoke, that he too had failed. They had all failed.

I could hear Dinky-Dunk’s voice outside, a little hoarse and throaty. I felt very tired, as I put Pee-Wee back in his cradle. It seemed as though an invisible hand were squeezing the life out of my body and making it hard for me to breathe. I could hear the cows bawling, reminding the world that they had not yet been milked. I could smell the strong coffee that Lady Alicia was pouring out into a cup. She stepped on something as she carried it to me. She stopped to pick it up—and it was one of Dinkie’s little stub-toed button shoes.

“Let me see it,” I commanded, as she made a foolish effort to get it out of sight. I took it from her and turned it over in my hand. That was the way, I remembered, mothers turned over the shoes of the children they had lost, the children who could never, never, so long as they worked and waited and listened in this wide world, come back to them again.

Then I put down the shoe, for I could hear one of the men outside say that the upper muskeg ought to be dragged.

“Try that cup of coffee now,” suggested Lady Alicia. I liked her quietness. I admired her calmness, under the circumstances. And I remembered that I ought to give some evidence of this by accepting the hot drink she had made for me. So I took the coffee and drank it. The bawling of my milk-cows, across the cold night air, began to annoy me.

“My cows haven’t been milked,” I complained. It was foolish, but I couldn’t help it. Then I reached out for Dinkie’s broken-toed shoe, and studied it for a long time. Lady Alicia crossed to the shack door, and stood staring out through it....

She was still standing there when Whinnie came in, with the stable lantern in his hand, and brushed her aside. He came to where I was sitting and knelt down in front of me, on the shack-floor, with his heavy rough hand on my knee. I could smell the stable-manure that clung to his shoes.

“God has been guid to ye, ma’am!” he said in a rapt voice, which was little more than an awed whisper. But it was more his eyes, with the uncanny light in them making them shine like a dog’s, that brought me to my feet. For I had a sudden feeling that there was Something just outside the door which he hadn’t dared to bring in to me, a little dead body with pinched face and trailing arms.

I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. I merely gulped. And Whinnie’s rough hand pushed me back into my chair.

“Dinna greet,” he said, with two tears creeping crookedly down his own seamed and wind-roughened face.

But I continued to gulp.

“Dinna greet, for your laddie’s safe and sound!” I heard the rapt voice saying.

I could hear what he’d said, quite distinctly, yet his words seemed without color, without meaning, without sense.

“Have you found him?” called out Lady Alicia sharply.

“Aye, he’s found,” said Whinnie, with an exultant gulp of his own, but without so much as turning to look at that other woman, who, apparently, was of small concern to him. His eyes were on me, and he was very intimately patting my leg, without quite knowing it.

“He says that the child’s been found,” interpreted Lady Alicia, obviously disturbed by the expression on my face.

“He’s just yon, as warm and safe as a bird in a nest,” further expounded Whinstane Sandy.

“Where?” demanded Lady Alicia. But Whinnie ignored her.

“It was Bobs, ma’am,” were the blessed words I heard the old lips saying to me, “who kept whimper-in’ and grievin’ about the upper stable door, which had been swung shut. It was Bobs who led me back yon, fair against my will. And there I found our laddie, asleep in the manger of Slip-Along, nested deep in the hay, as safe and warm as if in his own bed.”

I didn’t speak or move for what must have been a full minute. I couldn’t. I felt as though my soul had been inverted and emptied of all feeling, like a wine-glass that’s turned over. For a full minute I sat looking straight ahead of me. Then I got up, and went to where I remembered Dinky-Dunk kept his revolver. I took it up and started to cross to the open door. But Lady Alicia caught me sharply by the arm.

“What are you doing?” she gasped, imagining, I suppose, that I’d gone mad and was about to blow my brains out. She even took the firearm from my hand.

“It’s the men,” I tried to explain. “They should be told. Give them three signal-shots to bring them in.” Then I turned to Whinnie. He nodded and took me by the hand.

“Now take me to my boy,” I said very quietly.

I was still quite calm, I think. But deep down inside of me I could feel a faint glow. It wasn’t altogether joy, and it wasn’t altogether relief. It was something which left me just a little bewildered, a good deal like a school-girl after her first glass of champagne at Christmas dinner. It left me oddly self-immured, miles and miles from the figures so close to me, remote even from the kindly old man who hobbled a little and went with a decided list to starboard as he led me out toward what he always spoke of as the upper stable.

Yet at the back of my brain, all the while, was some shadow of doubt, of skepticism, of reiterated self-warning that it was all too good to be true. It wasn’t until I looked over the well-gnawed top rail of Slip-Along’s broken manger and saw that blessed boy there, by the light of Whinnie’s lantern, saw that blessed boy of mine half buried in that soft and cushioning prairie-grass, saw that he was warm and breathing, and safe and sound, that I fully realized how he had been saved for me.

“The laddie’d been after a clutch of eggs, I’m thinkin’,” whispered Whinnie to me, pointing to a yellow stain on his waist, which was clearly caused by the yolk of a broken egg. And Whinnie stooped over to take Dinkie up in his arms, but I pushed him aside.

“No, I’ll take him,” I announced.

He’d be the hungry boy when he awakened, I remembered as I gathered him up in my arms. My knees were a bit shaky, as I carried him back to the shack, but I did my best to disguise that fact. I could have carried him, I believe, right on to Buckhorn, he seemed such a precious burden. And I was glad of that demand for physical expenditure. It seemed to bring me down to earth again, to get things back into perspective. But for the life of me I couldn’t find a word to say to Lady Allie as I walked into my home with Dinky-Dink in my arms. She stood watching me for a moment or two as I started to undress him, still heavy with slumber. Then she seemed to realize that she was, after all, an outsider, and slipped out through the door. I was glad she did, for a minute later Dinkie began to whimper and cry, as any child would with an empty stomach and an over-draft of sleep. It developed into a good lusty bawl, which would surely have spoilt the picture to an outsider. But it did a good turn in keeping me too busy to pump any more brine on my own part.

When Dinky-Dunk came in I was feeding little Dinkie a bowl of hot tapioca well drowned in cream and sugar. My lord and master took off his hat—which struck me as funny—and stood regarding us from just inside the door. He stood there by the door for quite a long while.

“Hadn’t I better stay here with you to-night?” he finally asked, in a voice that didn’t sound a bit like his own.

I looked up at him. But he stood well back from the range of the lamplight and I found it hard to decipher his expression. The one feeling I was certain of was a vague feeling of disappointment. What caused it, I could not say. But it was there.

“After what’s happened,” I told him as quietly as I could, “I think I’d rather be alone!”

He stood for another moment or two, apparently letting this sink in. It wasn’t until he’d turned and walked out of the door that I realized the ambiguity of that retort of mine. I was almost prompted to go after him. But I checked myself by saying: “Well, if the shoe fits, put it on!” But in my heart of hearts I didn’t mean it. I wanted him to come back, I wanted him to share my happiness with me, to sit and talk the thing over, to exploit it to the full in a sweet retrospect of relief, as people seem to want to do after they’ve safely passed through great peril.

It wasn’t until half an hour later, when Dinkie was sound asleep again and tucked away in his crib, that I remembered my frantic promises to God to forgive Dinky-Dunk everything, if He’d only bring my boy back to me. And there’d been other promises, equally foolish and frantic. I’ve been thinking them over, in fact, and I am going to make an effort to keep them. I’m so happy that it hurts. And when you’re happy, you want other people to be that way, too.