The Prairie Mother Part 11

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 d.i.n.kie. 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 G.o.d! Guid G.o.d!"

over and over again, when I told him d.i.n.kie 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, la.s.sie, 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' G.o.d, _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 d.i.n.kie was lost, the little d.i.n.kie 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 d.i.n.ky-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 d.i.n.ky-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 d.i.n.ky-Dunk stared at her, almost accusingly, I thought. Then he swung his horse savagely about, and called out over our heads. Other hors.e.m.e.n, 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 G.o.d, watch close. He's not three yet, remember. He couldn't have got far away!"

I should have found something rea.s.suring 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 d.i.n.kie. 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 unb.u.t.toned 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 d.i.n.ky-Dunk's voice outside, a little hoa.r.s.e 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 d.i.n.kie's little stub-toed b.u.t.ton 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 d.i.n.kie'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.

"G.o.d 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-gla.s.s 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 d.i.n.ky-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 gla.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: He was warm and breathing, and safe and sound]

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-gra.s.s, 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 d.i.n.kie up in his arms, but I pushed him aside.