The Prairie Mother Part 15

But I'm not.

I'm so homesick for something which I can't quite define that it gives me a misty sort of ache just under the fifth rib. It's just three weeks now since d.i.n.ky-Dunk has ventured over from Casa Grande. If this aloofness continues, he'll soon need to be formally introduced to his own offspring when he sees them.

Now that I have Peter out working on the land, I can safely give a little more time to my household. But meals are still more or less a scramble. Peter has ventured the opinion that he might get a Chinaman for me, if he could have a week off to root out the right sort of c.h.i.n.k. But I prefer that Peter sticks to his tractor, much as I need help in the house.

My new hired man is still a good deal of a mystery to me, just as I seem to remain a good deal of a mystery to him. I've been asking myself just why it is that Peter is so easy to get along with, and why, in some indescribable way, he has added to the color of life since coming to Alabama Ranch. It's mostly, I think, because he's supplied me with the one thing I had sorely missed, without being quite conscious of it.

He has been able to give me mental companionship, at a time when my mind was starving for an idea or two beyond the daily drudgery of farm-work. He has given a fillip to existence, loath as I am to acknowledge it. He's served to knock the moss off my soul by more or less indirectly reminding me that all work and no play could make Chaddie McKail a very dull girl indeed.

I was rather afraid, at one time, that he was going to spoil it all by making love to me, after the manner of young Bud Dyruff, from the Cowen Ranch, who, because I waded bare-kneed into a warm little slough-end when the horses were having their noonday meal, a.s.sumed that I could be persuaded to wade with equal celerity into indiscriminate affection.

That rudimentary and ingenuous youth, in fact, became more and more offensive in his approaches, until finally I turned on him. "Are you trying to make love to me?" I demanded. "The surest thing you know," he said with a rather moonish smile. "Then let me tell you something," I hissed out at him, with my nose within six inches of his, "I'm a high-strung h.e.l.l-cat, I am. I'm a bob-cat, and I'm not aching to be pawed by you or any other hare-brained he-mutt. So now, right from this minute, keep your distance! Is that clear? Keep your distance, or I'll break your head in with this neck-yoke!"

Poor Bud! That rather blighted the flower of Bud's tender young romance, and to this day he effects a wide detour when he happens to meet me on the trail or in the byways of Buckhorn.

But Peter Ketley is not of the Bud Dyruff type. He is more complex, and, accordingly, more disturbing. For I can see admiration in his eye, even though he no longer expresses it by word of mouth. And there is something tonic to any woman in knowing that a man admires her. In my case, in fact, it's so tonic that I've ordered some benzoin and cuc.u.mber-cream, and think a little more about how I'm doing my hair, and argue with myself that it's a woman's own fault if she runs to seed before she's seen thirty. I may be the mother of three children, but I still have a hankering after personal power--and that comes to women through personal attractiveness, disquieting as it may be to have to admit it. We can't be big strong men and conquer through force, but our frivolous little bodies can house the triumphant weaknesses which make men forget their strength.

_Sunday the Fourteenth_

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 bra.s.s tacks. And even now the bra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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.

_Thursday the--I Can't Remember_

d.i.n.ky-Dunk rode over to-day when Peter was bolting some new wire stuts on the windmill tower and I was busy dry-picking two polygamous old roosters which Whinnie had beheaded for me. My husband attempted an offhand and happy-go-lucky air which, I very soon saw, was merely a mask to hide his embarra.s.sment. He even flushed up to the ears when little d.i.n.kie drew back for a moment or two, as any child might who didn't recognize his own father, though he later solicitously tiptoed to the sleeping-porch where the Twins were having their nap, and remarked that they were growing prodigiously.

It was all rather absurd. But when one member of this life-partnership business is stiff with constraint, you can't expect the other member to fall on his neck and weep. And d.i.n.ky-Dunk, for all his nonchalance, looked worried and hollow-eyed. He was in the saddle again, and headed back for Casa Grande, when he caught sight of Peter at work on the windmill. So he loped over to my hired man and had a talk with him.

What they talked about I couldn't tell, of course, but it seemed a casual and friendly enough conversation. Peter, in his blue-jeans, dirt-marked and oil-stained, and with a wrench in his hand, looked like an I. W. W. agitator who'd fallen on evil days.

I felt tempted to sally forth and reprove d.i.n.ky-Dunk for wasting the time of my hired help. But that, I remembered in time, might be treading on rather thin ice, or, what would be even worse, might seem like snooping. And speaking of snooping, reminds me that a few nights ago I listened carefully at the open window of the bunk-house where Whinstane Sandy was deep in repose. Not a sound, not a trace of a snore, arose from Whinnie's cot.

So my suspicions were confirmed. That old sourdough had deliberately lain awake and tried to trumpet my second man from the precincts which Whinnie felt he'd already preempted. He had attempted to snore poor Peter off the map and away from Alabama Ranch!

_Sat.u.r.day the Thirtieth_

The sedatest lives, I suppose, have their occasional Big Surprises.

Life, at any rate, has just treated me to one. Lady Alicia Newland's English maid, known as Struthers, arrived at Alabama Ranch yesterday afternoon and asked if I'd take her in. She'd had some words, she said, with her mistress, and didn't propose to be treated like the sc.u.m of the earth by anybody.

So the inevitable has come about. America, the liberalizer, has touched the worthy Struthers with her wand of democracy and transformed her from a silent machine of service into a Vesuvian female with a mind and a voice of her own.

I told Struthers, who was still a bit quavery and excited, to sit down and we'd talk the matter over, for rustling maids, in a land where they're as scarce as hen's teeth, is a much graver crime than rustling cattle. Yet if Lady Allie had taken my husband away from me, I didn't see why, in the name of poetic justice, I shouldn't appropriate her hand-maid.

And Struthers, I found, was quite definite as to her intentions. She is an expert needle-woman, can do plain cooking, and having been a nurse-maid in her younger days, is quite capable of looking after children, even American children. I winced at that, naturally, and winced still harder when she stipulated that she must have four o'clock tea every afternoon, and every alternate Sunday morning off for the purpose of "saging" her hair, which was a new one on me. But I weighed the pros and cons, very deliberately, and discussed her predicament very candidly, and the result is that Struthers is now duly installed at Alabama Ranch. Already, in fact, that efficient hand of hers has left its mark on the shack. Her m.u.f.fins this morning were above reproach and to-morrow we're to have Spotted Dog pudding. But already, I notice, she is casting sidelong glances in the direction of poor Peter, to whom, this evening at supper, she deliberately and unquestionably donated the fairest and fluffiest quarter of the lemon pie. I have no intention of pumping the lady, but I can see that there are certain matters pertaining to Casa Grande which she is not averse to easing her mind of. I am not quite sure, in fact, that I could find it possible to lend an ear to the gossipings of a servant. And yet--and yet, there are a few things I'd like to find out. And dignity may still be slaughtered on the altar of curiosity.

_Sunday the Sixth_

Now that I've had a breathing-spell, I've been sitting back and mentally taking stock. The showers of last week have brought the needed moisture for our wheat, which is looking splendid. Our oats are not quite so promising, but everything will depend upon the season.