The Prairie Mother Part 32

d.i.n.ky-Dunk, whom I actually heard singing as he took his bath this morning, is exercising his paternal prerogative of training little d.i.n.kie to go to bed without a light. He has peremptorily taken the matter out of my hands, and is, of course, prodigiously solemn about it all.

"I'll show that young Turk who's boss around this house!" he magisterially proclaims almost every night when the youthful wails of protest start to come from the Blue Room in the East Wing.

And off he goes, with his Holbein's Astronomer mouth set firm and the fiercest of frowns on his face.

It had a tendency to terrify me, at first. But now I know what a colossal old fraud and humbug this same soft-hearted and granite-crusted specimen of humanity can be. For last night, after the usual demonstration, I slipped out to the Blue Room and found big Dunkie kneeling down beside little d.i.n.kie's bed, with d.i.n.kie's small hand softly enclosed in his dad's big paw, and d.i.n.kie's yellow head nestled close against his dad's salt-and-peppery pate.

It made me gulp a little, for some reason or other. So I tiptoed away, without letting my lord and master know I'd discovered the secret of that stern mastery of his. And later on d.i.n.ky-Dunk himself tiptoed into Peter's study, farther down the same wing, so that he could, with a shadow of truth, explain that he'd been looking over some of the Spanish ma.n.u.scripts there, when I happened to ask him, on his return, just what had kept him away so long!

THE END