The Prairie Wife Part 2

He did not let his eyes meet mine.

"Why?" he asked.

"I'm afraid--out here!" I confessed as I clung to him and felt the need of having him close to me. He was very quiet and thoughtful all evening. Before I fell asleep he told me that on Monday the two of us would team in to Buckhorn and get a wagon-load of supplies.

_Sat.u.r.day the Twenty-eighth_

I have got my cayuse. d.i.n.ky-Dunk meant him for a surprise, but the shyest and reddest-headed cowboy that ever sat in a saddle came cantering along the trail, and I saw him first. He was leading the s.h.a.ggiest, piebaldest, pottest-tummied, craziest-looking little cayuse that ever wore a bridle. I gave one look at his tawny-colored forelock, which stood pompadour-style about his ears, and shouted out "Paderewski!" d.i.n.ky-Dunk came and stood beside me and laughed. He said that cayuse _did_ look like Paderewski, but the youth of the fiery locks blus.h.i.+ngly explained that his present name was "Jail-Bird," which some fool Scandinavian had used instead of "Grey-Bird," his authentic and original appellative. But I stuck to my name, though we have shortened it into "Paddy." And Paddy must indeed have been a jail-bird, or deserved to be one, for he is marked and scarred from end to end. But he is good-tempered, tough as hickory and obligingly omnivorous. Every one in the West, men and women alike, rides astride, and I have been practising on Paddy. It seems a very comfortable and sensible way to ride, but I shall have to toughen up a bit before I hit the trail for any length of time.

I've been wondering, Matilda Anne, if this all sounds pagan and foolish to you, uncultured, as Theobald Gustav would put it? I've also been wondering, since I wrote that last sentence, if people really need culture, or what we used to call culture, and if it means as much to life as so many imagine. Here we are out here without any of the refinements of civilization, and we're as much at peace with our own souls as are the birds of the air--when there _are_ birds in the air, which isn't in our country! Culture, it seems to me as I look back on things, tends to make people more and more mere spectators of life, detaching them from it and lifting them above it. Or can it be that the mere spectators demand culture, to take the place of what they miss by not being actual builders and workers?

We are farmers, just rubes and hicks, as they say in my country. But we're tilling the soil and growing wheat. We're making a great new country out of what was once a wilderness. To me, that seems almost enough. We're laboring to feed the world, since the world must have bread, and there's something satisfying and uplifting in the mere thought that we can answer to G.o.d, in the end, for our lives, no matter how raw and rude they may have been. And there are mornings when I am Browning's "Saul" in the flesh. The great wash of air from sky-line to sky-line puts something into my blood or brain that leaves me almost dizzy. I sizzle! It makes me pulse and tingle and cry out that life is good--_good_! I suppose it is nothing more than alt.i.tude and ozone. But in the matter of intoxicants it stands on a par with anything that was ever poured out of bottles at Martin's or Bustan.o.by's. And at sunrise, when the prairie is thinly silvered with dew, when the tiny hammocks of the spider-webs swing a million sparkling webs strung with diamonds, when every blade of gra.s.s is a singing string of pearls, hymning to G.o.d on High for the birth of a golden day, I can feel my heart swell, and I'm so abundantly, so inexpressibly alive, alive to every finger-tip!

Such s.p.a.ce, such light, such distances! And being Saul is so much better than reading about him!

_Wednesday the First_

I was too tired to write any last night, though there seemed so much to talk about. We teamed into Buckhorn for our supplies, two leisurely, lovely, lazy days on the trail, which we turned into a sort of gipsy-holiday. We took blankets and grub and feed for the horses and a frying-pan, and camped out on the prairie. The night was pretty cool, but we made a good fire, and had hot coffee. d.i.n.ky-Dunk smoked and I sang. Then we rolled up in our blankets and as I lay there watching the stars I got thinking of the lights of the Great White Way. Then I nudged my husband and asked him if he knew what my greatest ambition in life used to be. And of course he didn't. "Well, d.i.n.ky-Dunk," I told him, "it was to be the boy who opens the door at _Malliard's_! For two whole years I ate my heart out with envy of that boy, who always lived in the odor of such heavenly hot chocolate and wore two rows of s.h.i.+ning b.u.t.tons down his braided coat and was never without white gloves and morning, noon and night paraded about in the duckiest little skull-cap c.o.c.ked very much to one side like a Grenadier's!" And d.i.n.ky-Dunk told me to go to sleep or he'd smother me with a horse-blanket. So I squirmed back into my blanket and got "nested" and watched the fire die away while far, far off somewhere a coyote howled. That made me lonesome, so I got d.i.n.ky-Dunk's hand, and fell asleep holding it in mine.

I woke up early. d.i.n.ky-Dunk had forgotten about my hand, and it was cold. In the East there was a low bar of ethereally pale silver, which turned to amber, and then to ashes of roses, and then to gold. I saw one sublime white star go out, in the West, and then behind the bars of gold the sky grew rosy with morning until it was one Burgundian riot of bewildering color. I sat up and watched it. Then I reached over and shook d.i.n.ky-Dunk. It was too glorious a daybreak to miss. He looked at me with one eye open, like a sleepy hound.

"You must see it, d.i.n.ky-Dunk! It's so resplendent it's positively vulgar!"

He sat up, stared at the pageantry of color for one moment, and then wriggled down into his blanket again. I tickled his nose with a blade of sweet-gra.s.s. Then I washed my face in the dew, the same as we did in Christ-Church Meadow that glorious May-Day in Oxford. By the time d.i.n.ky-Dunk woke up I had the coffee boiling and the bacon sizzling in the pan. It was the most celestial smell that ever a.s.sailed human nostrils, and I blush with shame at the thought of how much I ate at that breakfast, sitting flat on an empty oat-sack and leaning against a wagon-wheel. By eight o'clock we were in the metropolis of Buckhorn and busy gathering up our things there. And they made a very respectable wagon-load.

_Thursday the Second_

I have been practising like mad learning to play the mouth-organ. I bought it in Buckhorn, without letting d.i.n.ky-Dunk know, and all day long, when I knew it was safe, I've been at it. So to-night, when I had my supper-table all ready, I got the ladder that leaned against one of the granaries and mounted the nearest hay-stack. There, quite out of sight, I waited until d.i.n.ky-Dunk came in with his team. I saw him go into the shack and then step outside again, staring about in a brown study. Then I struck up _Traumerei_.

You should have seen that boy's face! He looked up at the sky, as though my poor little harmonica were the aerial outpourings of archangels. He stood stock-still, drinking it in. Then he bolted for the stables, thinking it came from there. It took him some time to corner me up on my stack-top. Then I slid down into his arms. And I believe he loves that mouth-organ music. After supper he made me go out and sit on the oat-box and play my repertory. He says it's wonderful, from a distance. But that mouth-organ's rather bra.s.sy, and it makes my lips sore. Then, too, my mouth isn't big enough for me to "tongue" it properly. When I told d.i.n.ky-Dunk this he said:

"Of course it isn't! What d'you suppose I've been calling you Boca Chica for?"

And I've just discovered "Boca Chica" is Spanish for "Little Mouth"--and me with a trap, Matilda Anne, that you used to call the Cave of the Winds! Now d.i.n.ky-Dunk vows he'll have a Victrola before the winter is over! Ye G.o.ds and little fishes, what a luxury! There was a time, not so long ago, when I was rather inclined to sniff at the Westbury's electric player-piano and its cabinet of neatly canned cla.s.sics! How life humbles us! And how blind all women are in their ideals and their search for happiness! The sea-stones that lie so bright on the sh.o.r.es of youth can dry so dull in the hand of experience! And yet, as Birdalone's Nannie once announced, "If you thuck 'em they thay boo-ful!" And I guess it must be a good deal the same with marriage. You can't even afford to lay down on your job of loving. The more we ask, the more we must give. I've just been thinking of those days of my fiercely careless childhood when my soul used to float out to placid happiness on one piece of plum-cake--only even then, alas, it floated out like a polar bear on its iceberg, for as that plum-cake vanished my peace of mind went with it, madly as I clung to the last crumb. But now that I'm an old married woman I don't intend to be a Hamlet in petticoats. A good man loves me, and I love him back. And I intend to keep that love alive.

_Friday the Third_

I have just issued an ultimatum as to pigs. There shall be no more loose porkers wandering about my dooryard. It's an advertis.e.m.e.nt of bad management. And what's more, when I was hanging out my was.h.i.+ng this morning a shote rooted through my basket of white clothes with his dirty nose, and while I made after him his big brother actually tried to eat one of my wet table-napkins. And that meant another hour's hard work before the damage was repaired.

_Sat.u.r.day the Fourth_

Olie is painting the shack, inside and out, and now you'd never know our poor little Joseph-coat home. I told d.i.n.ky-Dunk if we'd ever put a chameleon on that shack-wall he'd have died of brain-f.a.g trying to make good on the color-schemes. So d.i.n.ky-Dunk made Olie take a day off and ply the brush. But the smell of paint made me think of Channel pa.s.sages, so off I went with d.i.n.ky-Dunk, _a la_ team and buckboard, to the Dixon Ranch to see about some horses, nearly seventy miles there and back. It was a glorious autumn day, and a glorious ride, with "Bronk" and "Tumble-Weed" loping along the double-trail and the air like crystal.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk and I sang most of the way. The gophers must have thought we were mad. My lord and master is incontinently proud of his voice, especially the chest-tones, but he rather tails behind me on the tune, plainly not always being sure of himself. We had dinner with the Dixons, and about three million flies. They gave me the blues, that family, and especially Mrs. Dixon. She seemed to make prairie-life so ugly and empty and hardening. Poor, dried-up, sad-eyed soul, she looked like a woman of sixty, and yet her husband said she was just thirty-seven. Their water is strong with alkali, and this and the prairie wind (combined with a something deep down in her own make-up) have made her like a vulture, lean and scrawny and dry. I stared at that hard line of jaw and cheekbone and wondered how long ago the soft curves were there, and if those overworked hands had ever been pretty, and if that flat back had ever been rounded and dimpled. Her hair was untidy. Her ap.r.o.n was unspeakably dirty, and she used it as both a handkerchief and a hand-towel. Her voice was as hard as nails, and her cooking was wretched. Not a door or window was screened, and, as I said before, we were nearly smothered with flies.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk did not dare to look at me, all dinner time. And on the way home Mrs. Dixon's eyes kept haunting me, they seemed so tired and vacant and accusing, as though they were secretly holding G.o.d Himself to account for cheating her out of her woman's heritage of joy. I asked d.i.n.ky-Dunk if we'd ever get like that. He said, "Not on your life!" and quoted the Latin phrase about mind controlling matter. The Dixons, he went on to explain, were of the "slum" type, only they didn't happen to live in a city. But tired and sleepy as I was that night, I got up to cold-cream my face and arms. And I'm going to write for almond-meal and glycerin from the mail-order house to-morrow. _And_ a bra.s.siere--for I saw what looked like the suspicion of a smile on d.i.n.ky-Dunk's unshaven lips as he watched me struggling into my corsets this morning. It took some writhing, and even then I could hardly make it. I threw my wet sponge after him when he turned back in the doorway with the mildly impersonal question: "Who's your fat friend?" Then he scooted for the corral, and I went back and studied my chin in the dresser-mirror, to make sure it wasn't getting terraced into a dew-lap like Uncle Carlton's.

But I can't help thinking of the Dixons, and feeling foolishly and helplessly sorry for them. It was dusk when we got back from that long drive to their ranch, and the stars were coming out. I could see our shack from miles off, a little lonely dot of black against the sky-line.

I made d.i.n.ky-Dunk stop the team, and we sat and looked at it. It seemed so tiny there, so lonely, so strange, in the middle of such miles and miles of emptiness, with a little rift of smoke going up from its desolate little pipe-end. Then I said, out loud, "Home! My home!" And out of a clear sky, for no earthly reason, I began to cry like a baby.

Women are such fools, sometimes! I told d.i.n.ky-Dunk we must get books, good books, and spend the long winter evenings reading together, to keep from going to seed.

He said, "All right, Gee-Gee," and patted my knee. Then we loped on along the trail toward the lonely little black dot ahead of us. But I hung on to d.i.n.ky-Dunk's arm, all the rest of the way, until we pulled up beside the shack, and poor old Olie, with a frying-pan in his hand, stood silhouetted against the light of the open door.

_Monday the Sixth_

The last few days I've been nothing but a two-footed retriever, scurrying off and carrying things back home with me. There have been rains, but the weather is still glorious. And I've discovered such heaps and heaps of mushrooms over at the old t.i.tchborne Ranch. They're thick all around the corral and in the pasture there. I am now what your English lord and master would call "a perfect seat" on Paddy, and every morning I ride over after my basketful of _Agaricus Campestris_--that ought to be in the plural, but I've forgotten how! We have them creamed on toast; we have them fried in b.u.t.ter; and we have them in soup--and such beauties! I'm going to try and can some for winter and spring use.

But the finest part of the mushroom is the finding it. To ride into a little white city that has come up overnight and looks like an encampment of fairy soldiers, to see the milky white domes against the vivid green of the prairie-gra.s.s, to catch sight of another clump of them, suddenly, like stars against an emerald sky, a hundred yards away, to inhale the clean morning air, and feel your blood tingle, and hear the prairie-chickens whir and the wild-duck scolding along the coulee-edges--I tell you, Matilda Anne, it's worth losing a little of your beauty sleep to go through it! I'm awake even before d.i.n.ky-Dunk, and I brought him out of his dreams this morning by poking his teeth with my little finger and saying:

"Twelve white horses On a red hill--"

and I asked him if he knew what it was, and he gave the right answer, and said he hadn't heard that conundrum since he was a boy.

All afternoon I've been helping d.i.n.ky-Dunk put up a barb-wire fence.

Barb-wire is nearly as hard as a woman to handle. d.i.n.ky-Dunk is fencing in some of the range, for a sort of cattle-run for our two milk-cows. He says it's only a small field, but there seemed to be miles and miles of that fencing. We had no stretcher, so d.i.n.ky-Dunk made s.h.i.+ft with me and a claw-hammer. He'd catch the wire, lever his hammer about a post, and I'd drive in the staple, with a hammer of my own. I got so I could hit the staple almost every whack, though one staple went off like shrapnel and hit Diddum's ear. So I'm some use, you see, even if I am a chekako!

But a wire slipped, and tore through my skirt and stocking, scratched my leg and made the blood run. It was only the tiniest cut, really, but I made the most of it, d.i.n.ky-Dunk was so adorably nice about doctoring me up. We came home tired and happy, singing together, and Olie, as usual, must have thought we'd both gone mad.

This husband of mine is so elementary. He secretly imagines that he's one of the most complex of men. But in a good many things he's as simple as a child. And I love him for it, although I believe I _do_ like to bedevil him a little. He is dignified, and hates flippancy. So when I greet him with "Morning, old boy!" I can see that nameless little shadow sweep over his face. Then I say, "Oh, I beg its little pardon!"

He generally grins, in the end, and I think I'm slowly shaking that monitorial air out of him, though once or twice I've had to remind him about La Rochefoucauld saying gravity was a stratagem invented to conceal the poverty of the mind! But d.i.n.ky-Dunk still objects to me putting my finger on his Adam's apple when he's talking. He wears a flannel s.h.i.+rt, when working outside, and his neck is bare. Yesterday I buried my face down in the corner next to his shoulder-blade and made him wriggle. As he shaves only on Sunday mornings now, that is about the only soft spot, for his face is p.r.i.c.kly, and makes my chin sore, the bearded brute! Then I bit him; not hard--but Satan said bite, and I just had to do it. He turned quite pale, swung me round so that I lay limp in his arms, and closed his mouth over mine. I got away, and he chased me.

We upset things. Then I got outside the shack, ran around the horse-corral, and then around the hay-stacks, with d.i.n.ky-Dunk right after me, giving me goose-flesh at every turn. I felt like a cave-woman. He grabbed me like a stone-age man and caught me up and carried me over his shoulder to a pile of prairie sweet-gra.s.s that had been left there for Olie's mattress. My hair was down. I was screaming, half sobbing and half laughing. He dropped me in the hay, like a bag of wheat. I started to fight him again. But I couldn't beat him off. Then all my strength seemed to go. He was laughing himself, but it frightened me a little to see his pupils so big that his eyes looked black. I felt like a lamb in a lion's jaw, d.i.n.ky-Dunk is so much stronger than I am. I lay there quite still, with my eyes closed. I went flop. I knew I was conquered.

Then I came back to life. I suddenly realized that it was mid-day, in the open air between the bald prairie-floor and G.o.d's own blue sky, where Olie could stumble on us at any moment--and possibly die with his boots on! d.i.n.ky-Dunk was kissing my left eyelid. It was a cup his lips just seemed to fit into. I tried to move. But he held me there. He held me so firmly that it hurt. Yet I couldn't help hugging him. Poor, big, foolish, baby-hearted d.i.n.ky-Dunk! And poor, weak, crazy, storm-tossed me! But, oh, G.o.d, it's glorious, in some mysterious way, to stir the blood of a strong big man! It's heaven--and I don't quite know why. But I love to see d.i.n.ky-Dunk's eyes grow black. Yet it makes me a little afraid of him. I can hear his heart pound, sometimes, quite distinctly.

And sometimes there seems something so pathetic about it all--we are such puny little mites of emotion played on by nature for her own immitigable ends! But every woman wants to be loved. d.i.n.ky-Dunk asked me why I shut my eyes when he kisses me. I wonder why? Sometimes, too, he says my kisses are wicked, and that he likes 'em wicked. He's a funny mixture. He's got the soul of a Scotch Calvinist tangled up in him somewhere, and after the storm he's very apt to grow pious and a bit preachy. But he has feelings, only he's ashamed of them. I think I'm taking a little of the ice-crust off his emotions. He's a stiff clay that needs to be well stirred up and turned over before it can mellow.

And I must be a sandy loam that wastes all its strength in one short harvest. That sounds as though I were getting to be a real farmer's wife with a vast knowledge of soils, doesn't it? At any rate my husband, out of his vast knowledge of me, says I have the swamp-cedar trick of flaring up into sudden and explosive attractiveness. Then, he says, I shower sparks. As I've already told him, I'm a wild woman, and will be hard to tame, for as Victor Hugo somewhere says, we women are only perfected devils!