The Prairie Mother. Stringer Arthur
the only way that I can see is for me to get out and rustle for work.”
“What kind of work?” I demanded.
“The kind there’s a famine for, at this very moment,” was Dinky-Dunk’s reply.
“You don’t mean being somebody else’s hired man?” I said, aghast.
“A hired man can get four dollars a day and board,” retorted my husband. “And a man and team can get nine dollars a day. We can’t keep things going without ready money. And there’s only one way, out here, of getting it.”
Dinky-Dunk was able to laugh at the look of dismay that came into my face. I hadn’t stopped to picture myself as the wife of a hired “hand.” I hadn’t quite realized just what we’d descended to. I hadn’t imagined just how much one needed working capital, even out here on the edge of Nowhere.
“But never that way, Diddums!” I cried out in dismay, as I pictured my husband bunking with a sweaty-smelling plowing-gang of Swedes and Finns and hoboing about the prairie with a thrashing outfit of the Great Unwashed. He’d get cooties, or rheumatism, or a sunstroke, or a knife between his ribs some fine night—and then where’d I be? I couldn’t think of it. I couldn’t think of Duncan Argyll McKail, the descendant of Scottish kings and second-cousin to a title, hiring out to some old skinflint of a farmer who’d have him up at four in the morning and keep him on the go until eight at night.
“Then what other way?” asked Dinky-Dunk.
“You leave it to me,” I retorted. I made a bluff of saying it bravely enough, but I inwardly decided that instead of sixteen yards of fresh chintz I’d have to be satisfied with five yards. Poverty, after all, is not a picturesque thing. But I didn’t intend to be poor, I protested to my troubled soul, as I went at that Harris Ranch wickiup, tooth and nail, while Iroquois Annie kept an eye on Dinkie and the Twins.
These same Twins, I can more than ever see, are going to be somewhat of a brake on the wheels of industry. I have even been feeding on “slops,” of late, to the end that Poppsy and Pee-Wee may thrive. And already I see sex-differences asserting themselves. Pee-Wee is a bit of a stoic, while his sister shows a tendency to prove a bit of a squealer. But Poppsy is much the daintier feeder of the two. I’ll probably have to wean them both, however, before many more weeks slip by. As soon as we get settled in our new shack and I can be sure of a one-cow supply of milk I’ll begin a bottle-feed once in every twenty-four hours. Dinky-Dunk says I ought to take a tip from the Indian mother, who sometimes nurses her babe until he’s two and three years old. I asked Ikkie—as Dinkie calls Iroquois Annie—about this and Ikkie says the teepee squaw has no cow’s milk and has to keep on the move, so she feeds him breast-milk until he’s able to eat meat. Ikkie informs me that she has seen a papoose turn away from its mother’s breast to take a puff or two at a pipe. From which I assume that the noble Red Man learns to smoke quite early in life.
Ikkie has also been enlightening me on other baby-customs of her ancestors, explaining that it was once the habit for a mother to name her baby for the first thing seen after its birth. That, I told Dinky-Dunk, was probably why there were so many “Running Rabbits,” and “White Pups” and “Black Calfs” over on the Reservation. And that started me maun enlarging on the names of Indians he’d known, the most elongated of which, he acknowledged, was probably “The-Man-Who-Gets-Up-In-The-Middle-Of-The-Night-To-Feed-Oats-To-His-Pony,” while the most descriptive was “Slow-To-Come-Over-The-Hill,” though “Shot-At-Many-Times” was not without value, and “Long-Time-No-See-Him,” as the appellative for a disconsolate young squaw, carried a slight hint of the Indian’s genius for nomenclature. Another thing mentioned by Dunkie, which has stuck in my memory, was his running across a papoose’s grave in an Indian burying-ground at Pincer Creek, when he was surveying, where the Indian baby had been buried—above-ground, of course—in an old Saratoga trunk. That served to remind me of Francois’ story about “Old Sun,” who preceded “Running Rabbit”—note the name—as chief of the Alberta Blackfoot tribe, and always carried among his souvenirs of conquest a beautiful white scalp, with hair of the purest gold, very long and fine, but would never reveal how or where he got it. Many a night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’ve worried about that white scalp, and dramatized the circumstances of its gathering. Who was the girl with the long and lovely tresses of purest gold? And did she die bravely? And did she meet death honorably and decently, or after the manner of certain of the Jesuits’ Relations? …
I have had a talk with Whinnie, otherwise Whinstane Sandy, who has been ditching at the far end of our half-section. I explained the situation to him quite openly, acknowledging that we were on the rocks but not yet wrecked, and pointing out that there might be a few months before the ghost could walk again. And Whinstane Sandy has promised to stick. Poor old Whinnie not only promised to stick, but volunteered that if he could get over to Seattle or ’Frisco and raise some money on his Klondike claim our troubles would be a thing of the past. For Whinnie, who is an old-time miner and stampeder, is, I’m afraid, a wee bit gone in the upper story. He dreams he has a claim up North where there’s millions and millions in gold to be dug out. On his moose-hide watch-guard he wears a nugget almost half as big as a praline, a nugget he found himself in ninety-nine, and he’d part with his life, I believe, before he’d part with that bangle of shiny yellow metal. In his chest of black-oak, too, he keeps a package of greasy and dog-eared documents, and some day, he proclaims, those papers will bring him into millions of money.
I asked Dinky-Dunk about the nugget, and he says it’s genuine gold, without a doubt. He also says there’s one chance in a hundred of Whinnie actually having a claim up in the gold country, but doubts if the poor old fellow will ever get up to it again. It’s about on the same footing, apparently, as Uncle Carlton’s Chilean nitrate mines. For Whinnie had a foot frozen, his third winter on the Yukon, and this, of course, has left him lame. It means that he’s not a great deal of good when it comes to working the land, but he’s a clever carpenter, and a good cement-worker, and can chore about milking the cows and looking after the stock and repairing the farm implements. Many a night, after supper, he tells us about the Klondike in the old days, about the stampedes of ninety-eight and ninety-nine, and the dance-halls and hardships and gamblers and claim-jumpers. I have always had a weakness for him because of his blind and unshakable love for my little Dinkie, for whom he whittles out ships and windmills and decoy-ducks. But when I explained things to simple-minded old Whinnie, and he offered to hand over the last of his ready money—the money he was hoarding dollar by dollar to get back to his hidden El Dorado—it brought a lump up into my throat.
I couldn’t accept his offer, of course, but I loved him for making it. And whatever happens, I’m going to see that Whinnie has patches on his panties and no holes in his socks as long as he abides beneath our humble roof-tree. I intend to make the new bunk-house just as homy and comfortable as I can, so that Whinnie, under that new roof, won’t feel that he’s been thrust out in the cold. But I must have my own house for myself and my babes. Soapy Stennet, by the way, has been paid off by Dinky-Dunk and is moving on to the Knee-Hill country, where he says he can get good wages breaking and seeding. Soapy, of course, was a good man on the land, but I never took a shine to that hard-eyed Canuck, and we’ll get along, in some way or other, without him. For, in the language of the noble Horatius, “I’ll find a way, or make it!”
On the way back to Casa Grande to-night, after a hard day’s work, I asked Dinky-Dunk if we wouldn’t need some sort of garage over at the Harris Ranch, to house our automobile. He said he’d probably put doors on the end of one of the portable granaries and use that. When I questioned if a car of that size would ever fit into a granary he informed me that we couldn’t keep our big car.
“I can get seventeen hundred dollars for that boat,” he explained. “We’ll have to be satisfied with a tin Lizzie, and squander less on gasoline.”
So once again am I reminded that the unpardonable crime of poverty is not always picturesque. But I wrestled with my soul then and there, and put my pride in my pocket and told Dinky-Dunk I didn’t give