THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT f ARTHUR STRINGER PRAIRIE STORIES Containing THE PRAIRIE WIFE THE PRAIRIE MOTHER THE PRAIRIE CHILD A. L. BURT COMPANY, Publishers NEW YORK CHICAGO 'THE PRAIRIE WIFE Copyright, 1915 THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY Copyright, 1915 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY THE PRAIRIE MOTHER Copyright, 1920 THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY Copyright, 1920 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY THE PRAIRIE CHILD Copyright, 1922 THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY Copyright, 1922 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA THE PRAIRIE WIFE TO VAN WHO KNOWS AND LOVES THE WEST AS WE LOVE HIM ! THE PRAIRIE WIFE Thursday the Nineteenth SPLASH! . . . That's me, Matilda Anne ! That's me falling plump into the pool of matrimony before I've had time to fall in love! And oh, Matilda Anne, Matilda Anne, I've got to talk to you ! You may be six thousand miles away, but still you've got to be my safety-valve. I'd blow up and explode if I didn't express myself to some one. For it's so lonesome out here I could go and commune with the gophers. This isn't a twenty-part letter, my dear, and it isn't a diary. It's the coral ring I'm cutting my teeth of desolation on. For, every so long, I've simply got to sit down and talk to some one, or I'd go mad, clean, stark, staring mad, and bite the tops off the sweet-grass ! It may even hap pen this will never be sent to you. But I like to think of you reading it, some day, page by page, 1 THE PRAIRIE WIFE when I'm fat and forty, or, what's more likely, when Duncan has me chained to a corral-post or finally shut up in a padded cell. For you were the one who was closest to me in the old days, Matilda Anne, and when I was in trouble you were always the staff on which I leaned, the calm-eyed Tillie- on-the-spot who never seemed to fail me! And I think you will understand. But there's so much to talk about I scarcely know where to begin. The funny part of it all is, I've gone and married the Other Man. And you won't understand that a bit, unless I start at the begin ning. But when I look back, there doesn't seem to be any beginning, for it's only in books that things really begin and end in a single lifetime. Howsomever, as Chinkie used to say, when I left you and Scheming Jack in that funny little stone house of yours in Corfu, and got to Palermo, 1 found Lady Agatha and Chinkie there at the Hotel des Palmes and the yacht being coaled from a tramp steamer's bunkers in the harbor. So I went on with them to Monte Carlo. We had a terrible trip THE PRAIRIE WIFE all the way up to the Riviera, and I was terribly sea-sick, and those lady novelists who love to get their heroines off on a private yacht never dream that in anything but duckpond weather the or dinary yacht at sea is about the meanest habita tion between Heaven and earth. But it was at Monte Carlo I got the cable from Uncle Carlton telling me the Chilean revolution had wiped out our nitrate mine concessions and that your poor Tabby's last little nest-egg had been smashed. ID other words, I woke up and found myself a beg gar, and for a few hours I even thought I'd have to travel home on that Monte Carlo Viaticum fund which so discreetly ships away the stranded adven turer before he musses up the Mediterranean scen ery by shooting himself. Then I remembered my letter of credit, and firmly but sorrowfully paid off poor Hortense, who through her tears pro claimed that she'd go with me anywhere, and with out any thought of wages (imagine being hooked up by a maid to whom you were under such democ ratizing obligations !) But I was firm, for I knew 3 THE PRAIRIE WIFE the situation might just as well be faced first as last. So I counted up my letter of credit and found I had exactly six hundred and seventy-one dollars, American money, between me and beggary. Then I sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was code) and later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates all the while to the Hotel de L'Athenee, the long boxes duly piled up in tiers, like coffins at the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness, called on me, in state. She came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow landau of hers, where she looked for all the world like an oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of the danger of international mar riages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo me away from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav which made me quite calmly and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of under-secretary ships, which really belonged to Op- penheim romances, and put him in the shoe busi ness in some nice New England town! 4 THE PRAIRIE WIFE From Monte Carlo I scooted right up to Paris. Two days later, as I intended to write you but didn't, I caught the boat-train for Cherbourg. And there at the rail as I stepped on the Baltic was the Other Man, to wit, Duncan Argyll McKail, in a most awful-looking yellow plaid English mackin tosh. His face went a little blank as he clapped eyes on me, for he'd dropped up to Banff last October when Chinkie and Lady Agatha and I were there for a week. He'd been very nice, that week at Banff, and I liked him a lot. But when Chinkie saw him "going it a bit too strong," as he put it, and quietly tipped Duncan Argyll off as to Theobald Gustav, the aforesaid D. A. bolted back to his ranch without as much as saying good-by to me. For Duncan Argyll McKail isn't an Irish man, as you might in time gather from that name of his. He's a Scotch-Canadian, and he's nothing but a broken-down civil engineer who's taken up farming in the Northwest. But I could see right away that he was a gentleman (I hate that word, but where'll you get another one to take its place?) 5 THE PRAIRIE WIFE and had known nice people, even before I found out he'd taught the Duchess of S. to shoot big-horn. He'd run over to England to finance a cooperative wheat-growing scheme, but had failed, because everything is so unsettled in England just now. But you're a woman, and before I go any fur ther you'll want to know what Duncan looks like. Well, he's not a bit like his name. The West has shaken a good deal of the Covenanter out of him. He's tall and gaunt and wide-shouldered, and has brown eyes with hazel specks in them, and a mouth exactly like Holbein's "Astronomer's," and a skin that is almost as disgracefully brown as an In dian's. On the whole, if a Lina Cavalier! had hap pened to marry a Lord Kitchener, and had hap pened to have a thirty-year-old son, I feel quite sure he'd have been the dead spit, as the Irish say, of my own Duncan Argyll. And Duncan Ar gyll, alias Dinky-Dunk, is rather reserved and quiet and, I'm afraid, rather masterful, but not as Theobald Gustav might have been, for with all his force the modern German, it seems to me, is 6 THE PRAIRIE WIFE like the bagpipes in being somewhat lacking in suavity. And all the way over Dinky-Dunk was so nice that he almost took my breath away. He was also rather audacious, gritting his teeth in the face of the German peril, and I got to like him so much I secretly decided we'd always be good friends, old- fashioned, above-board, Platonic good friends. But the trouble with Platonic love is that it's always turning out too nice to be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice. So I had to look straight at the bosom of that awful yellow-plaid English mackintosh and tell Dinky-Dunk the truth. And Dinky-Dunk lis tened, with his astronomer mouth set rather grim, and otherwise not in the least put out. His sense of confidence worried me. It was like the quietness of the man who is holding back his trump. And it wasn't until the impossible little wife of an im possible big lumberman from Saginaw, Michigan, showed me the Paris Herald with the cable in it about that spidery Russian stage-dancer, -, getting so nearly killed in Theobald*- THE PRAIRIE WIFE car down at Long Beach, that I realized there a trump card and that Dinky-Dunk had been toe manly to play it. I had a lot of thinking to do, the next three days. When Theobald came on from Washington and met the steamer my conscience troubled me and I should still have been kindness itself to him, if it hadn't been for his proprietary manner (which, by the way, had never annoyed me before), coupled with what I already knew. We had luncheon in the Delia Robbia room at the Vanderbilt and I was digging the marrons out of a Nesselrode when, presto, it suddenly came over me that the baroness was right and that I could never marry a foreigner. It came like a thunderclap. But somewhere in that senate of instinct which debates over such things down deep in the secret chambers of our souls, I suppose, the whole problem had been talked over and fought out and put to the vote. And in the face of the fact that Theobald Gustav had always seemed more nearly akin to one of Ouida's demi gods than any man I had ever known, the vote had 8 THE PRAIRIE WIFE gone against him. My hero was no longer a herbout the table, "that you feel exactly like an oyster-man who's just chipped his Blue-Point and got his knife-edge in under the shell! And the next wrench is going to tell you exactly what sort of an oyster you've got !" Dinky-Dunk grinned up at me as I buttered his toast, piping hot from the range. "Well, Lady 36 THE PRAIRIE WIFE Bird, you're not the kind that'll need paprika, any way !" he announced as he fell to. And he ate like a boa-constrictor and patted his pa jama- front and stentoriously announced that he'd picked a queen only he pronounced it kaveen, after the manner of our poor old Swedish Olie ! As that was Sunday we spent the morning "pi- rooting" about the place. Dinky-Dunk took me out and showed me the stables and the hay-stacks and the granaries which he'd just waterproofed so there'd be no more spoilt grain on that farm antf the "cool-hole" he used to use before the cellar was built, and the ruins of the sod-hut where the first homesteader that owned that land had lived. Then he showed me the new bunk-house for the men, which Olie is finishing in his spare time. It looks much better than our own shack, being of planed lumber. But Dinky-Dunk is loyal to the shack, and says it's really better built, and the warmest shack in the West as I'll find before winter is over. Then we stopped at the pump, and Dinky-Dunk 37 THE PRAIRIE WIFE made a confession. When he first bought that ranch there was no water at the shack, except what he could catch from the roof. Water had to be hauled for miles, and it was muddy and salty, at that. They used to call it "Gopher soup." This lack of water always worried him, he said, for women always want water, and oodles of it. It was the year before, after he had left me at Banff, that he was determined to get water. It was hard work, putting down that well, and up to almost the last moment it promised to be a dry hole. But when they struck that water, Dinky-Dunk says, he de cided in his soul that he was going to have me ? if I was to be had. It was water fit for a queen. And he wanted his queen. But of course even queens have to be well laved and well laundered. He said he didn't sleep all night, after they found the water was there. He was too happy ; he just went mean dering about the prairie, singing to himself. "So you were pretty sure of me, Kitten-Cats, even then ?" I demanded. He looked at me with his solemn Scotch-Canadian 38 THE PRAIRIE WIFE eyes. "I'm not sure of you, even now," was his answer. But I made him take it back. It's rather odd how Dinky-Dunk got this ranch, which used to be called the Cochrane Ranch, for even behind this peaceful little home of ours there is a touch of tragedy. Hugh Cochrane was one of Dinky-Dunk's surveyors when he first took up rail' road work in British Columbia. Hugh had a younger brother Andrew, who was rather wild and had been brought out here and planted on the prai rie to keep him out of mischief. One winter night he rode nearly thirty miles to a dance (they do that apparently out here, and think nothing of it) and instead of riding home at five o'clock in the morn ing, with the others, he visited a whisky-run ner who was operating a "blind pig." There he acquired much more whisky than was good for him and got lost on the trail. That meant he was badly frozen and probably out of his mind before he got back to the shack. He wasn't able to keep up a fire, of course, or do anything for himself and I suppose the poor boy simply froze to death 39 THE PRAIRIE WIFE He was alone there, and it was weeks and weeks be fore his body was found. But the most gruesome part of it all is that his horses had been stabled, tied up in their stalls without feed. They were all found dead, poor brutes. They'd even eaten the wooden boards the mangers were built of. Hugh Cochrane couldn't get over it, and was going to sell the ranch for fourteen hundred dollars when Dinky- Dunk heard of it and stepped in and bought the whole half-section. Then he bought the McKinnon place, a half-section to the north of this, after Mc Kinnon had lost all his buildings because he was too shiftless to make a fire-guard. And when the rail way work was finished Dinky-Dunk took up wheat- growing. He is a great believer in wheat. He says wheat spells wealth, in this country. Some people call him a "land-miner," he says, but when he's given the chance to do the thing as he wants to, he'll show them who's right. Wednesday the Twenty-fifth DINKY-DUNK and I have been making plans. He's promised to build an annex to the shack, a wing on the north side, so I can have a store-room and a clothes-closet at one end and a guest-chamber at the other. And I'm to have a sewing-machine and a bread-mixer, and the smelly steer-hide divan is going to be banished to the bunk-house. And Dinky-Dunk says I must have a pinto, a riding-horse, as soon as he can lay hands on* the right animal. Later on he says I must have help, but out here in the West women are hard to get, and harder to keep. They are snatched up by lonely bachelors like Dinky-Dunk. They can't even keep the school-teachers (mostly girls from Ontario) from marrying off. But I don't want a woman about, not for a few months yet. I want Dinky-Dunk all to myself. And the freedom of isolation like this is such a luxury ! To be just one's self, in civilization, is a luxury, is the 41 THE PRAIRIE WIFE greatest luxury in the world, and also the most expensive, I've found to my sorrow. Out here, there's no object in being anything but one's self. Life is so simple and honest, so back to first principles ! There's joy in the thought of get* ting rid of all the sublimated junk of city life. I'm just a woman ; and Dinky-Dunk is just a man. We've got a roof and a bed and a fire. That's all. And what is there, really, after that? We have to eat, of course, but we really live well. There's all the game we want, especially wild duck and prairie chicken, to say nothing of jack-rabbit. Dinky-Dunk sallies out and pots them a* we need them. We get our veal and beef by the quarter, but it will not keep well until the weather gets cooler, so I put what we don't need in brine and use it for boiling-meat. We have no fresh fruit, but even evaporated peaches can be stewed so that they're appetizing. And as I had the good sense to bring out with me no less than three cook-books, from Brentano's, I am able to attempt more and more llaborate dishes. 4? THE PRAIRIE WIFE Olie has a wire-fenced square where he grew beets and carrots and onions and turnips, and the biggest potatoes I ever saw. These will be pitted before the heavy frosts come. We get our butter and lard by the pail, and our flour by the sack, but getting things in quantities sometimes has its drawbacks. When I examined the oatmeal box I found it had weavels in it, and promptly threw all that meal away. Dinky-Dunk, coming in from the corral, viewed the pile with round-eyed amazement. "It's got worms in it !" I cried out to him. He took up a handful of it, and stared at it with tragic sor row. "Why, I ate weavels all last winter," he re provingly remarked. Dinky-Dunk, with his Scotch strain, loves his porridge. So we'll have to get a hundred-weight, guaranteed strictly un inhabited, when we team into Buckhorn. Men are funny ! A woman never quite knows a man until she has lived with him and day by day unearthed his little idiosyncrasies. She may seem close to him, in those earlier days of romance, but she never really knows him, any more than a spar- 43 THE PRAIRIE WIFE row on a telegraph wire knows the Morse Code thrilling along under its toes ! Men have so many little kinks and turns, even the best of them. I tacked oil-cloth on a shoe-box and draped chintz around it, and fixed a place for Dinky-Dunk to wash, in the bedroom, when he comes in at noon, At night I knew it would be impossible, for he's built a little wash-house with old binder-carrier can vas nailed to four posts, and out there Olie and he strip every evening and splash each other with horse-pails full of well-water. Dinky-Dunk is clean, whatever he may be, but I thought it would look more civilized if he'd perform his limited noon-day ablutions in the bedroom. He did it for one day, in pensive silence, and then sneaked the wash-things back to the rickety old bench outside the door. He said it saved time. Among other vital things, I've found that Dinky-Dunk hates burnt toast. Yesterday morn ing, Matilda Anne, I got thinking about Corfu an<{ Ragusa and you, and it did burn a little around the edges, I suppose. So I kissed his ear and told hint 44 THE PRAIRIE WIFE carbon would make his teeth white. But he got up and went out with a sort of "In-this-way-madness- lies" expression, and I felt wretched all day. So this morning I was more careful. I did that toast just to a turn. "Feast, O Kaikobad, on the blond est of toast !" I said as I salaamed and handed him the plate. He wrinkled up his forehead a little, at the sting in that speech, but he could not keep f roH grinning. Then, too, Dinky-Dunk always soaps the back of his hand, to wash his back, and reach high up. So do I. And on cold mornings he says * ( One, two, three, the bumble bee!" before he hops out of bed and I imagined I was the only grown up in all the wide world who still made use of that foolish rhyme. And the other day when he was hot and tired I found him drinking a dipperful of cold water fresh from the well. So I said : "Many a man has gone to his sarcophagus Thro' pouring cold water down a warm esophagus !" When I recited that rhyme to him he swung about as though he'd been shot. "Where did you ever 45 THE PRAIRIE WIFE hear that?" he asked. I told him that was what Lady Agatha always said to me when she caught me drinking ice-water. "I thought I was the only man in the world who knew that crazy old couplet," he confessed, and he chased me around the shack with the rest of the dipperful, to keep from chilling his tummy, he explained. Then Dinky-Dunk and I both like to give pet-names to things. He calls me "Lady Bird" and "Gee-Gee" and sometimes "Honey," and sometimes "Boca Chica" and "Tab by." And I call him Dinky-Dunk and The Dour Maun, and Kitten-Cats, though for some reason or other he hates that last name. I think he feels it's an affront to his dignity. And no man likes a trace of mockery in a woman. But Dinky-Dunk's names are born of affection, and I love him for them. Even the ranch horses have all been tagged with names. There's "Slip-Along" and "Water Light" and "Bronk" and "Patsy Crocker" and "Pick and Shovel" and "Tumble Weed," and others that I can't remember at the moment. And I find I'm 46 THE PRAIRIE WIFE picking up certain of Dinky-Dunk's little habits, and dropping into the trick of looking at .things