Part 3 (2/2)

The c.o.o.n-skins make me look like a Laplander, but they'll be mighty comfy when the cold weather comes, for d.i.n.ky-Dunk says it drops to forty and fifty below, sometimes.

I also got a lot of small stuff I'd written for from the mail-order house, little feminine things a woman simply _has_ to have. But the big thing was the duck-gun.

I no longer get heart failure when I hear the whir of a prairie-chicken, but drop my bird before it's out of range. Poor, plump, wounded, warm-bodied little feathery things! Some of them keep on flying after they've been shot clean through the body, going straight on for a couple of hundred feet, or even more, and then dropping like a stone.

How hard-hearted we soon get! It used to worry me. Now I gather 'em up as though they were so many chips and toss them into the wagon-box; or into my school-bag, if it's a private expedition of only Paddy and me.

And that's the way life treats us, too.

I've been practising on the gophers with my new gun, and with d.i.n.ky-Dunk's .22 rifle. A gopher is only a little bigger than a chipmunk, and usually pokes nothing more than his head out of his hole, so when I got thirteen out of fifteen shots I began to feel that I was a sharp-shooter. But don't regard this as wanton cruelty, for the gopher is worse than a rat, and in this country the government agents supply homesteaders with an annual allowance of free strychnine to poison them off.

_Sunday the Eleventh_

I've made my first b.u.t.ter, be it recorded--but in doing so I managed to splash the ceiling and the walls and my own woolly head, for I didn't have sense enough to tie a wet cloth about the handle of the churn-dasher until the damage had been done. I was too intent on getting my b.u.t.ter to pay attention to details, though it took a disheartening long time and my arms were tired out before I had finished. And when I saw myself spattered from head to foot it reminded me of what you once said about me and my reading, that I had the habit of coming out of a book like a spaniel out of water, scattering ideas as I came. But there are not many new books in my life these days. It is mostly hard work, although I reminded d.i.n.ky-Dunk last night that while Omar intimated that love and bread and wine were enough for any wilderness, we mustn't forget that he also included a book of verses underneath the bough! My lord says that by next year we can line our walls with books. But I'm like Moses on Mount Nebo--I can see my promised land, but it seems a terribly long way off. But this, as d.i.n.ky-Dunk would say, is not the spirit that built Rome, and has carried me away from my b.u.t.ter, the making of which cold-creamed my face until I looked as though I had snow on my headlight. Yet there is real joy in finding those lovely yellow granules in the bottom of your churn and then working it over and over with a saucer in a cooking-bowl until it is one golden ma.s.s. Several times before I'd shaken up sour cream in a sealer, but this was my first real b.u.t.ter-making. I have just discovered, however, that I didn't ”wash” it enough, so that all the b.u.t.termilk wasn't worked out of my first dairy-product. d.i.n.ky-Dunk, like the scholar and gentleman that he is, swore that it was worth its weight in Klondike gold. And next time I'll do better.

_Monday the Twelfth_

Golden weather again, with a clear sky and soft and balmy air! Just before our mid-day meal Olie arrived with mail for us. We've had letters from home! Instead of cheering me up they made me blue, for they seemed to bring word from another world, a world so far, far away!

I decided to have a half-day in the open, so I strapped on my duck-gun and off I went on Paddy, as soon as dinner was over and the men had gone. We went like the wind, until both Paddy and I were tired of it.

Then I found a ”soft-water” pond hidden behind a fringe of scrub-willow and poplar. The mid-day sun had warmed it to a tempting temperature. So I hobbled Paddy, peeled off and had a most glorious bath. I had just soaped down with bank-mud (which is an astonis.h.i.+ngly good solvent) and had taken a header and was swimming about on my back, blinking up at the blue sky, as happy as a mud-turtle in a mill-pond, when I heard Paddy nicker. That disturbed me a little, but I felt sure there could be n.o.body within miles of me. However, I swam back to where my clothes were, sunned myself dry, and was just standing up to shake out the ends of this short-cropped hair of mine when I saw a man's head Across the pond, staring through the bushes at me. I don't know how or why it is, but I suddenly saw red. I don't remember picking up the duck-gun, and I don't remember aiming it.

But I banged away, with both barrels, straight at that leering head--or at least it ought to have been a leering head, whatever that may mean!

The howl that went up out of the wilderness, the next moment, could have been heard for a mile!

It was d.i.n.ky-Dunk, and he said I might have put his eyes out with bird-shot, if he hadn't made the quickest drop of his life. And he also said that he'd seen me, a distinct splash of white against the green of the prairie, three good miles away, and wasn't I ashamed of myself, and what would I have done if he'd been Olie or old man Dixon? But he kissed my shoulder where the gun-stock had bruised it, and helped me dress.

Then we rode off together, four or five miles north, where d.i.n.ky-Dunk was sure we could get a bag of duck. Which we did, thirteen altogether, and started for home as the sun got low and the evening air grew chilly.

It was a heavenly ride. In the west a little army of thin blue clouds was edged with blazing gold, and up between them spread great fan-like shafts of amber light. Then came a riot of orange yellow and ashes of roses and the palest of gold with little islands of azure in it. Then while the dying radiance seemed to hold everything in a luminous wash of air, the stars came out, one by one, and a soft cool wind swept across the prairie, and the light darkened--and I was glad to have d.i.n.ky-Dunk there at my side, or I should have had a little cry, for the twilight prairie always makes me lonesome in a way that could never be put into words.

I tried to explain the feeling to d.i.n.ky-Dunk. He said he understood.

”I'm a Sour-Dough, Gee-Gee, but it still gets me that way,” he solemnly confessed. He said that when he listened to beautiful music he felt the same. And that got me thinking of grand opera, and of that _Romeo and Juliet_ night at La Scala, in Milan, when I first met Theobald Gustav.

Then I stopped to tell d.i.n.ky-Dunk that I'd been hopelessly in love with a tenor at thirteen and had written in my journal: ”I shall die and turn to dust still adoring him.” Then I told him about my first opera, _Rigoletto_, and hummed ”_La Donna E Mobile_,” which of course he remembered himself. It took me back to Florence, and to a box at the Pagliano, and me all in dimity and cork-screw curls, weeping deliciously at a lady in white, whose troubles I could not quite understand. Then I got thinking of New York and the Metropolitan, and poor old Morris's lines:

And still with listening soul I hear Strains hushed for many a noisy year: The pa.s.sionate chords which wake the tear, The low-voiced love-tales dear....

Scarce changed, the same musicians play The selfsame themes to-day; The silvery swift sonatas ring, The soaring voices sing!

And I could picture the old Metropolitan on a Caruso night. I could see the Golden Horse-Shoe and the geranium-red tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and the satiny white backs of the women, and smell that luxurious heavy smell of warm air and hothouse flowers and Paris perfumery and happy human bodies and hear the whisper of silk along the crimson stairways. I could see the lights go down, in a sort of sigh, before the overture began, and the scared-looking blotches of white on the musicians' scores and the other blotches made by their dress-s.h.i.+rt fronts, and the violins going up and down, up and down, as though they were one piece of machinery, and then the heavy curtain stealing up, and the thrill as that new heaven opened up to me, a gawky girl in her first low-cut dinner gown!

I told d.i.n.ky-Dunk I'd sat in every corner of that old house, up in the sky-parlor with the Italian barbers, in press-seats in the second gallery with dear old f.a.n.n.y-Rain-in-the-Face, and in the Westbury's box with the First Lady of the Land and a Spanish Princess with extremely dirty nails. It seemed so far away, another life and another world! And for three hours of ”Manon” I'd be willing to hang like a chimpanzee from the Metropolitan's center chandelier. I suddenly realized how much I missed it. I could have sung to the City as poor Charpentier's ”Louise”

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