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"You may have the good luck to be confronting me when I seem to be floored. I've been hailed out, it's true. But that has happened to other people, and they seem to have survived. And there are worse calamities, I find, than the loss of a crop." "Are you referring to anything that I have done?" asked Dinky-Dunk, with a slightly belligerent look in his eye.
For I could not banish from my bones an impression of tremendous reservations, of guarded waiting and watching from every point of that sedate and quiet-mannered little triangle. Yet for only one moment had I seen it come to the front. That was during the moment when Dinky-Dunk and Peter first shook hands. On both faces, for that moment, I caught the look with which two knights measure each other.
And our To-morrows are only our To-days over again.... So Dinky-Dunk, who keeps saying in unexpected and intriguing ways that he can't live without me, is trying to make love to me as he did in the old days before he got salt-and-peppery above the ears. And I'm blockhead enough to believe him. I'm like an old shoe, I suppose, comfortable but not showy.
And the Lord knows, my dear, that a woman without a sense of humor is worse than a dipper without a handle." Dinky-Dunk sat studying me. "I guess it was my own sense of proportion that got out of kilter, Gee-Gee," he finally said. "But there's one thing I want you to remember. If I got deeper into this game than I should have, it wasn't for what money meant to me.
Dinky-Dunk, who seems intent on keeping my mind occupied, brought me home a bundle of old magazines last night. They were so frayed and thumbed-over that some of the pages reminded me of well-worn bank-notes. I've been reading some of the stories, and they all seem silly. Everybody appears to be in love with somebody else's wife.
We each knew that the other was playing a part, and the time came when to keep it up was altogether too much of a mockery. "Dinky-Dunk," I said after a silence that was too abysmal to be ignored, "let's look this thing squarely in the face." "I can't!" "Why not?" "I haven't the courage." "Then we've got to get it," I insisted. "I'm ready to face the music, if you are.
So we got guns and cartridges and blankets and slickers and cooking things, and stowed them away in the wagon-box. Then we made a list of the provisions we'd need, and while Dinky-Dunk bagged up some oats for the team I was busy packing the grub-box.
But it masked a decision which we both must have recognized as being momentous. And I knew, without saying anything further, that he would go. Sunday the Third Dinky-Dunk left Friday night and got back early this morning before I was up. This naturally surprised me. But what surprised me more was the way he looked. He was white and shaken and drawn about the eyes.
It was two hours later before they came back. Their voices now seemed more facetious and there was more laughing and joking, Dinky-Dunk and the uncivil civil engineer being the only quiet ones. And then the car engine purred and hummed and they climbed heavily in and lighted cigars and waved hands and were off in a cloud of dust.
I learned that by experience. My appetite is disgraceful, and I'm still gaining. Chinkie could never again say I reminded him of one of the lean kine in Pharaoh's dream. I have been asking Dinky-Dunk if it isn't downright cruelty to leave horses and cattle out on the range in weather like this. My husband says not, so long as they have a wind-break in time of storms.
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