United States or Madagascar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He ignored the children, and apparently avoided me, and went straight out to the pergola, where he and Dinky-Dunk fell to pacing slowly up and down, with the shadows dappling their white-clad shoulders like leopards as they walked up and down, up and down, as serious and solemn as two ministers of state in a national crisis.
But if what's left of my crop, of course, is any use to Duncan, he's welcome to it.... I looked for that letter which I wrote to Dinky-Dunk several weeks ago, looked for it for an hour and more this morning, but haven't succeeded in finding it. I was sure that I'd put it between the pages of the old ranch journal. But it's not there.
It didn't look so bad then, and when I tried on Dinky-Dunk's coat in front of the glass I saw that I wouldn't make such a bad-looking boy. But I waited until noon with my heart in my mouth, to see what Dinky-Dunk would say. What he really did say I can't write here, for there was a wicked swear-word mixed up in his ejaculation of startled wonder.
Barb-wire is nearly as hard as a woman to handle. Dinky-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 Dinky-Dunk made shift with me and a claw-hammer.
I've just told Dinky-Dunk of my decision to take the kiddies to California for the winter months. He rather surprised me by agreeing with everything I suggested. He feels, I think, as I do, that there's danger in going aimlessly on and on as we have been doing. And it's really a commonplace for the prairie rancher when he can afford it to slip down to California for the winter.
I tried to explain the feeling to Dinky-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.
I can't even remember the date. But I know that midsummer is here, that the men folks are so busy I have to shift for myself, and that the talk is still of wheat, and how it's heading, and how the dry weather of the last few weeks will affect the length of the straw. Dinky-Dunk is making desperate efforts to get men to cut wild-hay.
So now I have music! And Dinky-Dunk does enjoy my playing, these long winter evenings. Some nights we let Olie come in and listen to the concert. He sits rapt, especially when I play ragtime, which seems the one thing that touches his holy of holies. Poor Olie! I surely have a good friend in that silent, faithful, uncouth Swede! Dinky-Dunk himself is so thin that it worries me.
He said he could have stuffed and mounted my hawk, if I hadn't clubbed the poor thing almost to pieces. There's a devil in me somewhere, I told Dinky-Dunk. But he only laughed. Monday the Nineteenth To-night Dinky-Dunk and I spent a solid hour trying to decide on a name for the shack.
As I was being told this I tried to remember where Dinky-Dunk had stowed away his revolver-holster and his hammerless ejector and his Colt repeater. But I made that handsome young man in the scarlet coat come right into the shack and begin his search by looking under the bed, and then going down the cellar. I stood holding the trap-door and warned him not to break my pickle-jars.
Word Of The Day