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As it is, there's a constant cloud of worry over my heart when I'm away from the shack and my bairns are left behind. This same Ikkie, apparently, tried to scald poor old Bobs the other day, but Bobs dodged most of that steaming potato-water and decided to even up the ledger of ill-usage by giving her a well-placed nip on the hip.
Oh, Mrs. Pitman, I'm so afraid for him!" She had quite forgotten Isaac. I turned to the school-teacher's room and opened the door. "The woman who belongs here is out at a lecture," I said. "Come in here, Ikkie, and I'll find the evening paper for you. "'Ikkie'!" said Lida, and stood staring at me. I think I went white. "The lady heah and I is old friends," Isaac said, with his splendid manner.
My Dinkie was not there. He was nowhere to be found. He was lost lost on the prairie. And I was shouting all this at Ikkie, without being quite conscious of what I was doing. "And remember," I hissed out at her, in a voice that didn't sound like my own as I swung her about by her suddenly parting waist, "if anything has happened to that child, I'll kill you!
Then, too, machinery has one thing in common with man: they occasionally get out of kilter at the very time you expect most from them. So this morning I had to bend, if I did not actually break, the Sabbath by working on my tractor-engine. I put on Ikkie's overalls for I have succeeded in coercing Ikkie into a jumper and the riding-seat of the old gang-plow and went out and studied that tractor.
I ought to be enthusiastic about it, but I can't. Dinkie himself, however, who calls it his "new nailor nuit" not being yet able to manage the sibilants struts about in it proud as a peacock, and refuses to sit down in his supper-chair until Ikkie has carefully wiped off the seat of the same, to the end that the beloved nailor nuit might remain immaculate.
"I suppose it ought to be an Indian name, in honor of Ikkie?" I suggested, doing my best to maintain an unruffled front. And Duncan Argyll absently agreed that it might just as well. "Then what's the matter with calling it Alabama?" I mordantly suggested. "For as I remember it, that means 'Here we rest. And I can imagine nothing more appropriate."
And there could only be an hour or two of daylight left. If he wasn't found before night came on I shut the thought out of my heart, and started back for the shack, in a white heat of desperation. "If you want to live," I said to the now craven and shrinking Ikkie, "you get in that buckboard and make for Casa Grande. Drive there as fast as you can.
Tell my husband that our boy, that my boy, is lost on the prairie. Tell him to get help, and come, come quick. And stop at the Teetzel ranch on your way. Tell them to send men on horses, and lanterns! But move, woman, move!" Ikkie went, with Slip-Along making the buckboard skid on the uneven trail as though he were playing a game of crack-the-whip with that frightened Indian.
Ikkie now sits down with difficulty, and Bobs shows the white of his eye when she comes near him, which isn't more often than Ikkie can help And of such, in these troublous Ides of March, and April and May, is the kingdom of Chaddie McKail! Tuesday the Second I may as well begin at the beginning, I suppose, so as to get the whole thing straight.
"Good night, ma'am," he quavered. I had tears in my eyes. I tried to keep them back. "Good night," I said. "Good night, Ikkie." It had slipped out, my baby name for old Isaac! "Miss Bess!" he cried. "Oh, praise Gawd, it's Miss Bess again!"
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