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Updated: May 23, 2025
It occurred to me, as I stood at the window and saw Dinky-Dunk's lantern wavering about in the rain while he was getting the team and hooking them on to the buckboard, that it would be only the decent thing to send him off with a cup of hot coffee, now that I had the kettle boiling. But he'd martyrize himself, I knew, by refusing it, even though I made it.
Last night, in fact, when Pee-Wee cried for his dad, poor old Dinky-Dunk's face looked almost radiumized. He has announced that on Tuesday, when he will have to go in to Buckhorn, he intends to carry along the three kiddies and have their photograph taken. It reminded me that I had no picture whatever of the Twins.
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.
But he could still lift that table, I knew, even with me sitting on top of it. So I started to pile things on the overturned table, until it looked like a moving-van ready for a May-Day migration. Then I sat on top of that pile of household goods, reached for Dinky-Dunk's repeater, and deliberately fired a shot up through the open door.
He said he chopped his first kindling to-day, though he had to stand in a wash-tub, while he did it, to keep from cutting his feet. Dinky-Dunk's birthday is only three weeks off, and I'm making plans for a celebration. Tuesday the Ninth The days slip by, and scarcely leave me time to write. Dinky-Dunk is a sort of pendulum, swinging out to work, back to eat, and then out, and then back again.
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 railroad work in British Columbia.
Then he came up and stood squinting thoughtfully out through the doorway. "Have you got a gun?" he suddenly asked me. I showed him my duck-gun with its silver mountings, and he smiled a little. "Haven't you a rifle?" he demanded. I explained that my husband had, and he still stood squinting out through the doorway as I poked about the shack-corners and found Dinky-Dunk's repeater.
He said that even when they showed their teeth, the rest of their face was apologizing for the threat. And before supper was over that coyote, at least I suppose it was the same coyote, was howling at the rising full moon. I went out with Dinky-Dunk's gun, but couldn't get near the brute. Then I came back. "Sing, you son-of-a-gun, sing!" I called out to him from the shack door.
"She's on her way out here to inspect a ranch which doesn't exist!" I sat for a full minute gaping into Dinky-Dunk's woebegone face. And still again I had considerable thinking to do. "Then we'll make it exist," I finally announced. But Dinky-Dunk, staring gloomily off into space, wasn't even interested. They had stunned the spirit out of him. He wasn't himself.
And somewhere in her make-up was a strain of cruelty or she would never have come to me the way she did, and struck at me with an open claw. That cruelty, quite naturally, could never have been paraded before my poor old Dinky-Dunk's eyes. It would be, later on, after disillusionment and boredom. Then, and then only, it would dare to show its ugly head.
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