Chapter 1

THE PRAIRIE WIFE

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THE PRAIRIE WIFE

By ARTHUR STRINGER

With Frontispiece in Color by
H. T. DUNN

A. L. BURT COMPANY
PUBLISHERS--NEW YORK

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TO VAN
WHO KNOWS AND LOVES
THE WEST
AS WE LOVE HIM!

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Thursday the Nineteenth 1
Saturday the Twenty-first 16
Monday the Twenty-third 33
Wednesday the Twenty-fifth 41
Thursday the Twenty-sixth 48
Saturday the Twenty-eighth 57
Wednesday the First 61
Thursday the Second 64
Friday the Third 67
Saturday the Fourth 68
Monday the Sixth 73
Wednesday the Eighth 80
Saturday the Tenth 88
Sunday the Eleventh 91
Monday the Twelfth 93
Sunday the Eighteenth 101
Monday the Nineteenth 103
Tuesday the Twentieth 105
Thursday the Twenty-second 115
Saturday the Twenty-fourth 119
Tuesday the Twenty-seventh 128
Thursday the Twenty-ninth 133
Friday the Fifth 136
Sunday the Seventh 137
Tuesday the Ninth 138
Saturday the Twenty-first 142
Sunday the Twenty-ninth 150
Monday the Seventh 152
Friday the Eleventh 153
Sunday the Thirteenth 155
Wednesday the Sixteenth 156
Sunday the Twentieth 157
Sunday the Twenty-seventh 158
Wednesday the Thirtieth 159
Thursday the Thirty-first 160
Sunday the Third 167
Thursday the Seventh 171
Saturday the Ninth 172
Monday the Eleventh 175
Tuesday the Nineteenth 182
Sunday the Thirty-first 186
Tuesday the Ninth 188
Wednesday the Seventeenth 189
Thursday the Twenty-fifth 190
Tuesday the Second 191
Thursday the Fourth 193
Wednesday the Seventeenth 194
Saturday the Twenty-seventh 195
Tuesday the Sixth 198
Monday the Twelfth 199
Tuesday the Twentieth 202
Monday the Twenty-sixth 205
Wednesday the Twenty-eighth 207
Monday the Second 209
Thursday the Fifth 210
Tuesday the Tenth 214
Monday the Sixteenth 217
Tuesday the Twenty-fourth 220
Friday the Third 222
Thursday the Ninth 224
Wednesday the Fifteenth 228
Friday the Seventeenth 230
Saturday the Nineteenth 231
Friday the Twenty-eighth 233
Saturday the Twenty-ninth 234
Sunday the Thirtieth 236
Tuesday the First 237
Monday the Seventh 243
Sunday the Thirteenth 247
Monday the Twenty-eighth 249
Saturday the Second 251
Wednesday the Sixth 252
Tuesday the Twelfth 254
Thursday the Fourteenth 255
Wednesday the Fifth 256
Sunday the Ninth 260
Monday the Tenth 262
Tuesday the Eleventh 264
Wednesday the Thirteenth 265
Thursday the Fourteenth 267
Friday the Fifteenth 269
Saturday the Sixteenth 272
Monday the Seventeenth 275
Wednesday the Nineteenth 276
Friday the Twenty-first 277
Monday the Twelfth 290
Wednesday the Fourteenth 292
Thursday the Fifteenth 295
Friday the Sixteenth 298
Sunday the Eighteenth 307
Sunday the Twenty-fifth 308
Tuesday the Twenty-seventh 309
Wednesday the Twenty-eighth 310
Friday the Thirtieth 313
Sunday the First 314

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THE PRAIRIE WIFE

_Thursday the Nineteenth_

Splash!... That's me, Matilda Anne! That's me falling plump into the
pool of matrimony before I've had time to fall in love! And oh, Matilda
Anne, Matilda Anne, I've _got_ to talk to you! You may be six thousand
miles away, but still you've got to be my safety-valve. I'd blow up and
explode if I didn't express myself to some one. For it's so lonesome out
here I could go and commune with the gophers. This isn't a twenty-part
letter, my dear, and it isn't a diary. It's the coral ring I'm cutting
my teeth of desolation on. For, every so long, I've simply got to sit
down and talk to some one, or I'd go mad, clean, stark, staring mad, and
bite the tops off the sweet-grass! It may even happen this will never be
sent to you. But I like to think of you reading it, some day, page by
page, when I'm fat and forty, or, what's more likely, when Duncan has
me chained to a corral-post or finally shut up in a padded cell. For you
were the one who was closest to me in the old days, Matilda Anne, and
when I was in trouble you were always the staff on which I leaned, the
calm-eyed Tillie-on-the-spot who never seemed to fail me! And I think
you will understand.

But there's so much to talk about I scarcely know where to begin. The
funny part of it all is, I've gone and married the _Other Man_. And you
won't understand that a bit, unless I start at the beginning. But when I
look back, there doesn't seem to be any beginning, for it's only in
books that things really begin and end in a single lifetime.

Howsomever, as Chinkie used to say, when I left you and Scheming Jack in
that funny little stone house of yours in Corfu, and got to Palermo, I
found Lady Agatha and Chinkie there at the Hotel des Palmes and the
yacht being coaled from a tramp steamer's bunkers in the harbor. So I
went on with them to Monte Carlo. We had a terrible trip all the way up
to the Riviera, and I was terribly sea-sick, and those lady novelists
who love to get their heroines off on a private yacht never dream that
in anything but duckpond weather the ordinary yacht at sea is about the
meanest habitation between Heaven and earth. But it was at Monte Carlo I
got the cable from Uncle Carlton telling me the Chilean revolution had
wiped out our nitrate mine concessions and that your poor Tabby's last
little nest-egg had been smashed. In other words, I woke up and found
myself a beggar, and for a few hours I even thought I'd have to travel
home on that Monte Carlo Viaticum fund which so discreetly ships away
the stranded adventurer before he musses up the Mediterranean scenery by
shooting himself. Then I remembered my letter of credit, and firmly but
sorrowfully paid off poor Hortense, who through her tears proclaimed
that she'd go with me anywhere, and without any thought of wages
(imagine being hooked up by a maid to whom you were under such
democratizing obligations!) But I was firm, for I knew the situation,
might just as well be faced first as last.

So I counted up my letter of credit and found I had exactly six hundred
and seventy-one dollars, American money, between me and beggary. Then I
sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was
code) and later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates
all the while to the Hotel de L'Athenee, the long boxes duly piled up in
tiers, like coffins at the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness,
called on me, in state. She came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow
landau of hers, where she looked for all the world like an
oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of the danger of
international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo me away
from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav--which made me quite calmly
and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of
under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and
put him in the shoe business in some nice New England town!

From Monte Carlo I scooted right up to Paris. Two days later, as I
intended to write you but didn't, I caught the boat-train for Cherbourg.
And there at the rail as I stepped on the _Baltic_ was the Other Man, to
wit, Duncan Argyll McKail, in a most awful-looking yellow plaid English
mackintosh. His face went a little blank as he clapped eyes on me, for
he'd dropped up to Banff last October when Chinkie and Lady Agatha and I
were there for a week. He'd been very nice, that week at Banff, and I
liked him a lot. But when Chinkie saw him "going it a bit too strong,"
as he put it, and quietly tipped Duncan Argyll off as to Theobald
Gustav, the aforesaid D. A. bolted back to his ranch without as much as
saying good-by to me. For Duncan Argyll McKail isn't an Irishman, as you
might in time gather from that name of his. He's a Scotch-Canadian, and
he's nothing but a broken-down civil engineer who's taken up farming in
the Northwest. But I could see right away that he was a gentleman (I
_hate_ that word, but where'll you get another one to take its place?)
and had known nice people, even before I found out he'd taught the
Duchess of S. to shoot big-horn. He'd run over to England to finance a
cooperative wheat-growing scheme, but had failed, because everything is
so unsettled in England just now.

But you're a woman, and before I go any further you'll want to know what
Duncan looks like.

Well, he's not a bit like his name. The West has shaken a good deal of
the Covenanter out of him. He's tall and gaunt and wide-shouldered, and
has brown eyes with hazel specks in them, and a mouth exactly like
Holbein's "Astronomer's," and a skin that is almost as disgracefully
brown as an Indian's. On the whole, if a Lina Cavalieri had happened to
marry a Lord Kitchener, and had happened to have a thirty-year-old son,
I feel quite sure he'd have been the dead spit, as the Irish say, of my
own Duncan Argyll. And Duncan Argyll, _alias_ Dinky-Dunk, is rather
reserved and quiet and, I'm afraid, rather masterful, but not as
Theobald Gustav might have been, for with all his force the modern
German, it seems to me, is like the bagpipes in being somewhat lacking
in suavity.

And all the way over Dinky-Dunk was so nice that he almost took my
breath away. He was also rather audacious, gritting his teeth in the
face of the German peril, and I got to like him so much I secretly
decided we'd always be good friends, old-fashioned, above-board,
Platonic good friends. But the trouble with Platonic love is that it's
always turning out too nice to be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice.
So I had to look straight at the bosom of that awful yellow-plaid
English mackintosh and tell Dinky-Dunk the truth. And Dinky-Dunk
listened, with his astronomer mouth set rather grim, and otherwise not
in the least put out. His sense of confidence worried me. It was like
the quietness of the man who is holding back his trump. And it wasn't
until the impossible little wife of an impossible big lumberman from
Saginaw, Michigan, showed me the Paris _Herald_ with the cable in it
about that spidery Russian stage-dancer, L----, getting so nearly killed
in Theobald's car down at Long Beach, that I realized there _was_ a
trump card and that Dinky-Dunk had been too manly to play it.

I had a lot of thinking to do, the next three days.

When Theobald came on from Washington and met the steamer my conscience
troubled me and I should still have been kindness itself to him, if it
hadn't been for his proprietary manner (which, by the way, had never
annoyed me before), coupled with what I already knew. We had luncheon in
the Della Robbia room at the Vanderbilt and I was digging the marrons
out of a Nesselrode when, presto, it suddenly came over me that the
baroness was right and that _I could never marry a foreigner_. It came
like a thunderclap. But somewhere in that senate of instinct which
debates over such things down deep in the secret chambers of our souls,
I suppose, the whole problem had been talked over and fought out and put
to the vote. And in the face of the fact that Theobald Gustav had always
seemed more nearly akin to one of Ouida's demigods than any man I had
ever known, the vote had gone against him. My hero was no longer a
hero. I knew there had been times, of course, when that hero, being a
German, had rather regarded this universe of ours as a department-store
and this earth as the particular section over which the August Master
had appointed him floor-walker. I had thought of him as my
_Eisenfresser_ and my big blond _Saebierassler_. But my eyes opened with
my last marron and I suddenly sat back and stared at Theobald's handsome
pink face with its Krupp-steel blue eyes and its haughtily upturned
mustache-ends. He must have seen that look of appraisal on my own face,
for, with all his iron-and-blood Prussianism, he clouded up like a hurt
child. But he was too much of a diplomat to show his feelings. He merely
became so unctuously polite that I felt like poking him in his
steel-blue eye with my mint straw.

Remember, Matilda Anne, not a word was said, not one syllable about what
was there in both our souls. Yet it was one of life's biggest moments,
the Great Divide of a whole career--and I went on eating Nesselrode and
Theobald went on pleasantly smoking his cigarette and approvingly
inspecting his well-manicured nails.

It was funny, but it made me feel blue and unattached and terribly alone
in the world. Now, I can see things more clearly. I know that mood of
mine was not the mere child of caprice. Looking back, I can see how
Theobald had been more critical, more silently combative, from the
moment I stepped off the _Baltic_. I realized, all at once, _that he had
secretly been putting me to a strain_. I won't say it was because my
_dot_ had gone with The Nitrate Mines, or that he had discovered that
Duncan had crossed on the same steamer with me, or that he knew I'd soon
hear of the L---- episode. But these prophetic bones of mine told me
there was trouble ahead. And I felt so forsaken and desolate in spirit
that when Duncan whirled me out to Westbury, in a hired motor-car, to
see the Great Neck First defeated by the Meadow Brook Hunters, I went
with the happy-go-lucky glee of a truant who doesn't give a hang what
happens. Dinky-Dunk was interested in polo ponies, which, he explained
to me, are not a particular breed but just come along by accident--for
he'd bred and sold mounts to the Coronado and San Mateo Clubs and the
Philadelphia City Cavalry boys. And he loved the game. He was so genuine
and sincere and _human_, as we sat there side by side, that I wasn't a
bit afraid of him and knew we could be chums and didn't mind his lapses
into silence or his extension-sole English shoes and crazy London
cravat.

And I was happy, until the school-bell rang--which took the form of
Theobald's telephone message to the Ritz reminding me of our dinner
engagement. It was an awful dinner, for intuitively I knew what was
coming, and quite as intuitively he knew what was coming, and even the
waiter knew when it came,--for I flung Theobald's ring right against his
stately German chest. There'd be no good in telling you, Matilda Anne,
what led up to that most unlady-like action. I don't intend to burn
incense in front of myself. It may have looked wrong. But I know you'll
take my word when I say he deserved it. The one thing that hurts is
that he had the triumph of being the first to sever diplomatic
relations. In the language of Shorty McCabe and my fellow countrymen,
_he threw me down!_ Twenty minutes later, after composing my soul and
powdering my nose, I was telephoning all over the city trying to find
Duncan. I got him at last, and he came to the Ritz on the run. Then we
picked up a residuary old horse-hansom on Fifth Avenue and went rattling
off through Central Park. There I--who once boasted of seven proposals
and three times that number of nibbles--promptly and shamelessly
proposed to my Dinky-Dunk, though he is too much of a gentleman not to
swear it's a horrid lie and that he'd have fought through an acre of
Greek fire to get me!

But whatever happened, Count Theobald Gustav Von Guntner threw me down,
and Dinky-Dunk caught me on the bounce, and now instead of going to
embassy balls and talking world-politics like a Mrs. Humphry Ward
heroine I've married a shack-owner who grows wheat up in the Canadian
Northwest. And instead of wearing a tiara in the Grand Tier at the
Metropolitan I'm up here a dot on the prairie and wearing an apron made
of butcher's linen! _Sursum corda!_ For I'm still in the ring. And it's
no easy thing to fall in love and land on your feet. But I've gone and
done it. I've taken the high jump. I've made my bed, as Uncle Carlton
had the nerve to tell me, and now I've got to lie in it. But _assez
d'Etrangers_!

That wedding-day of mine I'll always remember as a day of smells, the
smell of the pew-cushions in the empty church, the smell of the
lilies-of-the-valley, that dear, sweet, scatter-brained
Fanny-Rain-In-The-Face (she rushed to town an hour after getting my
wire) insisted on carrying, the smell of the leather in the damp taxi,
the tobaccoy smell of Dinky-Dunk's quite impossible best man, who'd been
picked up at the hotel, on the fly, to act as a witness, and the smell
of Dinky-Dunk's brand new gloves as he lifted my chin and kissed me in
that slow, tender, tragic, end-of-the-world way big and bashful men
sometimes have with women. It's all a jumble of smells.

Then Dinky-Dunk got the wire saying he might lose his chance on the
Stuart Ranch, if he didn't close before the Calgary interests got hold
of it. And Dinky-Dunk wanted that ranch. So we talked it over and in
five minutes had given up the idea of going down to Aiken and were
telephoning for the stateroom on the Montreal Express. I had just four
hours for shopping, scurrying about after cook-books and golf-boots and
table-linen and a chafing dish, and a lot of other absurd things I
thought we'd need on the ranch. And then off we flew for the West,
before poor, extravagant, ecstatic Dinky-Dunk's thirty-six wedding
orchids' from Thorley's had faded and before I'd a chance to show Fanny
my nighties!

Am I crazy? Is it all wrong? Do I love my Dinky-Dunk? _Do_ I? The Good
Lord only knows, Matilda Anne! O God, O God, if it _should_ turn out
that I don't, that I can't? But I'm going to! I know I'm going to! And
there's one other thing that I know, and when I remember it, it sends a
comfy warm wave through all my body: Dinky-Dunk loves me. He's as mad as
a hatter about me. He deserves to be loved back. And I'm going to love
him back. That is a vow I herewith duly register. _I'm going to love my
Dinky-Dunk._ But, oh, isn't it wonderful to wake love in a man, in a
strong man? To be able to sweep him off, that way, on a tidal wave that
leaves him rather white and shaky in the voice and trembly in the
fingers, and seems to light a little luminous fire at the back of his
eyeballs so that you can see the pupils glow, the same as an animal's
when your motor head-lights hit them! It's like taking a little match
and starting a prairie-fire and watching the flames creep and spread
until the heavens are roaring! I wonder if I'm selfish? I wonder? But I
can't answer that now, for it's supper time, and your Tabby has the grub
to rustle!

_Saturday the Twenty-first_

I'm alone in the shack to-night, and I'm determined not to think about
my troubles. So I'm going to write you a ream, Matilda Anne, whether you
like it or not. And I must begin by telling you about the shack itself,
and how I got here. All the way out from Montreal Dinky-Dunk, in his
kindly way, kept doing his best to key me down and make me not expect
too much. But I'd hold his hand, under the magazine I was pretending to
read, and whistle _Home, Sweet Home_! He kept saying it would be hard,
for the first year or two, and there would be a terrible number of
things I'd be sure to miss. _Love Me and The World Is Mine!_ I hummed,
as I leaned over against his big wide shoulder. And I lay there smiling
and happy, blind to everything that was before me, and I only laughed
when Dinky-Dunk asked me if I'd still say that when I found there
wasn't a nutmeg-grater within seven miles of my kitchen.

"Do you love me?" I demanded, hanging on to him right in front of the
car-porter.

"I love you better than anything else in all this wide world!" was his
slow and solemn answer.

When we left Winnipeg, too, he tried to tell me what a plain little
shack we'd have to put up with for a year or two, and how it wouldn't be
much better than camping out, and how he knew I was clear grit and would
help him win that first year's battle. There was nothing depressing to
me in the thought of life in a prairie-shack. I never knew, of course,
just what it would be like, and had no way of knowing. I remembered
Chinkie's little love of a farm in Sussex, and I'd been a week at the
Westbury's place out on Long Island, with its terraced lawns and gardens
and greenhouses and macadamized roads. And, on the whole, I expected a
cross between a shooting-box and a Swiss chalet, a little nest of a home
that was so small it was sure to be lovable, with a rambler-rose draping
the front and a crystal spring bubbling at the back door, a little
flowery island on the prairie where we could play Swiss-Family-Robinson
and sally forth to shoot prairie-chicken and ruffed grouse to our
hearts' content.

Well, that shack wasn't quite what I expected! But I mustn't run ahead
of my story, Matilda Anne, so I'll go back to where Dinky-Dunk and I got
off the side-line "accommodation" at Buckhorn, with our traps and trunks
and hand-bags and suitcases. And these had scarcely been piled on the
wooden platform before the station-agent came running up to Duncan with
a yellow sheet in his hand. And Duncan looked worried as he read it, and
stopped talking to his man called Olie, who was there beside the
platform, in a big, sweat-stained Stetson hat, with a big team hitched
to a big wagon with straw in the bottom of the box.

Olie, I at once told myself, was a Swede. He was one of the ugliest men
I ever clapped eyes on, but I found out afterward that his face had been
frozen in a blizzard, years before, and his nose had split. This had
disfigured him--and the job had been done for life. His eyes were big
and pale blue, and his hair and eyebrows were a pale yellow. He was the
most silent man I ever saw. But Dinky-Dunk had already told me he was a
great worker, and a fine fellow at heart. And when Dinky-Dunk says he'd
trust a man, through thick and thin, there must be something good in
that man, no matter how bulbous his nose is or how scared-looking he
gets when a woman speaks to him. Olie looked more scared than ever when
Dinky-Dunk suddenly ran to where the train-conductor was standing beside
his car-steps, asked him to hold that "accommodation" for half a minute,
pulled his suit-case from under my pile of traps, and grabbed little me
in his arms.

"Quick," he said, "good-by! I've got to go on to Calgary. There's
trouble about my registrations."

I hung on to him for dear life. "You're not going to leave me here,
Dinky-Dunk, in the middle of this wilderness?" I cried out, while the
conductor and brakeman and station-agent all called and holloed and
clamored for Duncan to hurry.

"Olie will take you home, beloved," Dinky-Dunk tried to assure me.
"You'll be there by midnight, and I'll be back by Saturday evening!"

I began to bawl. "Don't go! Don't leave me!" I begged him. But the
conductor simply tore him out of my arms and pushed him aboard the
tail-end of the last car. I made a face at a fat man who was looking out
a window at me. I stood there, as the train started to move, feeling
that it was dragging my heart with it.

Then Dinky-Dunk called out to Olie, from the back platform: "Did you get
my message and paint that shack?" And Olie, with my steamer-rug in his
hand, only looked blank and called back "No." But I don't believe
Dinky-Dunk even heard him, for he was busy throwing kisses at me. I
stood there, at the edge of the platform, watching that lonely last
car-end fade down into the lonely sky-line. Then I mopped my eyes, took
one long quavery breath, and said out loud, as Birdalone Pebbley said
Shiner did when he was lying wounded on the field of Magersfontein:
"_Squealer, squealer, who's a squealer?_"

I found the big wagon-box filled with our things and Olie sitting there
waiting, viewing me with wordless yet respectful awe. Olie, in fact, has
never yet got used to me. He's a fine chap, in his rough and
inarticulate way, and there's nothing he wouldn't do for me. But I'm a
novelty to him. His pale blue eyes look frightened and he blushes when I
speak to him. And he studies me secretly, as though I were a dromedary,
or an archangel, or a mechanical toy whose inner mechanism perplexed
him. But yesterday I found out through Dinky-Dunk what the probable
secret of Olie's mystification was. It was my hat. "It ban so dam'
foolish!" he fervently confessed.

That wagon-ride from Buckhorn out to the ranch seemed endless. I thought
we were trekking clear up to the North Pole. At first there was what you
might call a road, straight and worn deep, between parallel lines of
barb-wire fencing. But this road soon melted into nothing more than a
trail, a never-ending gently curving trail that ribboned out across the
prairie-floor as far as the eye could see. It was a glorious afternoon,
one of those opaline, blue-arched autumn days when it should have been a
joy merely to be alive. But I was in an antagonistic mood, and the
little cabin-like farmhouses that every now and then stood up against
the sky-line made me feel lonesome, and the jolting of the heavy wagon
made me tired, and by six o'clock I was so hungry that my ribs ached. We
had been on the trail then almost five hours, and Olie calmly informed
me it was only a few hours more. It got quite cool as the sun went down,
and I had to undo my steamer-rug and get wrapped up in it. And still we
went on. It seemed like being at sea, with a light now and then, miles
and miles away. Something howled dismally in the distance, and gave me
the creeps. Olie told me it was only a coyote. But we kept on, and my
ribs ached worse than ever.

Then I gave a shout that nearly frightened Olie off the seat, for I
remembered the box of chocolates we'd had on the train. We stopped and
found my hand-bag, and lighted matches and looked through it. Then I
gave a second and more dismal shout, for I remembered Dinky-Dunk had
crammed it into his suit-case at the last moment. Then we went on again,
with me a squaw-woman all wrapped in her blanket. I must have fallen
asleep, for I woke with a start. Olie had stopped at a slough to water
his team, and said we'd make home in another hour or two. How he found
his way across that prairie Heaven only knows. I no longer worried. I
was too tired to think. The open air and the swaying and jolting had
chloroformed me into insensibility. Olie could have driven over the edge
of a canyon and I should never have stopped him.

Instead of falling into a canyon, however, at exactly ten minutes to
twelve we pulled up beside the shack door, which had been left unlocked,
and Olie went in and lighted a lamp and touched a match to the fire
already laid in the stove. I don't remember getting down from the wagon
seat and I don't remember going into the shack. But when Olie came from
putting in his team I was fast asleep on a luxurious divan made of a
rather smelly steer-hide stretched across two slim cedar-trees on four
little cedar legs, with a bag full of pine needles at the head. I lay
there watching Olie, in a sort of torpor. It surprised me how quickly
his big ungainly body could move, and how adept those big sunburned
hands of his could be.

Then sharp as an arrow through a velvet curtain came the smell of bacon
through my drowsiness. And it was a heavenly odor. I didn't even wash. I
ate bacon and eggs and toasted biscuits and orange marmalade and coffee,
the latter with condensed milk, which I hate. I don't know how I got to
my bed, or got my clothes off, or where the worthy Olie slept, or who
put out the light, or if the door had been left open or shut. I never
knew that the bed was hard, or that the coyotes were howling. I only
know that I slept for ten solid hours, without turning over, and that
when I opened my eyes I saw a big square of golden sunlight dancing on
the unpainted pine boards of the shack wall. And the funny part of it
all was, Matilda Anne, I didn't have the splitting headache I'd so
dolorously prophesied for myself. Instead of that I felt buoyant. I
started to sing as I pulled on my stockings. And I suddenly remembered
that I was terribly hungry again.

I swung open the window beside me, for it was on hinges, and poked my
head out. I could see a corral, and a long low building which I took to
be the ranch stables, and another and newer-looking building with a
metal roof, and several stacks of hay surrounded by a fence, and a row
of portable granaries. And beyond these stretched the open prairie,
limitless and beautiful in the clear morning sunshine. Above it arched a
sky of robin-egg blue, melting into opal and pale gold down toward the
rim of the world.