Chapter 2

I breathed in lungfuls of clear, dry, ozonic air, and
I really believe it made me a little light-headed, it was so
exhilarating, so champagnized with the invisible bubbles of life.

I needed that etheric eye-opener, Matilda Anne, before I calmly and
critically looked about our shack. Oh, that shack, that shack! What a
comedown it was for your heart-sore Chaddie! In the first place, it
seemed no bigger than a ship's cabin, and not one-half so orderly. It is
made of lumber, and not of logs, and is about twelve feet wide and
eighteen feet long. It has three windows, on hinges, and only one door.
The floor is rather rough, and has a trap door leading into a small
cellar, where vegetables can be stored for winter use. The end of the
shack is shut off by a "tarp"--which I have just found out is short for
tarpaulin. In other words, the privacy of my bedroom is assured by
nothing more substantial than a canvas drop-curtain, shutting off my
boudoir, where I could never very successfully _bouder_, from the larger
living-room.

This living-room is also the kitchen, the laundry, the sewing-room, the
reception-room and the library. It has a good big cookstove, which burns
either wood or coal, a built-in cupboard with an array of unspeakably
ugly crockery dishes, a row of shelves for holding canned goods, books
and magazines, cooking utensils, gun-cartridges, tobacco-jars,
carpenter's tools and a coal-oil lamp. There is also a plain pine table,
a few chairs, one rocking-chair which has plainly been made by hand, and
a flour-barrel. Outside the door is a wide wooden bench on which stands
a big tin wash-basin and a cake of soap in a sardine can that has been
punched full of holes along the bottom. Above it hung a roller towel
which looked a little the worse for wear. And that was to be my home, my
one and only habitation, for years and years to come! That little
cat-eyed cubby-hole of a place!

I sat down on an overturned wash-tub about twenty paces from the shack,
and studied it with calm and thoughtful eyes. It looked infinitely worse
from the outside. The reason for this was that the board siding had
first been covered with tar-paper, for the sake of warmth, and over this
had been nailed pieces of tin, tin of every color and size and
description. Some of it was flattened out stove-pipe, and some was
obviously the sides of tomato-cans. Even tin tobacco-boxes and Dundee
marmalade holders and the bottoms of old bake-pans and the sides of an
old wash-boiler had been pieced together and patiently tacked over those
shack-sides. It must have taken weeks and weeks to do. And it suddenly
impressed me as something poignant, as something with the Vergilian
touch of tears in it. It seemed so full of history, so vocal of the
tragic expedients to which men on the prairie must turn. It seemed
pathetic. It brought a lump into my throat. Yet that Joseph's Coat of
metal was a neatly done bit of work. All it needed was a coat of paint
or two, and it would look less like a crazy-quilt solidified into a
homestead. And I suddenly remembered Dinky-Dunk's question called out to
Olie from the car-end--and I knew he'd hurried off a message to have
that telltale tinning-job painted over before I happened to clap eyes on
it.

As Olie had disappeared from the scene and was nowhere to be found, I
went in and got my own breakfast. It was supper over again, only I
scrambled my eggs instead of frying them. And all the while I was eating
that meal I studied those shack-walls and made mental note of what
should be changed and what should be done. There was so much, that it
rather overwhelmed me. I sat at the table, littered with its dirty
dishes, wondering where to begin. And then the endless vista of it all
suddenly opened up before me. I became nervously conscious of the
unbroken silence about me, and I realized how different this new life
must be from the old. It seemed like death itself, and it got a strangle
hold on my nerves, and I knew I was going to make a fool of myself the
very first morning in my new home, in my home and Dinky-Dunk's. But I
refused to give in. I did something which startled me a little,
something which I had not done for years. I got down on my knees beside
that plain wooden chair and prayed to God. I asked Him to give me
strength to keep me from being a piker and make me a wife worthy of the
man who loved me, and lead me into the way of bringing happiness to the
home that was to be ours. Then I rolled up my sleeves, tied a face towel
over my head and went to work.

It was a royal cleaning-out, I can tell you. In the afternoon I had Olie
down on all fours scrubbing the floor. When he had washed the windows I
had him get a garden rake and clear away the rubbish that littered the
dooryard. I draped chintz curtains over the windows, and had Olie nail
two shelves in a packing-box and then carry it into my boudoir behind
the drop-curtain. Over this box I tacked fresh chintz (for the shack did
not possess so feminine a thing as a dresser) and on it put my
folding-mirror and my Tiffany traveling-clock and all my foolish
shimmery silver toilet articles. Then I tacked up photographs and
magazine-prints about the bare wooden walls--and decided that before the
winter came those walls would be painted and papered, or I'd know the
reason why. Then I aired the bedding and mattress, and unpacked my
brand-new linen sheets and the ridiculous hemstitched pillow-slips that
I'd scurried so frenziedly about the city to get, and stowed my things
away on the box-shelves, and had Olie pound the life out of the
well-sunned pillows, and carefully remade the bed.

And then I went at the living-room. And it was no easy task,
reorganizing those awful shelves and making sure I wasn't throwing away
things Dinky-Dunk might want later on. But the carnage was great, and
all afternoon the smoke went heavenward from my fires of destruction.
And when it was over I told Olie to go out for a good long walk, for I
intended to take a bath. Which I did in the wash-tub, with much joy and
my last cake of Roger-and-Gallet soap. And I had to shout to poor
ambulating Olie for half-an-hour before I could persuade him to come in
to supper. And even then he came tardily, with countless hesitations and
pauses, as though a lady temerarious enough to take a scrub were for all
time taboo to the race of man. And when he finally ventured in through
the door, round-eyed and blushing a deep russet, he gaped at my white
middy and my little white apron with that silent but eloquent admiration
which couldn't fail to warm the cockles of the most unimpressionable
housewife's heart.

_Monday the Twenty-third_

My Dinky-Dunk is back--and oh, the difference to me! I kept telling
myself that I was too busy to miss him. He came Saturday night as I was
getting ready for bed. I'd been watching the trail every now and then,
all day long, and by nine o'clock had given him up. When I heard him
shouting for Olie, I made a rush for him, with only half my clothes on,
and nearly shocked Olie and some unknown man, who'd driven Dinky-Dunk
home, to death. How I hugged my husband! My husband--I love to write
that word. And when I got him inside we had it all over again. He was
just like a big overgrown boy. And he put the table between us, so he'd
have a chance to talk. But even that didn't work. He smothered my
laughing in kisses, and held me up close to him and said I was
wonderful. Then we'd try to get down to earth again, and talk sensibly,
and then there'd be another death-clinch. Dinky-Dunk says I'm worse
than he is. "Of course it's all up with a man," he confessed, "when he
sees you coming for him with that Australian crawl-stroke of yours!"

For which I did my best to break in his floating ribs. Heaven only knows
how late we talked that night. And Dinky-Dunk had a bundle of surprises
for me. The first was a bronze reading-lamp. The second was a soft
little rug for the bedroom--only an Axminster, but very acceptable. The
third was a pair of Juliets, lined with fur, and oceans too big for me.
And Dinky-Dunk says by Tuesday we'll have two milk-cows, part-Jersey, at
the ranch, and inside of a week a crate of hens will be ours. Thereupon
I couldn't help leading Duncan to the inventory I had made of what we
had, and the list, on the opposite side, of what we had to have. The
second thing under the heading of "Needs" was "lamp," the fifth was
"bedroom rug," the thirteenth was "hens," and the next was "cow." I
think he was rather amazed at the length of that list of "needs," but he
says I shall have everything in reason. And when he kind of settled
down, and noticed the changes in the living-room and then went in and
inspected the bedroom he grew very solemn, of a sudden. It worried me.

"Lady Bird," he said, taking me in his arms, "this is a pretty hard life
I've trapped you into. It will _have_ to be hard for a year or two, but
we'll win out, in the end, and I guess it'll be worth the fight!"

Dinky-Dunk is such a dear. I told him of course we'd win out, but I
wouldn't be much use to him at first. I'd have to get broken in and made
bridle-wise.

"But, oh, Dinky-Dunk, whatever happens, you must always love me!"--and I
imagine I swam for him with my Australian crawl-stroke again. All I
remember is that we went to sleep in each other's arms. And as I started
to say and forgot to finish, I'd been missing my Dinky-Dunk more than I
imagined, those last few days. After that night it was no longer just a
shack. It was "Home." Home--it's such a beautiful word! It must mean so
much to every woman. And I fell asleep telling myself it was the
loveliest word in the English language.

In the morning I slipped out of bed before Dinky-Dunk was awake, for
breakfast was to be our first home meal, and I wanted it to be a
respectable one. _Der Mensch ist was er isst_--so I must feed my lord
and master on the best in the land. Accordingly I put an extra
tablespoonful of cream in the scrambled eggs, and two whole eggs in the
coffee, to make dead sure it was crystal-clear. Then, feeling like Van
Roon when Berlin declared war on France, I rooted out Dinky-Dunk, made
him wash, and sat him down in his pajamas and his ragged old
dressing-gown.

"I suppose," I said as I saw his eyes wander about the table, "that you
feel exactly like an oyster-man who's just chipped his Blue-Point and
got his knife-edge in under the shell! And the next wrench is going to
tell you exactly what sort of an oyster you've got!"

Dinky-Dunk grinned up at me as I buttered his toast, piping hot from the
range. "Well, Lady Bird, you're not the kind that'll need paprika,
anyway!" he announced as he fell to. And he ate like a boa-constrictor
and patted his pajama-front and stentoriously announced that he'd picked
a queen--only he pronounced it kaveen, after the manner of our poor old
Swedish Olie!

As that was Sunday we spent the morning "pi-rooting" about the place.
Dinky-Dunk took me out and showed me the stables and the hay-stacks and
the granaries--which he'd just waterproofed so there'd be no more spoilt
grain on that farm--and the "cool-hole" he used to use before the cellar
was built, and the ruins of the sod-hut where the first homesteader that
owned that land had lived. Then he showed me the new bunk-house for the
men, which Olie is finishing in his spare time. It looks much better
than our own shack, being of planed lumber. But Dinky-Dunk is loyal to
the shack, and says it's really better built, and the warmest shack in
the West--as I'll find before winter is over.

Then we stopped at the pump, and Dinky-Dunk made a confession. When he
first bought that ranch there was no water at the shack, except what he
could catch from the roof. Water had to be hauled for miles, and it was
muddy and salty, at that. They used to call it "Gopher soup." This lack
of water always worried him, he said, for women always want water, and
oodles of it. It was the year before, after he had left me at Banff,
that he was determined to get water. It was hard work, putting down that
well, and up to almost the last moment it promised to be a dry hole. But
when they struck that water, Dinky-Dunk says, he decided in his soul
that he was going to have me, if I was to be had. It was water fit for a
queen. And he wanted his queen. But of course even queens have to be
well laved and well laundered. He said he didn't sleep all night, after
they found the water was there. He was too happy; he just went
meandering about the prairie, singing to himself.

"So you were pretty sure of me, Kitten-Cats, even then?" I demanded.

He looked at me with his solemn Scotch-Canadian eyes. "I'm not sure of
you, even now," was his answer. But I made him take it back.

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. Hugh
had a younger brother Andrew, who was rather wild and had been brought
out here and planted on the prairie to keep him out of mischief. One
winter night he rode nearly thirty miles to a dance (they do that
apparently out here, and think nothing of it) and instead of riding home
at five o'clock in the morning, with the others, he visited a
whisky-runner who was operating a "blind pig." There he acquired much
more whisky than was good for him and got lost on the trail. That meant
he was badly frozen and probably out of his mind before he got back to
the shack. He wasn't able to keep up a fire, of course, or do anything
for himself--and I suppose the poor boy simply froze to death. He was
alone there, and it was weeks and weeks before his body was found. But
the most gruesome part of it all is that his horses had been stabled,
tied up in their stalls without feed. They were all found dead, poor
brutes. They'd even eaten the wooden boards the mangers were built of.
Hugh Cochrane couldn't get over it, and was going to sell the ranch for
fourteen hundred dollars when Dinky-Dunk heard of it and stepped in and
bought the whole half-section. Then he bought the McKinnon place, a
half-section to the north of this, after McKinnon had lost all his
buildings because he was too shiftless to make a fire-guard. And when
the railway work was finished Dinky-Dunk took up wheat-growing. He is a
great believer in wheat. He says wheat spells wealth, in this country.
Some people call him a "land-miner," he says, but when he's given the
chance to do the thing as he wants to, he'll show them who's right.

_Wednesday the Twenty-fifth_

Dinky-Dunk and I have been making plans. He's promised to build an annex
to the shack, a wing on the north side, so I can have a store-room and a
clothes-closet at one end and a guest-chamber at the other. And I'm to
have a sewing-machine and a bread-mixer, and the smelly steer-hide divan
is going to be banished to the bunk-house. And Dinky-Dunk says I must
have a pinto, a riding-horse, as soon as he can lay hands on the right
animal. Later on he says I must have help, but out here in the West
women are hard to get, and harder to keep. They are snatched up by
lonely bachelors like Dinky-Dunk. They can't even keep the
school-teachers (mostly girls from Ontario) from marrying off. But I
don't want a woman about, not for a few months yet. I want Dinky-Dunk
all to myself. And the freedom of isolation like this is such a luxury!
To be just one's self, in civilization, is a luxury, is the greatest
luxury in the world,--and also the most expensive, I've found to my
sorrow.

Out here, there's no object in being anything but one's self. Life is so
simple and honest, so back to first principles! There's joy in the
thought of getting rid of all the sublimated junk of city life. I'm just
a woman; and Dinky-Dunk is just a man. We've got a roof and a bed and a
fire. That's all. And what is there, really, after that? We have to eat,
of course, but we really live well. There's all the game we want,
especially wild duck and prairie chicken, to say nothing of jack-rabbit.
Dinky-Dunk sallies out and pots them as we need them. We get our veal
and beef by the quarter, but it will not keep well until the weather
gets cooler, so I put what we don't need in brine and use it for
boiling-meat. We have no fresh fruit, but even evaporated peaches can be
stewed so that they're appetizing. And as I had the good sense to bring
out with me no less than three cook-books, from Brentano's, I am able to
attempt more and more elaborate dishes.

Olie has a wire-fenced square where he grew beets and carrots and onions
and turnips, and the biggest potatoes I ever saw. These will be pitted
before the heavy frosts come. We get our butter and lard by the pail,
and our flour by the sack, but getting things in quantities sometimes
has its drawbacks. When I examined the oatmeal box I found it had
weavels in it, and promptly threw all that meal away. Dinky-Dunk, coming
in from the corral, viewed the pile with round-eyed amazement. "It's got
_worms_ in it!" I cried out to him. He took up a handful of it, and
stared at it with tragic sorrow. "Why, I ate weavels all last winter,"
he reprovingly remarked. Dinky-Dunk, with his Scotch strain, loves his
porridge. So we'll have to get a hundred-weight, guaranteed strictly
uninhabited, when we team into Buckhorn.

Men are funny! A woman never quite knows a man until she has lived with
him and day by day unearthed his little idiosyncrasies. She may seem
close to him, in those earlier days of romance, but she never really
knows him, any more than a sparrow on a telegraph wire knows the Morse
Code thrilling along under its toes! Men have so many little kinks and
turns, even the best of them. I tacked oil-cloth on a shoe-box and
draped chintz around it, and fixed a place for Dinky-Dunk to wash, in
the bedroom, when he comes in at noon. At night I knew it would be
impossible, for he's built a little wash-house with old binder-carrier
canvas nailed to four posts, and out there Olie and he strip every
evening and splash each other with horse-pails full of well-water.
Dinky-Dunk is clean, whatever he may be, but I thought it would look
more civilized if he'd perform his limited noonday ablutions in the
bedroom. He did it for one day, in pensive silence, and then sneaked the
wash-things back to the rickety old bench outside the door. He said it
saved time.

Among other vital things, I've found that Dinky-Dunk hates burnt toast.
Yesterday morning, Matilda Anne, I got thinking about Corfu and Ragusa
and you, and it _did_ burn a little around the edges, I suppose. So I
kissed his ear and told him carbon would make his teeth white. But he
got up and went out with a sort of "In-this-way-madness-lies"
expression, and I felt wretched all day. So this morning I was more
careful. I did that toast just to a turn. "Feast, O Kaikobad, on the
blondest of toast!" I said as I salaamed and handed him the plate. He
wrinkled up his forehead a little, at the sting in that speech, but he
could not keep from grinning. Then, too, Dinky-Dunk always soaps the
back of his hand, to wash his back, and reach high up. So do I. And on
cold mornings-he says "One, two, three, the bumble bee!" before he hops
out of bed--and I imagined I was the only grownup in all the wide world
who still made use of that foolish rhyme. And the other day when he was
hot and tired I found him drinking a dipperful of cold water fresh from
the well. So I said:

"Many a man has gone to his sarcophagus
Thro' pouring cold water down a warm esophagus!"

When I recited that rhyme to him he swung about as though he'd been
shot. "Where did you ever hear that?" he asked. I told him that was
what Lady Agatha always said to me when she caught me drinking
ice-water. "I thought I was the only man in the world who knew that
crazy old couplet," he confessed, and he chased me around the shack with
the rest of the dipperful, to keep from chilling his tummy, he
explained. Then Dinky-Dunk and I both like to give pet-names to things.
He calls me "Lady Bird" and "Gee-Gee" and sometimes "Honey," and
sometimes "Boca Chica" and "Tabby." And I call him Dinky-Dunk and The
Dour Maun, and Kitten-Cats, though for some reason or other he hates
that last name. I think he feels it's an affront to his dignity. And no
man likes a trace of mockery in a woman. But Dinky-Dunk's names are born
of affection, and I love him for them.

Even the ranch horses have all been tagged with names. There's
"Slip-Along" and "Water Light" and "Bronk" and "Patsy Crocker" and "Pick
and Shovel" and "Tumble Weed," and others that I can't remember at the
moment. And I find I'm picking up certain of Dinky-Dunk's little
habits, and dropping into the trick of looking at things from his
standpoint. I wonder if husbands and wives really _do_ get to be alike?
There are times when Dinky-Dunk seems to know just what I'm thinking,
for when he speaks he says exactly the thing I was going to ask him. And
he's inexorable in his belief that one's right shoe should always be put
on first. So am I!

_Thursday the Twenty-sixth_

Dinky-Dunk is rather pinched for ready money. He is what they call "land
poor" out here. He has big plans, but not much cash. So we shall have to
be frugal. I had decided on vast and sudden changes in this household,
but I'll have to draw in my horns a little. Luckily I have nearly two
hundred dollars of my own money left--and have never mentioned it to
Dinky-Dunk. So almost every night I study the magazine advertisements,
and the catalog of the mail-order house in Winnipeg. Each night I add to
my list of "Needs," and then go back and cross out some of the earlier
ones, as being too extravagant, for the length of my list almost gives
me heart-failure. And as I sit there thinking of what I have to do
without, I envy the women I've known in other days, the women with all
their white linen and their cut glass and silverware and their
prayer-rugs and period rooms and their white-tiled baths and their
machinery for making life so comfortable and so easy. I envy them. I put
away my list, and go to bed envying them. But, oh, I sleep so soundly,
and I wake up so buoyant in heart, so eager to get at the next day's
work, so glad to see I'm slowly getting things more ship-shape. It
doesn't leave room for regret. And there is always the future, the
happier to-morrow to which our thoughts go out. I get to thinking of the
city again, of the hundreds of women I know going like hundreds of crazy
squirrels on their crazy treadmill of amusements, and of the thousands
and thousands of women who are toiling without hope, going on in the
same old rut from day to day, cooped up in little flats and back rooms,
with bad air and bad food and bad circulation, while I have all God's
outdoors to wander about in, and can feel the singing rivers of health
in my veins. And here I side-step my Song-of-Solomon voluntary, for they
have one thing I _do_ miss, and that is music. I wish I had a
cottage-piano or a Baby Grand or a _Welte Mignon_! I wish I had any
kind of an old piano! I wish I had an accordion, or a German
Sweet-Potato, or even a Jew's-Harp!

But what's the use of wishing for luxuries, when we haven't even a
can-opener--Dinky-Dunk says he's used a hatchet for over a year! And our
only toaster is a kitchen-fork wired to the end of a lath. I even saw
Dinky-Dunk spend half an hour straightening out old nails taken from one
of our shipping-boxes. And the only colander we have was made out of a
leaky milk-pan with holes punched in its bottom. And we haven't a
double-boiler or a mixing-bowl or a doughnut-cutter. When I told
Dinky-Dunk yesterday that we were running out of soap, he said he'd
build a leach of wood-ashes and get beef-tallow and make soft soap. I
asked him how long he'd want to kiss a downy cheek that had been washed
in soft soap. He said he'd keep on kissing me if I was a mummy pickled
in bitumen. But I prefer not risking too much of the pickling process.

Which reminds me of the fact that I find my hair a terrible nuisance,
with no Hortense to struggle with it every morning. As you know, it's as
thick as a rope and as long as my arm. I begrudge the time it takes to
look after it, and such a thing as a good shampoo is an event to be
approached with trepidation and prepared for with zeal. "Coises on me
beauty!" I think I'll cut that wool off. But on each occasion when I
have my mind about made up I experience one of "Mr. Polly's" l'il dog
moments. The thing that makes me hesitate is the thought that Dinky-Dunk
might hate me for the rest of his days. And now that our
department-store aristocracy seems to have a corner in Counts and I seem
destined to worry along with merely an American husband, I don't intend
to throw away the spoons with the dish-water! But having to fuss so with
that hair is a nuisance, especially at night, when I am so tired that my
pillow seems to bark like a dog for me to come and pat it.

And speaking of that reminds me that I have to order arch-supports for
my feet. I'm on them so much that by bedtime my ankles feel like a
_chocolat mousse_ that's been left out in the sun. Yet this isn't a
whimper, Matilda Anne, for when I turn in I sleep like a child. No more
counting and going to the medicine-chest for coal-tar pills. I abjure
them. I, who used to have so many tricks to bring the starry-eyed
goddess bending over my pillow, hereby announce myself as the noblest
sleeper north of the Line! I no longer need to count the sheep as they
come over the wall, or patiently try to imagine the sound of surf-waves,
or laboriously re-design that perennial dinner-gown which I've kept
tucked away in the cedar-chest of the imagination as long as I can
remember, elaborating it over and over again down to the minutest
details through the longest hour of my whitest white night until it
began to merge into the velvety robes of slumber itself! Nowadays an
ogre called Ten-O'Clock steals up behind my chair with a club in his
hand and stuns me into insensibility. Two or three times, in fact, my
dear old clumsy-fingered Dinky-Dunk has helped me get my clothes off.
But he says that the nicest sound he knows is to lie in bed and hear the
tinkle of my hair-pins as I toss them into the little Coalport pin-tray
on my dresser--which reminds me what Chinkie once said about his idea of
Heaven being eating my divinity-fudge to the sound of trumpets!

I brag about being busy, but I'm not the only busy person about this
wickyup. Olie and Dinky-Dunk talk about summer-fallowing and
double-discing and drag-harrowing and fire-guarding, and I'm beginning
to understand what it all means. They are out with their teams all day
long, working like Trojans. We have mid-day dinner, which Olie bolts in
silence and with the rapidity of chain-lightning. He is the most expert
of sword-swallowers, with a table-knife, and Dinky-Dunk says it keeps
reminding him how Burbank could make a fortune inventing a square pea
that would stay on a knife-blade.