I was called to the phone before breakfast this morning and it was the blessed voice of Peter I heard from the other end of the wire. My telegram had got out to him from Buckhorn a day late. But he had no definite news for me. He was quite fixed in his belief, however, that Dinkie would be bobbing up at his old home in a day or two.
“The boy will travel this way,” he assured me. “He’s bound to do that. It’s as natural as water running down-hill!”
Duncan asked me whom I’d been talking to, and I had to tell him. His face clouded and the familiar quick look of resentment came into his eyes.
“I can’t see what that Quaker’s got to do with this question,” he barked out. But I held my peace.
Sunday the First
I have found a message from my Dinkie. I came across it this morning, by accident. It was in my sewing-basket, the basket made of birch-bark and stained porcupine quills and lined with doe-skin, which I’d once bought from a Reservation squaw in Buckhorn with a tiny papoose on her back. Duncan had upbraided me for passing out my last five-dollar bill to that hungry Nitchie, but the poor woman needed it.
My fingers were shaking as I unfolded the note. And written there in the script I knew so well I read:
“Darligest Mummsey: