It is raining to-night, I notice, steadily and dismally. It is a dark night, outside, for lost children....
Duncan has just come home, wet and muddy, and gone up to his room. The gray-faced solemnity with which he strode past me makes me feel sure that he has been conversing with his lady-love. But what 356 difference does it make? What difference does anything make? In the matter of women, I have just remembered, what may be one man’s meat is another man’s poison. But I can’t understand these reversible people, like house-rugs, who can pretend to love two ways at once.... I only know one man, in all the wide world, who has not shattered my faith in his kind. He is one of those neck-or-nothing men who never change.
There are many ranchers, out in this country, who keep what they call a blizzard-line. It’s a rope that stretches in winter from their house-door to their shed or their stable, a rope that keeps them from getting lost when a blizzard is raging. Peter, I know, has been my blizzard-line. And in some way, please God, he will yet lead me back to warmth. He is himself out there in the cold, accepting it, all the time, with the same quiet fortitude that a Polar bear might. But he will thole through, in the end. For with all his roughness he can be unexpectedly adroit. Whinstane Sandy once told me something he had learned about Polar bears in his old Yukon days: with all their heaviness, they can go where a dog daren’t venture. If need be, they can flatten out and slide over a sheet of ice too thin to support a running 357 dog. And the drift-ice may be widening, but I refuse to give up my hope of hope. “Let the mother go,” as the Good Book says, “that it may be well with thee!” ...
I have just remembered that I tried to shoot my husband once. He may make use of that, when he gets down to Virginia City. It might, in fact, help things along very materially. And Susie’s eyes will probably pop out, when she reads it in a San Francisco paper....
I’ve thought of so many clever things I should have said to Alsina Teeswater. As I look back, I find it was the other lady who did about all the talking. There were old ulcerations to be cleared away, of course, and I let her talk about the same as you let a dentist work with his fingers in your mouth.... But now I must go up and make sure my Poppsy is safely tucked in. I have just opened the door and looked out. It is storming wretchedly. God pity any little boys who are abroad on such a night!
Two Hours Later
It is well past midnight. But there is no sleep this night for Chaddie McKail. I am too happy to sleep. I am too happy to act sane. For my boy is safe. Peter has found my Dinkie!
I was called to the telephone, a little after eleven, but couldn’t hear well on the up-stairs extension, so I went to the instrument down-stairs, where the operator told me it was long-distance, from Buckhorn. So I listened, with my heart in my mouth. But all I could get was a buzz and crackle and an occasional ghostly word. It was the storm, I suppose. Then I heard Peter’s voice, thin and faint and far away, but most unmistakably Peter’s voice.