“From you,” retorted Peter.
“But what will happen to me, if you do that?” I heard my own voice asking as Buntie started to paw the prairie-floor and I did my level best to fight down the black waves of desolation that were half-drowning me. “What’ll there be to hold me up, when you’re the only man in all this world who can keep my barrel 381 of happiness from going slap-bang to pieces? What––?”
“Verboten!” interrupted Peter. But that solemn-soft smile of his gathered me in and covered me, very much as the rumpled feathers of a mother-bird cover her young, her crazily twittering and crazily wandering young who never know their own mind.
“What’ll happen to me,” I went desperately on, “when you’re the only man alive who understands this crazy old heart of mine, when you’ve taught me to hitch the last of my hope on the one unselfish man I’ve ever known?”
This seemed to trouble Peter. But only remotely, as the lack of grammar in the Lord’s Prayer might affect a Holy Roller. He insisted, above all things, on being judicial.
“Then I’ll have to come back, I suppose,” he finally admitted, “for Dinkie’s sake.”
“Why for Dinkie’s sake?” I asked.
“Because some day, my dear, our Dinkie is going to be a great man. And I want to have a hand in fashioning that greatness.”
I sat looking at the red ball of the sun slipping down behind the shoulder of the world. A wind came out of the North, cool and sweet and balsamic with 382 hope. I heard a loon cry. And then the earth was still again.
“We’ll be waiting,” I said, with a tear of happiness tickling the bridge of my nose. And then, so that Peter might not see still another loon crying, I swung Buntie sharply about on the trail. And we rode home, side by side, through the twilight.