Tuesday, the Twenty-First
The armistice continues. And I continue to sit on my keg of powder and sing “O Sole Mio” to the northern moon.
I have had Whinstane Sandy build a toboggan-slide out of the old binder-shed, which has been pretty well blown to pieces by last summer’s wind-storms. He picked out the soundest of the two-by-fours and made a framework which he boarded over with the best of the weather-bleached old siding. For when you haven’t the luxury of a hill on your landscape, you can at least make an imitation one. Whinnie even planed the board-joints in the center of the runway and counter-sunk every nail-head—and cussed volubly when he pounded his heavily mittened thumb with the hammer. The finished structure could hardly be called a thing of beauty. We have only one of the stable-ladders to mount it from the rear, and instead of toboggans we have only Poppsy’s home-made hand-sleigh and Dinkie’s somewhat dilapidated “flexible coaster.” But when water had been carried out 266 to that smooth runway and the boards had been coated with ice, like brazil-nuts glacé, and the snow along the lower course had been well packed down, it at least gave you a run for your money.
The tip-top point of the slide couldn’t have been much more than fourteen or fifteen feet above the prairie-floor, but it seemed perilous enough when I tried it out—much to the perturbation of Whinstane Sandy—by lying stomach-down on Dinkie’s coaster and letting myself shoot along that well-iced incline. It was a kingly sensation, that of speed wedded to danger, and it took me back to Davos at a breath. Then I tried it with Dinkie, and then with Poppsy, and then with Poppsy and Dinkie together. We had some grand old tumbles, in the loose snow, and some unmentionable bruises, before we became sufficiently expert to tool our sleigh-runners along their proper trail. But it was good fun. The excitement of the thing, in fact, rather got into my blood. In half an hour the three of us were covered with snow, were shouting like Comanches, and were having an altogether wild time of it. There was climbing enough to keep us warm, for all the sub-zero weather, and I was finally allowed to escape to the house only on the promise that I risk my neck again on the morrow.
Friday the Twenty-Fourth
My Dinkie’s secret is no longer a secret. It divulged itself to me to-day with the suddenness of a thunder-clap. Peter Ketley has been back at Alabama Ranch for nearly three weeks.
I was out with the kiddies this afternoon, having another wild time on the toboggan-slide, dressed in an old Mackinaw of Dinky-Dunk’s buckled in close around my waist and a pair of Whinnie’s heaviest woolen socks over my moccasins and a mangy old gray-squirrel cap on by head. The children looked like cherubs who’d been rolled in a flour-barrel, with their eyes shining and their cheeks glowing like Richmond roses, but I must have looked like something that had been put out to frighten the coyotes away. At any rate, there we were, all squealing like pigs and all powdered from tip to toe with the dry snow and all looking like Piutes on the war-path. And who should walk calmly about the corner of the buildings but Peter himself!
My heart stopped beating and I had to lean 268 against the end of the toboggan-slide until I could catch my breath.