This seemed a trivial enough incident, at first. But the heat and moisture of that little pocket of flesh caused the bean to swell, and soon had Dinkie crying with pain. So I renewed my efforts to get that bean out of the child’s ear, for by this time he was really suffering. But I didn’t succeed. There was no way of getting behind it, or getting a hold on it. And poor Dinkie bawled bitterly, ignorant of why this pain should be inflicted on him and outraged that his own mother should add to it by probing about the already swollen side of his head.
I was, in fact, getting a bit panicky, and speculating on how long it would take to get Dinkie in to Buckhorn and a doctor, when Struthers remembered about a pair of toilet tweezers she’d once possessed herself of, for pulling out an over-punctual gray-hair or two. Even then I had to resort to heroic measures, tying the screaming child’s hands tight to his side with a bath-towel and having the tremulous Struthers hold his poor little head flat against the kitchen table.
It was about as painful, I suppose, as extracting a tooth, but I finally got a grip on that swollen legume and pulled it from its inflamed pocket of flesh. I felt as relieved and triumphant as an obstetrician after a hard case, and meekly handed over to Dinkie anything his Royal Highness desired, even to his fifth cookie and the entire contents of my sewing-basket, which under ordinary circumstances is strictly taboo. But once the ear-passage was clear the pain went away, and Dinkie, at the end of a couple of hours, was himself again.
But Peter has left a hole in our lives. I keep feeling that he’s merely out on the land and will be coming in with that quiet and remote smile of his and talking like mad through a meal that I always had an incentive for making a little more tempting than the ordinary grub-rustling of a clodhopper.
The only person about Alabama Ranch who seems undisturbed by Peter’s departure is Whinstane Sandy. He reminds me of a decrepit but robustious old rooster repossessing himself of a chicken-run after the decapitation of an arrogant and envied rival. He has with a dour sort of blitheness connected up the windmill pump, in his spare time, and run a pipe in through the kitchen wall and rigged up a sink, out of a galvanized pig-trough. It may not be lovely to the eye, but it will save many a step about this shack of ours. And the steps count, now that the season’s work is breaking over us like a Jersey surf!
Thursday the Twenty-sixth
I’ve got Struthers in jumpers, and she’s learning how to handle a team. Whinnie laughed at her legs, and said they made him think a-muckle o’ a heron. But men are scarce in this section, and it looks as though Alabama Ranch was going to have a real wheat crop. Whinnie boasts that we’re three weeks ahead of Casa Grande, which, they tell me, is taking on a neglected look.
I’ve had no message from my Dinky-Dunk, and no news of him. All day long, at the back of my brain, a nervous little mouse of anxiety keeps nibbling and nibbling away. Last night, when she was helping me get the Twins ready for bed, Struthers confided to me that she felt sure Lady Alicia and my husband had been playmates together in England at one time, for she’s heard them talking, and laughing about things that had happened long ago. But it’s not the things that happened long ago that are worrying me. It’s the things that may be happening now.
I wonder what the fair Lady Alicia intends doing about getting her crop off. Sing Lo will scarcely be the man to master that problem.... The Lord knows I’m busy enough, but I seem to be eternally waiting for something. I wonder if every woman’s life has a larval period like this? I’ve my children and Bobs. Over my heart, all day long, should flow a deep and steady current of love. But it’s not the kind I’ve a craving for. There’s something missing. I’ve been wondering if Dinky-Dunk, even though he were here at my side, would still find any “kick” in my kisses. I can’t understand why he never revealed to me the fact that he and Lady Allie were playmates as children. In that case, she must be considerably older than she looks. But old or young, I wish she’d stayed in England with her croquet and pat-tennis and broom-stick-cricket, instead of coming out here and majestically announcing that nothing was to be expected of a country which had no railway porters!