Struthers, who is to go in to Buckhorn with the children when they have their picture taken, is already deep in elaborating preparations for that expedition. She is improvising an English nurse’s uniform and has asked if there might be one picture of her and the children.
Tuesday the Fifteenth
The children have been away for a whole day, the first time in family history. And oh, what a difference it makes in this lonely little prairie home of ours! The quietness, the emptiness, the desolation of it all was something quite beyond my imagination. I know now that I could never live apart from them. Whatever happens, I shall not be separated from my kiddies....
I spent my idle time in getting Peter’s music-box in working order. Dinky-Dunk, who despises it, thoughtlessly sat on the package of records and broke three of them. I’ve been trying over the others. They sound tinny and flat, and I’m beginning to suspect I haven’t my sound-box adjusted right. I’ve a hunger to hear good music. And without quite knowing it, I’ve been craving for city life again, for at least a taste of it, for even a chocolate cream-soda at a Huyler counter. Dinky-Dunk yesterday said that I was a cloudy creature, and accused me of having a mutinous mouth. Men seem to think that love should be like an eight-day clock, with a moment or two of industrious winding-up rewarded by a long week of undeviating devotion.
Sunday the Twenty-seventh
The thrashing outfits are over at Casa Grande, and my being a mere spectator of the big and busy final act of the season’s drama reminds me of three years ago, just before Dinkie arrived. Struthers, however, is at Casa Grande and in her glory, the one and only woman in a circle of nine active-bodied men.
I begin to see that it’s true what Dinky-Dunk said about business looming bigger in men’s lives than women are apt to remember. He’s working hard, and his neck’s so thin that his Adam’s apple sticks out like a push-button, but he gets his reward in finding his crop running much higher than he had figured. He’s as keen as ever he was for power and prosperity. He wants success, and night and day he’s scheming for it. Sometimes I wonder if he didn’t deliberately use his cousin Allie in this juggling back of Casa Grande into his own hands. Yet Dinky-Dunk, with all his faults, is not, and could not be, circuitous. I feel sure of that.
He became philosophical, the other day when I complained about the howling of the coyotes, and protested it was these horizon-singers that kept the prairie clean. He even argued that the flies which seem such a pest to the cattle in summer-time are a blessing in disguise, since the unmolested animals over-eat when feed is plentiful and get black-rot. So out of suffering comes wisdom and out of endurance comes fortitude!