My poor old Dinky-Dunk, by the way, meanders about these days so moody and morose it’s beginning to disturb me. He’s at the end of his string, and picked clean to the bone, and I’m beginning to see that it’s my duty to buoy that man up, to nurse him back into a respectable belief in himself. His nerves are a bit raw, and he’s not always responsible for his manners. The other night he came in tired, and tried to read, when Poppsy and Pee-Wee were both going it like the Russian Balalaika. To tell the truth, their little tummies were a bit upset, because the food purveyor had had too strenuous a day to be regular in her rounds.

“Can’t you keep those squalling brats quiet?” Dinky-Dunk called out to me. It came like a thunder clap. It left me gasping, to think that he could call his own flesh and blood “squalling brats.” And I was shocked and hurt, but I decided not to show it.

“Will somebody kindly page Lord Chesterfield?” I quietly remarked as I went to the Twins and wheeled them out to the kitchen, where I gave them hot peppermint and rubbed their backs and quieted them down again.

I suppose there’s no such thing as a perfect husband. That’s a lesson we’ve all got to learn, the same as all children, apparently, have to find out that acorns and horse-chestnuts aren’t edible. For the nap wears off men the same as it does off clothes. I dread to have to write it down, but I begin to detect thinnesses in Dinky-Dunk, and a disturbing little run or two in the even web of his character. But he knows when he’s played Indian and attempts oblique and rather shamefaced efforts to make amends, later on, when it won’t be too noticeable. Last night, as I sat sewing, our little Dinkie must have had a bad dream, for he wakened from a sound sleep with a scream of terror. Dinky-Dunk went to him first, and took him up and sang to him, and when I glanced in I saw a rumply and tumbly and sleepy-eyed tot with his kinky head against his father’s shoulder. As I took up my sewing again and heard Dinky-Dunk singing to his son, it seemed a proud and happy and contented sort of voice. It rose and fell in that next room, in a sort of droning bass, and for the life of me I can’t tell why, but as I stopped in my sewing and sat listening to that father singing to his sleepy-eyed first-born, it brought the sudden tears to my eyes. It has been a considerable length of time, en passant, since I found myself sitting down and pumping the brine. I must be getting hardened in my old age.

Tuesday the Fourteenth

Lady Allie sent over for Dinky-Dunk yesterday morning, to fix the windmill at Casa Grande. They’d put it out of commission in the first week, and emptied the pressure-tank, and were without water, and were as helpless as a couple of canaries. We have a broken windmill of our own, right here at home, but Diddums went meekly enough, although he was in the midst of his morning work—and work is about to loom big over this ranch, for we’re at last able to get on the land. And the sooner you get on the land, in this latitude, the surer you are of your crop. We daren’t shave down any margins of chance. We need that crop....

I am really beginning to despair of Iroquois Annie. She is the only thing I can get in the way of hired help out here, and yet she is hopeless. She is sullen and wasteful, and she has never yet learned to be patient with the children. I try to soften and placate her with the gift of trinkets, for there is enough Redskin in her to make her inordinately proud of anything with a bit of flash and glitter to it. But she is about as responsive to actual kindness as a diamond-back rattler would be, and some day, if she drives me too far, I’m going off at half-cock and blow that breed into mince-meat.

By the way, I can see myself writ small in little Dinkie, my moods and waywardnesses and wicked impulses, and sudden chinooks of tenderness alternating with a perverse sort of shrinking away from love itself, even when I’m hungering for it. I can also catch signs of his pater’s masterfulness cropping out in him. Small as he is, he disturbs me by that combative stare of his. It’s almost a silent challenge I see in his eyes as he coolly studies me, after a proclamation that he will be spanked if he repeats a given misdeed.

I’m beginning to understand the meaning of that very old phrase about one’s chickens coming home to roost. I can even detect sudden impulses of cruelty in little Dinkie, when, young and tender as he appears to the casual eye, a quick and wilful passion to hurt something takes possession of him. Yesterday I watched him catch up his one-eyed Teddy Bear, which he loves, and beat its head against the shack-floor. Sometimes, too, he’ll take possession of a plate and fling it to the floor with all his force, even though he knows such an act is surely followed by punishment. It’s the same with Poppsy and Pee-Wee, with whom he is apt to be over-rough, though his offenses in that direction may still be touched with just a coloring of childish jealousy, long and arduously as I struggle to implant some trace of fraternal feeling in his anarchistic little breast. There are even times, after he’s been hugging my knees or perhaps stroking my cheek with his little velvet hands and murmuring “Maaa-maa!” in his small and bird-like coo, when he will suddenly turn savage and try to bite my patella or pull my ear out by the root.