“I can’t say that I quite understand you,” I told him, with a sick feeling which I found it hard to keep under. Yet he must have noticed something amusingly tragic in my attitude, for he laughed, though it wasn’t without a touch of bitterness. And laughter, under the circumstances, didn’t altogether add to my happiness.
“I simply mean that Allie’s made me an offer of a hundred and fifty dollars a month to become her ranch-manager,” Dinky-Dunk announced with a casualness that was patently forced. “And as I can’t wring that much out of this half-section, and as I’d only be four-flushing if I let outsiders come in and take everything away from a tenderfoot, I don’t see—”
“And such a lovely tenderfoot,” I interrupted.
“—I don’t see why it isn’t the decent and reasonable thing,” concluded my husband, without stooping to acknowledge the interruption, “to accept that offer.”
I understood, in a way, every word he was saying; yet it seemed several minutes before the real meaning of a somewhat startling situation seeped through to my brain.
“But surely, if we get a crop,” I began. It was, however, a lame beginning. And like most lame beginnings, it didn’t go far.
“How are we going to get a crop when we can’t even raise money enough to get a tractor?” was Dinky-Dunk’s challenge. “When we haven’t help, and we’re short of seed-grain, and we can’t even get a gang-plow on credit?”
It didn’t sound like my Dinky-Dunk of old, for I knew that he was equivocating and making excuses, that he was engineering our ill luck into an apology for worse conduct. But I was afraid of myself, even more than I was afraid of Dinky-Dunk. And the voice of Instinct kept whispering to me to be patient.
“Why couldn’t we sell off some of the steers?” I valiantly suggested.
“It’s the wrong season for selling steers,” Dinky-Dunk replied with a ponderous sort of patience. “And besides, those cattle don’t belong to me.”