“He play somew’ere roun’,” announced Ikkie, secreting the purloined head-gear and circling away from the forbidden dressing-table.
“But where?” I asked, with exceptional sharpness, for my eye had already traversed the most of that shack and had encountered no sign of him.
That sloe-eyed breed didn’t know just where, and apparently didn’t care. He was playing somewhere outside, with three or four old wooden decoy-ducks. That was all she seemed to know. But I didn’t stop to question her. I ran to the door and looked out. Then my heart began going down like an elevator, for I could see nothing of the child. So I made the rounds of the shack again, calling “Dinkie!” as I went.
Then I looked through the bunk-house, and even tried the cellar. Then I went to the rainwater tub, with my heart up in my throat. He wasn’t there, of course. So I made a flying circle of the out-buildings. But still I got no trace of him.
I was panting when I got back to the shack, where Iroquois Annie was fussing stolidly over the stove-fire. I caught her by the snake-like braid of her hair, though I didn’t know I was doing it, at the moment, and swung her about so that my face confronted hers.
“Where’s my boy?” I demanded in a sort of shout of mingled terror and rage and dread. “Where is he, you empty-eyed idiot? Where is he?”
But that half-breed, of course, couldn’t tell me. And a wave of sick fear swept over me. My Dinkie was not there. He was nowhere to be found. He was lost—lost on the prairie. And I was shouting all this at Ikkie, without being quite conscious of what I was doing.
“And remember,” I hissed out at her, in a voice that didn’t sound like my own as I swung her about by her suddenly parting waist, “if anything has happened to that child, I’ll kill you! Do you understand, I’ll kill you as surely as you’re standing in those shoes!”
I went over the shack, room by room, for still the third time. Then I went over the bunk-house and the other buildings, and every corner of the truck-garden, calling as I went.
But still there was no answer to my calls. And I had to face the steel-cold knowledge that my child was lost. That little toddler, scarcely more than a baby, had wandered away on the open prairie.