“Heard him what?” I asked.
“Heard him snore,” explained Peter, with a sigh.
“Are you sure?” I inquired, remembering the mornings when I’d had occasion to waken Whinnie, always to find him sleeping as silent and placid as one of my own babies.
“I had eight hours of it in which to dissipate any doubts,” he pointedly explained.
This mystified me, but to object to the tent, of course, would have been picayune. I had just the faintest of suspicions, however, that the fair Peter might never return from Buckhorn, though I tried to solace myself with the thought that the motor-car and the beaver-lined lap-robe would at least remain with me. But my fears were groundless. Before supper-time Peter was back in high spirits, with the needed new parts for the windmill, and an outfit of blue denim apparel for himself, and a little red sweater for Dinkie, and an armful of magazines for myself.
Whinnie, as he stood watching Peter’s return, clearly betrayed the disappointment which that return involved. He said nothing, but when he saw my eye upon him he gazed dourly toward his approaching rival and tapped a weather-beaten brow with one stubby finger. He meant, of course, that Peter was a little locoed.
But Peter is not. He is remarkably clear-headed and quick-thoughted, and if there’s any madness about him it’s a madness with a deep-laid method. The one thing that annoys me is that he keeps me so continuously and yet so obliquely under observation. He pretends to be studying out my windmill, but he is really trying to study out its owner. Whinnie, I know, won’t help him much. And I refuse to rise to his gaudiest flies. So he’s still puzzling over what he regards as an anomaly, a farmerette who knows the difference between De Bussey and a side-delivery horse-rake, a mother of three children who can ride a pinto and play a banjo, a clodhopper in petticoats who can talk about Ragusa and Toarmina and the summer races at Piping Rock. But it’s a relief to converse about something besides summer-fallowing and breaking and seed-wheat and tractor-oil and cows’ teats. And it’s a stroke of luck to capture a farm-hand who can freshen you up on foreign opera at the same time that he campaigns against the domestic weed!
Thursday the Eleventh
We are a peaceful and humdrum family, very different from the westerners of the romantic movies. If we were the cinema kind of ranchers Pee-Wee would be cutting his teeth on a six-shooter, little Dinkie would be off rustling cattle, Poppsy would be away holding up the Transcontinental Limited, and Mummsie would be wearing chaps, toting a gun, and pretending to the sheriff that her jail-breaking brother was not hidden in the cellar!