Part 15

"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."

"Then whose are they?" I demanded.

"They're yours," retorted Dinky-Dunk, and I found his hair-splitting, at such a time, singularly exasperating.

"I rather imagine they belonged to the family, if you intend it to remain a family."

He winced at that, as I had proposed that he should.

"It seems to be getting a dangerously divided one," he flung back, with a quick and hostile glance in my direction.

I was ready to fly to pieces, like a barrel that's lost its hoops. But a thin and quavery and over-disturbing sound from the swing-box out on the sleeping-porch brought me up short. It was a pizzicato note which I promptly recognized as the gentle Pee-Wee's advertisement of wakefulness. So I beat a quick and involuntary retreat, knowing only too well what I'd have ahead of me if Poppsy joined in to make that solo a duet.

But Pee-Wee refused to be silenced, and what Dinky-Dunk had just said felt more and more like a branding-iron against my breast. So I carried my wailing infant back to the dinner-table where my husband still stood beside his empty chair. The hostile eye with which he regarded the belcantoing Pee-Wee reminded me of the time he'd spoken of his own off-spring as "squalling brats." And the memory wasn't a tranquillizing one. It was still another spur roweling me back to the ring of combat.

"Then you've decided to take that position?" I demanded as I surveyed the cooling roast-beef and the fallen Yorkshire pudding.

"As soon as they can fix up my sleeping-quarters in the bunk-house over at Casa Grande," was Dinky-Dunk's reply. He tried to say it casually, but didn't quite succeed, for I could see his color deepen a little. And this, in turn, led to a second only too obvious gesture of self-defense.

"My monthly check, of course, will be delivered to you," he announced, with an averted eye.

"Why to me?" I coldly inquired.

"It wouldn't be of much use to me," he retorted. And I resented his basking thus openly in the fires of martyrdom.

"In that case," I asked, "what satisfaction are you getting out of your new position?"

That sent the color ebbing from his face again, and he looked at me as I'd never seen him look at me before. We'd both been mauled by the paw of Destiny, and we were both nursing ragged nerves and oversensitized spirits, facing each other as irritable as teased rattlers, ready to thump rocks with our head. More than once I'd heard Dinky-Dunk proclaim that the right sort of people never bickered and quarreled. And I remembered Theobald Gustav's pet aphorism to the effect that Hassen machts nichts. But life had its limits. And I wasn't one of those pink-eared shivery little white mice who could be intimidated into tears by a frown of disapproval from my imperial mate. And married life, after all, is only a sort of guerre d'usure.

"And you think you're doing the right thing?" I demanded of my husband, not without derision, confronting him with a challenge on my face and a bawling Pee-Wee on my hip.

Dinky-Dunk sniffed.

"That child seems to have its mother's disposition," he murmured, ignoring my question.

"The prospects of its acquiring anything better from its father seem rather remote," I retorted, striking blindly. For that over-deft adding of insult to injury had awakened every last one of my seven sleeping devils. It was an evidence of cruelty, cold and calculated cruelty. And by this time little waves of liquid fire were running through my tingling body.

"Then I can't be of much service to this family," announced Dinky-Dunk, with his maddening note of mockery.

"I fail to see how you can be a retriever for a flabby-minded idler and the head of this household at one and the same time," I said out of the seething crater-fogs of my indignation.

"She's never impressed me as being flabby," he ventured, with a quietness which only a person who knew him would or could recognize as dangerous.

"Well, I don't share your admiration for her," I retorted, letting the tide of vitriol carry me along in its sweep.

Dinky-Dunk's face hardened.

"Then what do you intend doing about it?" he demanded.