Part 5

"I understand that it's almost an hour past supper-time, my Lord, and that if you don't give me a chance to stoke up I'll bite the edges off the lamp-shade!"

I was rewarded by just the ghost of a smile, a smile that was much too wan and sickly to live long.

"All right," announced Dinky-Dunk, "I'll be down in a minute or two."

There was courage in that, I saw, for all the listlessness of the tone in which it had been uttered. So I went skipping down-stairs and closed my baby grand and inspected the table and twisted the glass bowl that held my nasturtium-buds about, to the end that the telltale word of "Salt" embossed on its side would not betray the fact that it had been commandeered from the kitchen-cabinet. Then I turned up the lamp and smilingly waited until my lord and master seated himself at the other side of the table, grateful beyond words that we had at least that evening alone and were not compelled to act up to a part before the eyes of strangers.

Yet it was anything but a successful meal. Dinky-Dunk's pretense at eating was about as hollow as my pretense at light-heartedness. We each knew that the other was playing a part, and the time came when to keep it up was altogether too much of a mockery.

"Dinky-Dunk," I said after a silence that was too abysmal to be ignored, "let's look this thing squarely in the face."

"I can't!"

"Why not?"

"I haven't the courage."

"Then we've got to get it," I insisted. "I'm ready to face the music, if you are. So let's get right down to hard-pan. Have they--have they really cleaned you out?"

"To the last dollar," he replied, without looking up.

"What did it?" I asked, remaining stubbornly and persistently ox-like in my placidity.

"No one thing did it, Chaddie, except that I tried to bite off too much. And for the last two years, of course, the boom's been flattening out. If our Associated Land Corporation hadn't gone under--"

"Then it has gone under?" I interrupted, with a catch of the breath, for I knew just how much had been staked on that venture.

Dinky-Dunk nodded his head. "And carried me with it," he grimly announced. "But even that wouldn't have meant a knock-out, if the government had only kept its promise and taken over my Vancouver Island water-front."

That, I remembered, was to have been some sort of a shipyard. Then I remembered something else.

"When the Twins were born," I reminded Dunkie, "you put the ranch here at Casa Grande in my name. Does that mean we lose our home?"

I was able to speak quietly, but I could hear the thud of my own heart-beats.

"That's for you to decide," he none too happily acknowledged. Then he added, with sudden decisiveness: "No, they can't touch anything of yours! Not a thing!"

"But won't that hold good with the Harris Ranch, as well?" I further inquired. "That was actually bought in my name. It was deeded to me from the first, and always has been in my name."

"Of course it's yours," he said with a hesitation that was slightly puzzling to me.

"Then how about the cattle and things?"

"What cattle?"

"The cattle we've kept on it to escape the wild land tax? Aren't those all legally mine?"

It sounded rapacious, I suppose, under the circumstances. It must have seemed like looting on a battlefield. But I wasn't thinking entirely about myself, even though poor old Dinky-Dunk evidently assumed so, from the look of sudden questioning that came into his stricken eyes.

"Yes, they're yours," he almost listlessly responded.

"Then, as I've already said, let's look this thing fairly and squarely in the face. We've taken a gambler's chance on a big thing, and we've lost. We've lost our pile, as they phrase it out here, but if what you say is true, we haven't lost our home, and what is still more important, we haven't lost our pride."

My husband looked down at his plate.