Part 6

"That's gone, too," he slowly admitted.

"It doesn't sound like my Dinky-Dunk, a thing like that," I promptly admonished. But I'd spoken before I caught sight of the tragic look in his eyes as he once more looked up at me.

"If those politicians had only kept their word, we'd have had our shipyard deal to save us," he said, more to himself than to me. Yet that, I knew, was more an excuse than a reason.

"And if the rabbit-dog hadn't stopped to scratch, he might have caught the hare!" I none too mercifully quoted. My husband's face hardened as he sat staring across the table at me.

"I'm glad you can take it lightly enough to joke over," he remarked, as he got up from his chair. There was a ponderous sort of bitterness in his voice, a bitterness that brought me up short. I had to fight back the surge of pity which was threatening to strangle my voice, pity for a man, once so proud of his power, standing stripped and naked in his weakness.

"Heaven knows I don't want to joke, Honey-Chile," I told him. "But we're not the first of these wild-catting westerners who've come a cropper. And since we haven't robbed a bank, or--"

"It's just a little worse than that," cut in Dinky-Dunk, meeting my astonished gaze with a sort of Job-like exultation in his own misery. I promptly asked him what he meant. He sat down again, before speaking.

"I mean that I've lost Allie's money along with my own," he very slowly and distinctly said to me. And we sat there, staring at each other, for all the world like a couple of penguins on a sub-Arctic shingle.

Allie, I remembered, was Dinky-Dunk's English cousin, Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland, who'd made the Channel flight in a navy plane and the year before had figured in a Devonshire motor-car accident. Dinky-Dunk had a picture of her, from The Queen, up in his study somewhere, the picture of a very debonair and slender young woman on an Irish hunter. He had a still younger picture of her in a tweed skirt and spats and golf-boots, on the brick steps of a Sussex country-house, with the jaw of a bull-dog resting across her knee. It was signed and dated and in a silver frame and every time I'd found myself polishing that oblong of silver I'd done so with a wifely ruffle of temper.

"How much was it?" I finally asked, still adhering to my rôle of the imperturbable chorus.

"She sent out over seven thousand pounds. She wanted it invested out here."

"Why?"

"Because of the new English taxes, I suppose. She said she wanted a ranch, but she left everything to me."

"Then it was a trust fund!"

Dinky-Dunk bowed his head, in assent.

"It practically amounted to that," he acknowledged.

"And it's gone?"

"Every penny of it."

"But, Dinky-Dunk," I began. I didn't need to continue, for he seemed able to read my thoughts.

"I was counting on two full sections for Allie in the Simmond's Valley tract. That land is worth thirty dollars an acre, unbroken, at any time. But the bank's swept that into the bag, of course, along with the rest. The whole thing was like a stack of nine-pins--when one tumbled, it knocked the other over. I thought I could manage to save that much for her, out of the ruin. But the bank saw the land-boom was petering out. They shut off my credit, and foreclosed on the city block--and that sent the whole card-house down."

I had a great deal of thinking to do, during the next minute or two.

"Then isn't it up to us to knuckle down, Dinky-Dunk, and make good on that Lady Alicia mistake? If we get a crop this year we can--"

But Dinky-Dunk shook his head. "A thousand bushels an acre couldn't get me out of this mess," he maintained.

"Why not?"

"Because your Lady Alicia and her English maid have already arrived in Montreal," he quietly announced.

"How do you know that?"

"She wrote to me from New York. She's had influenza, and it left her with a wheezy tube and a spot on her lungs, as she put it. Her doctor told her to go to Egypt, but she says Egypt's impossible, just now, and if she doesn't like our West she says she'll amble on to Arizona, or try California for the winter." He looked away, and smiled rather wanly. "She's counting on the big game shooting we can give her!"

"Grizzly, and buffalo, and that sort of thing?"