Seventh_

The weather has cleared: there's a chinook arch in the sky, and a sort
of St. Martin's-Summer haze on all the prairie. But there's news to-day.
Kino, our new neighbor's Jap, has decamped with a good deal of money and
about all of Percival Benson's valuables. The poor boy is almost
helpless, but he's not a quitter. He said he chopped his first kindling
to-day, though he had to stand in a wash-tub, while he did it, to keep
from cutting his feet. Dinky-Dunk's birthday is only three weeks off,
and I'm making plans for a celebration.

_Tuesday the Ninth_

The days slip by, and scarcely leave me time to write. Dinky-Dunk is a
sort of pendulum, swinging out to work, back to eat, and then out, and
then back again. Olie is teaming in lumber and galvanized iron for a new
building of some sort. My lord, in the evenings, sits with paper and
pencil, figuring out measurements and making plans. I sit on the other
side of the table, as a rule, sewing. Sometimes I go around to his side
of the table, and make him put his plans away for a few minutes. We are
very happy. But where the days fly to I scarcely know. We are always
looking toward the future, talking about the future, "conceiting" for
the future, as the Irish say. Next summer is to be our banner year.
Dinky-Dunk is going to risk everything on wheat. He's like a general
plotting out a future plan of campaign--for when the work comes, he
says, it will come in a rush. Help will be hard to get, so he'll sell
his British Columbia timber rights and buy a forty-horse-power gasoline
tractor. He will at least if gasoline gets cheaper, for with "gas" still
at twenty-six cents a gallon horse-power is cheapest. But during the
breaking season in April and May, one of these engines can haul eight
gang-plows behind it. In twenty-four hours it will be able to turn over
thirty-five acres of prairie soil--and the ordinary man and team counts
two acres of plowing a decent day's work.

To-night I asked Dinky-Dunk why he risked everything on wheat and warned
him that we might have to revise the old Kansas trekker's slogan to--

"In wheat we trusted,
In wheat we busted!"

Dinky-Dunk explained that to keep on raising only wheat would be bad for
the land, and even now meant taking a chance, but situated as he was it
brought in the quickest money. And he wanted money in a hurry, for he
had a nest to feather for a lady wild-bird that he'd captured--which
meant me. Later on