ner travels
a couple of hundred miles out here to put it in shape. And it's far too
big for the shack, even when pushed right up into the corner. But
Dinky-Dunk says that before next winter there'll be a different sort of
house on this spot where Casa Grande now stands.

"And that's to keep your soul alive, in the meantime," he announced. I
scolded him for being so extravagant, when he needed every dollar he
could lay his hands on. But he wouldn't listen to me. In fact, it only
started an outburst.

"My God, Gee-Gee," he cried, "haven't you given up enough for me?
Haven't you sacrificed enough in coming out here to the end of nowhere
and leaving behind everything that made life decent?"

"Why, Honey Chile, didn't I get _you_?" I demanded. But even that didn't
stop him.

"Don't you suppose I ever think what it's meant to you, to a woman like
you? There are certain things we can't have, but there are some things
we're going to have. This next ten or twelve months will be hard, but
after that there's going to be a change--if the Lord's with me, and I
have a white man's luck!"

"And supposing we have bad luck?" I asked him. He was silent for a
moment or two.

"We can always give up, and go back to the city," he finally said.

"Give up!" I said with a whoop. "Give up? Not on your life, Mister Dour
Man! We're not going to be Dixonites! We're going to win out!" And we
were together in a death-clinch, hugging the breath out of each other,
when Olie came in to ask if he hadn't better get the stock stabled, as
there was bad weather coming.

_Monday the Eleventh_

We are having the first real blizzard of the winter. It began yesterday,
as Olie intimated, and for all the tail-end of the day my Dinky-Dunk was
on the go, in the bitter cold, looking after fuel and feed and getting
things ship-shape, for all the world like a skipper who's read his
barometer and seen a hurricane coming. There had been no wind for a
couple of days, only dull and heavy skies with a disturbing sense of
quietness. Even when I heard Olie and Dinky-Dunk shouting outside, and
shoring up the shack-walls with poles, I could not quite make out what
it meant.

Then the blizzard came. It came down out of the northwest, like a
cloudburst. It hummed and sang, and then it whined, and then it
screamed, screamed in a high falsetto that made you think poor old
Mother Earth was in her last throes! The snow was fine and hard, really
minute particles o