k-tines
eight inches in his body while she picked up her father and carried him
back to the house. And I won't even kill my own hens, but have always
appointed Olie as the executioner.

_Friday the Seventeenth_

It is funny to see Percy teaching Olga. She watches him as though he
were a miracle man. Her dewy red lips form the words slowly, and the
full white throat utters them largely, laboriously, instruments on them,
and in some perhaps uncouth way makes them lovely. I sit with my sewing,
listening. Sometimes I open the piano and play. But I feel out of it. I
seem to be on the fringe of things that are momentous only to other
people. Last night, when Percy said he thought he'd sell his ranch,
Dinky-Dunk looked up from his paper-littered desk and told him to hang
on to that land like a leech. But he didn't explain why.

_Saturday the Nineteenth_

I can't even remember the date. But I know that midsummer is here, that
the men folks are so busy I have to shift for myself, and that the talk
is still of wheat, and how it's heading, and how the dry weather of the
last few weeks will affect the length of the straw. Dinky-Dunk is making
desperate efforts to get men to cut wild-hay. He's bought the hay rights
of a large stretch between some sloughs about seven miles east of our
place. He says men are scarcer than hen's teeth, but has the promise of
a couple of cutthroats who were thrown off a freight-train near
Buckhorn. Percy volunteered to help, and was convinced of the fact that
he could drive a mower. Olie, who nurses a vast contempt for Percy, and,
I secretly believe, rather resents his attentions to Olga, put the new
team of colts on the mower. They promptly ran away with Percy, who came
within an ace of being thrown in front of the mower-knife, which would
have chopped him up into very unscholarly mincemeat. Olga got on a
horse, bareback, and rounded up the colts. Then she cooed about poor
bruised Percy and tried to coax him to come to the house. But Percy said
he was going to drive that team, even if he had to be strapped to the
mower-seat. And, oddly enough, he did "gat them beat," as Olga expressed
it, but it tired him out and wilted his collar and the sweat was running
down his face when he came in at noon. Olga is very proud of him. But
she announced that she'd drive that mower herself, and sailed into Olie
for giving a tenderfoot a team like that to drive. It was her first
outburst. I couldn't