ground was rocking slowly from side to side like a boat. But Dinky-Dunk
didn't even observe me. He was fighting out the last patch of fire, on
foot.

When he came over to where I was waiting for him he was as sooty and
black as a boiler-maker. He dropped down beside me, breathing hard. We
sat there holding each other's hand, for several minutes, in utter
silence. Then he said, rather thickly: "Are you all right?" And I told
him that of course I was all right. Then he said, without looking at me,
"I forgot!" Then he got Paddy and patched up the harness and took me
home in the buckboard.

But all the rest of the day he hung about the shack, as solemn as an
owl. And once in the night he got up and lighted the lamp and came over
and studied my face. I blinked up at him sleepily, for I was dog-tired
and had been dreaming that we were back in Paris at the Bal des Quatz
Arts and were about to finish up with an early breakfast at the Madrid.
He looked so funny with his rumpled up hair and his faded pajamas that I
couldn't help laughing a little as he blew out the light and got back
into bed.

"Dinky-Dunk," I said, as I turned over my pillow and got comfy again,
"wouldn't it have been hell if all our wheat had been burned up?" I
forget what Duncan said, for in two minutes I was asleep again.

_Monday the Seventh_

The dry spell has been broken, and broken with a vengeance. One gets
pretty well used to high winds, in the West. There used to be days at a
time when that unending high wind would make me think something was
going to happen, filling me with a vague sense of impending calamity and
making me imagine a big storm was going to blow up and wipe Casa Grande
and its little coterie off the map. But we've had a real wind-storm,
this time, with rain and hail. Dinky-Dunk's wheat looks sadly draggled
out and beaten down, but he says there wasn't enough hail to hurt
anything; that the straw will straighten up again, and that this
downpour was just what he wanted. Early in the afternoon, on looking out
the shack door, I saw a tangle of clouds on the sky-line. They seemed
twisted up like a skein of wool a kitten had been playing with. Then
they seemed to marshal themselves into one solid line and sweep up over
the sky, getting blacker and blacker as they came. Olga ran in with her
yellow hair flying, slamming and bolting the stable-doors, locking the
chicken-coop, and calling out for me to get my clothes off the line o