ut I'd hold his hand, under the magazine I was pretending to
read, and whistle _Home, Sweet Home_! He kept saying it would be hard,
for the first year or two, and there would be a terrible number of
things I'd be sure to miss. _Love Me and The World Is Mine!_ I hummed,
as I leaned over against his big wide shoulder. And I lay there smiling
and happy, blind to everything that was before me, and I only laughed
when Dinky-Dunk asked me if I'd still say that when I found there
wasn't a nutmeg-grater within seven miles of my kitchen.

"Do you love me?" I demanded, hanging on to him right in front of the
car-porter.

"I love you better than anything else in all this wide world!" was his
slow and solemn answer.

When we left Winnipeg, too, he tried to tell me what a plain little
shack we'd have to put up with for a year or two, and how it wouldn't be
much better than camping out, and how he knew I was clear grit and would
help him win that first year's battle. There was nothing depressing to
me in the thought of life in a prairie-shack. I never knew, of course,
just what it would be like, and had no way of knowing. I remembered
Chinkie's little love of a farm in Sussex, and I'd been a week at the
Westbury's place out on Long Island, with its terraced lawns and gardens
and greenhouses and macadamized roads. And, on the whole, I expected a
cross between a shooting-box and a Swiss chalet, a little nest of a home
that was so small it was sure to be lovable, with a rambler-rose draping
the front and a crystal spring bubbling at the back door, a little
flowery island on the prairie where we could play Swiss-Family-Robinson
and sally forth to shoot prairie-chicken and ruffed grouse to our
hearts' content.

Well, that shack wasn't quite what I expected! But I mustn't run ahead
of my story, Matilda Anne, so I'll go back to where Dinky-Dunk and I got
off the side-line "accommodation" at Buckhorn, with our traps and trunks
and hand-bags and suitcases. And these had scarcely been piled on the
wooden platform before the station-agent came running up to Duncan with
a yellow sheet in his hand. And Duncan looked worried as he read it, and
stopped talking to his man called Olie, who was there beside the
platform, in a big, sweat-stained Stetson hat, with a big team hitched
to a big wagon with straw in the bottom of the box.

Olie, I at once told myself, was a Swede. He was one of the ugliest men
I ever clapped eyes on, but I found out aft