er have stopped him.

Instead of falling into a canyon, however, at exactly ten minutes to
twelve we pulled up beside the shack door, which had been left unlocked,
and Olie went in and lighted a lamp and touched a match to the fire
already laid in the stove. I don't remember getting down from the wagon
seat and I don't remember going into the shack. But when Olie came from
putting in his team I was fast asleep on a luxurious divan made of a
rather smelly steer-hide stretched across two slim cedar-trees on four
little cedar legs, with a bag full of pine needles at the head. I lay
there watching Olie, in a sort of torpor. It surprised me how quickly
his big ungainly body could move, and how adept those big sunburned
hands of his could be.

Then sharp as an arrow through a velvet curtain came the smell of bacon
through my drowsiness. And it was a heavenly odor. I didn't even wash. I
ate bacon and eggs and toasted biscuits and orange marmalade and coffee,
the latter with condensed milk, which I hate. I don't know how I got to
my bed, or got my clothes off, or where the worthy Olie slept, or who
put out the light, or if the door had been left open or shut. I never
knew that the bed was hard, or that the coyotes were howling. I only
know that I slept for ten solid hours, without turning over, and that
when I opened my eyes I saw a big square of golden sunlight dancing on
the unpainted pine boards of the shack wall. And the funny part of it
all was, Matilda Anne, I didn't have the splitting headache I'd so
dolorously prophesied for myself. Instead of that I felt buoyant. I
started to sing as I pulled on my stockings. And I suddenly remembered
that I was terribly hungry again.

I swung open the window beside me, for it was on hinges, and poked my
head out. I could see a corral, and a long low building which I took to
be the ranch stables, and another and newer-looking building with a
metal roof, and several stacks of hay surrounded by a fence, and a row
of portable granaries. And beyond these stretched the open prairie,
limitless and beautiful in the clear morning sunshine. Above it arched a
sky of robin-egg blue, melting into opal and pale gold down toward the
rim of the world. I breathed in lungfuls of clear, dry, ozonic air, and
I really believe it made me a little light-headed, it was so
exhilarating, so champagnized with the invisible bubbles of life.

I needed that etheric eye-opener, Matilda Anne, before I calmly and