of me, Kitten-Cats, even then?" I demanded.

He looked at me with his solemn Scotch-Canadian eyes. "I'm not sure of
you, even now," was his answer. But I made him take it back.

It's rather odd how Dinky-Dunk got this ranch, which used to be called
the Cochrane Ranch, for even behind this peaceful little home of ours
there is a touch of tragedy. Hugh Cochrane was one of Dinky-Dunk's
surveyors when he first took up railroad work in British Columbia. Hugh
had a younger brother Andrew, who was rather wild and had been brought
out here and planted on the prairie to keep him out of mischief. One
winter night he rode nearly thirty miles to a dance (they do that
apparently out here, and think nothing of it) and instead of riding home
at five o'clock in the morning, with the others, he visited a
whisky-runner who was operating a "blind pig." There he acquired much
more whisky than was good for him and got lost on the trail. That meant
he was badly frozen and probably out of his mind before he got back to
the shack. He wasn't able to keep up a fire, of course, or do anything
for himself--and I suppose the poor boy simply froze to death. He was
alone there, and it was weeks and weeks before his body was found. But
the most gruesome part of it all is that his horses had been stabled,
tied up in their stalls without feed. They were all found dead, poor
brutes. They'd even eaten the wooden boards the mangers were built of.
Hugh Cochrane couldn't get over it, and was going to sell the ranch for
fourteen hundred dollars when Dinky-Dunk heard of it and stepped in and
bought the whole half-section. Then he bought the McKinnon place, a
half-section to the north of this, after McKinnon had lost all his
buildings because he was too shiftless to make a fire-guard. And when
the railway work was finished Dinky-Dunk took up wheat-growing. He is a
great believer in wheat. He says wheat spells wealth, in this country.
Some people call him a "land-miner," he says, but when he's given the
chance to do the thing as he wants to, he'll show them who's right.

_Wednesday the Twenty-fifth_

Dinky-Dunk and I have been making plans. He's promised to build an annex
to the shack, a wing on the north side, so I can have a store-room and a
clothes-closet at one end and a guest-chamber at the other. And I'm to
have a sewing-machine and a bread-mixer, and the smelly steer-hide divan
is going to be banished to the bunk-house. And Dinky-Dunk says I mus