ked like a woman of
sixty, and yet her husband said she was just thirty-seven. Their water
is strong with alkali, and this and the prairie wind (combined with a
something deep down in her own make-up) have made her like a vulture,
lean and scrawny and dry. I stared at that hard line of jaw and
cheekbone and wondered how long ago the soft curves were there, and if
those overworked hands had ever been pretty, and if that flat back had
ever been rounded and dimpled. Her hair was untidy. Her apron was
unspeakably dirty, and she used it as both a handkerchief and a
hand-towel. Her voice was as hard as nails, and her cooking was
wretched. Not a door or window was screened, and, as I said before, we
were nearly smothered with flies.

Dinky-Dunk did not dare to look at me, all dinner time. And on the way
home Mrs. Dixon's eyes kept haunting me, they seemed so tired and vacant
and accusing, as though they were secretly holding God Himself to
account for cheating her out of her woman's heritage of joy. I asked
Dinky-Dunk if we'd ever get like that. He said, "Not on your life!" and
quoted the Latin phrase about mind controlling matter. The Dixons, he
went on to explain, were of the "slum" type, only they didn't happen to
live in a city. But tired and sleepy as I was that night, I got up to
cold-cream my face and arms. And I'm going to write for almond-meal and
glycerin from the mail-order house to-morrow. _And_ a brassiere--for I
saw what looked like the suspicion of a smile on Dinky-Dunk's unshaven
lips as he watched me struggling into my corsets this morning. It took
some writhing, and even then I could hardly make it. I threw my wet
sponge after him when he turned back in the doorway with the mildly
impersonal question: "Who's your fat friend?" Then he scooted for the
corral, and I went back and studied my chin in the dresser-mirror, to
make sure it wasn't getting terraced into a dew-lap like Uncle
Carlton's.

But I can't help thinking of the Dixons, and feeling foolishly and
helplessly sorry for them. It was dusk when we got back from that long
drive to their ranch, and the stars were coming out. I could see our
shack from miles off, a little lonely dot of black against the sky-line.
I made Dinky-Dunk stop the team, and we sat and looked at it. It seemed
so tiny there, so lonely, so strange, in the middle of such miles and
miles of emptiness, with a little rift of smoke going up from its
desolate little pipe-end. Then I said