d up a
little blade of prairie-grass, and held it up in front of me.

"Have you any idea of how far it is from the Rockies across to the
Hudson Bay and from the Line up to the Peace River Valley?"

Of course I hadn't.

"And have you any idea of how many millions of acres of land that is,
and how many millions of blades of grass like this there are in each
acre?" he soberly demanded.

And again of course I hadn't.

"Well, this one blade of grass is the amount of love I am able to
express for you, and all those other blades in all those millions of
acres is what love itself is!"

I thought it over, just as solemnly as he had said it. I think I was
satisfied. For when my Dinky-Dunk was away off on the prairie, working
like a nailer, and I was alone in the shack, I went to his old coat
hanging there--the old coat that had some subtle aroma of
Dinky-Dunkiness itself about every inch of it--and kissed it on the
sleeve.

This afternoon as Paddy and I started for home with a pail of mushrooms
I rode face to face with my first coyote. We stood staring at each
other. My heart bounced right up into my throat, and for a moment I
wondered if I was going to be eaten by a starving timber-wolf, with
Dinky-Dunk finding my bones picked as clean as those animal-carcasses
we see in an occasional buffalo-wallow. I kept up my end of the stare,
wondering whether to advance or retreat, and it wasn't until that coyote
turned tail and scooted that my courage came back. Then Paddy and I went
after him, like the wind. But we had to give up. And at supper
Dinky-Dunk told me coyotes were too cowardly to come near a person, and
were quite harmless. He said that even when they showed their teeth, the
rest of their face was apologizing for the threat. And before supper was
over that coyote, at least I suppose it was the same coyote, was howling
at the rising full moon. I went out with Dinky-Dunk's gun, but couldn't
get near the brute. Then I came back.

"Sing, you son-of-a-gun, sing!" I called out to him from the shack door.
And that shocked my lord and master so much that he scolded me, for the
first time in his life. And when I poked his Adam's apple with my finger
he got on his dignity. He was tired, poor boy, and I should have
remembered it. And when I requested him not to stand there and stare at
me in the hieratic rigidity of an Egyptian idol I could see a little
flush of anger go over his face. He didn't say anything. But he took one