ullet-holes and if certain dents and abrasions in
its timbers mean the hostile arrows of skulking Apaches when women and
children crouched low behind the ramparts of this tiny wooden
fortress. I can't help picturing what those women and children had to
endure, and how trivial, after all, are our puny hardships compared
with theirs.

And I don't intend to dwell on those hardships. I'm holding out the
hand of compromise to my fellow-trekker. Existence is only a
prairie-schooner, and we have to accommodate ourselves to it. And I
thank Heaven now that I can see things more clearly and accept them
more quietly. That's a lesson Time teaches us. And Father Time, after
all, has to hand us something to make up for so mercilessly
permitting us to grow old. It leaves us more tolerant. We're not
allowed to demand more life, but we can at least ask for more light.
So I intend to be cool-headedly rational about it all. I'm going to
keep Reason on her throne. I'm going to be a bitter-ender, in at least
one thing: I'm going to stick to my Dinky-Dunk to the last ditch. I'm
going to patch up the old top and forget the old scars. For we're in
the same schooner, and we must make the most of it. And if I have to
eat my pot of honey on the grave of all our older hopes, I'm at least
going to dig away at that pot until its bottom is scraped clean. I'm
going to remain the neck-or-nothing woman I once prided myself on
being. I'm even going to overlook Dinky-Dunk's casual cruelty in
announcing, when I half-jokingly inquired why he preferred other women
to his own Better-Half, that no horse eats hay after being turned out
to fresh grass. I'm going on, I repeat, no matter what happens. I'm
going on to the desperate end, like my own Dinkie with the
chocolate-cake when I warned him he'd burst if he dared to eat another
piece and he responded: "Then pass the cake, Mummy--and everybody
stand back!"

_Tuesday the Fourth_

_Sursum corda_ is the word--so here goes! I am determined to be blithe
and keep the salt of humor sprinkled thick across the butter-crock of
concession. Dinky-Dunk watches me with a guarded and wary eye and
Pauline Augusta does not always approve of me. Yesterday, when I got
on Briquette and made that fire-eater jump the two rain-barrels put
end to end Dinky-Dunk told me I was too old to be taking a chance like
that. So I promptly and deliberately turned a somersault on the
prairie-sod, just to show him I wasn't the old lad