, trying to hold
myself in, but feeling the bob-cat getting the better of the purring
tabby.

"I've rather concluded that was the way you made it for _me_,"
countered Duncan, with a coolness of manner which I came more and more
to resent.

"In what way?" I asked.

"In shutting up shop," he rather listlessly responded.

"I don't think I quite understand," I told him.

"Well, in crowbarring me out of your scheme of life, if you insist on
knowing," were the words that came from the husband sitting so close
beside me. "You had your other interests, of course. But you also
seem to have had the idea that you could turn me loose like a range
horse. I could paw for my fodder and eat snow when I got thirsty. You
didn't even care to give me a wind-break to keep a forty-mile blizzard
out of my bones. You didn't know where I was browsing, and didn't much
care. It was up to me to rustle for myself and be rounded up when the
winter was over and there was another spell of work on hand!"

We rode on in silence, for almost a mile, with the cold air beating
against my body and a colder numbness creeping about the corner of my
heart.

"Do you mean, Dinky-Dunk," I finally asked, "that you want your
freedom?"

"I'm not saying that," he said, after another short silence.

"Then what is it you want?" I asked, wondering why the windshield
should look so blurred in the half-light.

"I want to get something out of life," was his embittered retort.

It was a retort that I thought over, thought over with an oddly
settling mind, like a stirred pool that has been left to clear itself.
For that grown man sitting there beside me seemed ridiculously like a
spoiled child, an indulged child forlornly alone in the fogs of his
own arrogance. He made me think of a black bear which bites at the
bullet wound in his own body. I felt suddenly sorry for him, in a
maternal sort of way. I felt sorry for him at the same time that I
remained a trifle afraid of him, for he still possessed, I knew, his
black-bear power of inflicting unlooked-for and ursine blows. I simply
ached to swing about on him and say: "Dinky-Dunk, what you need is a
good spanking!" But I didn't have the courage. I had to keep my sense
of humor under cover, just as you have to blanket garden-geraniums
before the threat of a black frost. Yet, oddly enough, I felt
fortified by that sense of pity. It seemed to bring with it the
impression that Duncan was still a small boy who might s