I cried.

"I must go away, at once," he meditatively observed.

"_Peter!_" I said again, with the flute turning into a pair of
ice-tongs that clamped into the corners of my heart.

"Far, far away," he continued as he studiously avoided my eye. "For
there will be safety now only in flight."

"Safety from what?" I demanded.

"From you," retorted Peter.

"But what will happen to _me_, if you do that?" I heard my own voice
asking as Buntie started to paw the prairie-floor and I did my level
best to fight down the black waves of desolation that were
half-drowning me. "What'll there be to hold me up, when you're the
only man in all this world who can keep my barrel of happiness from
going slap-bang to pieces? What----?"

"_Verboten!_" interrupted Peter. But that solemn-soft smile of his
gathered me in and covered me, very much as the rumpled feathers of a
mother-bird cover her young, her crazily twittering and crazily
wandering young who never know their own mind.

"What'll happen to me," I went desperately on, "when you're the only
man alive who understands this crazy old heart of mine, when you've
taught me to hitch the last of my hope on the one unselfish man I've
ever known?"

This seemed to trouble Peter. But only remotely, as the lack of
grammar in the Lord's Prayer might affect a Holy Roller. He insisted,
above all things, on being judicial.

"Then I'll have to come back, I suppose," he finally admitted, "for
Dinkie's sake."

"Why for Dinkie's sake?" I asked.

"Because some day, my dear, our Dinkie is going to be a great man. And
I want to have a hand in fashioning that greatness."

I sat looking at the red ball of the sun slipping down behind the
shoulder of the world. A wind came out of the North, cool and sweet
and balsamic with hope. I heard a loon cry. And then the earth was
still again.

"_We'll be waiting_," I said, with a tear of happiness tickling the
bridge of my nose. And then, so that Peter might not see still another
loon crying, I swung Buntie sharply about on the trail. And we rode
home, side by side, through the twilight.

THE END

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Prairie Child, by Arthur Stringer

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRAIRIE CHILD ***

***** This file should be named 28514.txt or 28514.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/2/8/5/1/28514/

Produced by Roger Frank an