rs in the bunk-house
over at Casa Grande," was Dinky-Dunk's reply. He tried to say it
casually, but didn't quite succeed, for I could see his color deepen a
little. And this, in turn, led to a second only too obvious gesture of
self-defense.

"My monthly check, of course, will be delivered to you," he announced,
with an averted eye.

"Why to me?" I coldly inquired.

"It wouldn't be of much use to me," he retorted. And I resented his
basking thus openly in the fires of martyrdom.

"In that case," I asked, "what satisfaction are you getting out of
your new position?"

That sent the color ebbing from his face again, and he looked at me as
I'd never seen him look at me before. We'd both been mauled by the paw
of Destiny, and we were both nursing ragged nerves and oversensitized
spirits, facing each other as irritable as teased rattlers, ready to
thump rocks with our head. More than once I'd heard Dinky-Dunk
proclaim that the right sort of people never bickered and quarreled.
And I remembered Theobald Gustav's pet aphorism to the effect that
_Hassen machts nichts_. But life had its limits. And I wasn't one of
those pink-eared shivery little white mice who could be intimidated
into tears by a frown of disapproval from my imperial mate. And
married life, after all, is only a sort of _guerre d'usure_.

"And you think you're doing the right thing?" I demanded of my
husband, not without derision, confronting him with a challenge on my
face and a bawling Pee-Wee on my hip.

Dinky-Dunk sniffed.

"That child seems to have its mother's disposition," he murmured,
ignoring my question.

"The prospects of its acquiring anything better from its father seem
rather remote," I retorted, striking blindly. For that over-deft
adding of insult to injury had awakened every last one of my seven
sleeping devils. It was an evidence of cruelty, cold and calculated
cruelty. And by this time little waves of liquid fire were running
through my tingling body.

"Then I can't be of much service to this family," announced Dinky-Dunk,
with his maddening note of mockery.

"I fail to see how you can be a retriever for a flabby-minded idler
and the head of this household at one and the same time," I said out
of the seething crater-fogs of my indignation.

"She's never impressed me as being flabby," he ventured, with a
quietness which only a person who knew him would or could recognize as
dangerous.

"Well, I don't share your admiration for h