er," I retorted, letting the
tide of vitriol carry me along in its sweep.

Dinky-Dunk's face hardened.

"Then what do you intend doing about it?" he demanded.

That was a poser, all right. That was a poser which, I suppose, many a
woman at some time in her life has been called on to face. What did I
intend doing about it? I didn't care much. But I at least intended to
save the bruised and broken hulk of my pride from utter annihilation.

"I intend," I cried out with a quaver in my voice, "since you're not
able to fill the bill, to be head of this household myself."

"That sounds like an ultimatum," said Dinky-Dunk very slowly, his face
the sickly color of a meerschaum-pipe bowl.

"You can take it any way you want to," I passionately proclaimed,
compelled to raise my voice to the end that it might surmount
Pee-Wee's swelling cries. "And while you're being lackey for Lady
Alicia Newland I'll run this ranch. I'll run it in my own way, and
I'll run it without hanging on to a woman's skirt!"

Dinky-Dunk stared at me as though he were looking at me through a
leper-squint. But he had been brutal, was being brutal. And it was a
case of fighting fire with fire.

"Then you're welcome to the job," I heard him proclaiming out of his
blind white heat of rage. "After _that_, I'm through!"

"It won't be much of a loss," I shot back at him, feeling that he'd
soured a bright and sunny life into eternal blight.

"I'll remember that," he said with his jaw squared and his head down.
I saw him push his chair aside and wheel about and stride away from
the Yorkshire pudding with the caved-in roof, and the roast-beef that
was as cold as my own heart, and the indignantly protesting Pee-Wee
who in some vague way kept reminding me that I wasn't quite as
free-handed as I had been so airily imagining myself. For I mistily
remembered that the Twins, before the day was over, were going to find
it a very flatulent world. But I wasn't crushed. For there are times
when even wives and worms will turn. And this was one of them.

_Thursday the Thirtieth_

It's a busy three days I've been having, and if I'm a bit tuckered out
in body I'm still invincible in spirit. For I've already triumphed
over a tangle or two and now I'm going to see this thing through. I'm
going to see Alabama Ranch make good.

I teamed in to Buckhorn, with Dinkie and the Twins and Ikkie bedded
down in the wagon-box on fresh wheat-straw, and