had wandered away on the open prairie.

For one moment of warming relief I thought of Bobs. I remembered what
a dog is sometimes able to do in such predicaments. But I also
remembered that Bobs was still out on the trail with Whinnie. So I
circled off on the undulating floor of the prairie, calling "Dinkie"
every minute or two and staring into the distance until my eyes ached,
hoping to see some moving dot in the midst of all that silence and
stillness.

"My boy is lost," I kept saying to myself, in sobbing little whimpers,
with my heart getting more and more like a ball of lead. And there
could only be an hour or two of daylight left. If he wasn't found
before night came on--I shut the thought out of my heart, and started
back for the shack, in a white heat of desperation.

"If you want to live," I said to the now craven and shrinking Ikkie,
"you get in that buckboard and make for Casa Grande. Drive there as
fast as you can. Tell my husband that our boy, that my boy, is lost on
the prairie. Tell him to get help, and come, come quick. And stop at
the Teetzel ranch on your way. Tell them to send men on horses, and
lanterns! But move, woman, move!"

Ikkie went, with Slip-Along making the buckboard skid on the uneven
trail as though he were playing a game of crack-the-whip with that
frightened Indian. And I just as promptly took up my search again,
forgetting about the Twins, forgetting about being tired, forgetting
everything.

Half-way between the fenced-in hay-stacks and the corral-gate I found
a battered decoy-duck with a string tied to its neck. It was one of a
set that Francois and Whinstane Sandy had whittled out over a year
ago. It was at least a clue. Dinkie must have dropped it there.

It sent me scuttling back among the hay-stacks, going over the ground
there, foot by foot and calling as I went, until my voice had an eerie
sound in the cold air that took on more and more of a razor-edge as
the sun and the last of its warmth went over the rim of the world. It
seemed an empty world, a plain of ugly desolation, unfriendly and
pitiless in its vastness. Even the soft green of the wheatlands took
on a look like verdigris, as though it were something malignant and
poisonous. And farther out there were muskegs, and beyond the
three-wire fence, which would stand no bar to a wandering child, there
were range-cattle, half-wild cattle that resented the approach of
anything but a man on horseback. And somewhere in tho