d
moisture of that little pocket of flesh caused the bean to swell, and
soon had Dinkie crying with pain. So I renewed my efforts to get that
bean out of the child's ear, for by this time he was really suffering.
But I didn't succeed. There was no way of getting behind it, or
getting a hold on it. And poor Dinkie bawled bitterly, ignorant of why
this pain should be inflicted on him and outraged that his own mother
should add to it by probing about the already swollen side of his
head.

I was, in fact, getting a bit panicky, and speculating on how long it
would take to get Dinkie in to Buckhorn and a doctor, when Struthers
remembered about a pair of toilet tweezers she'd once possessed
herself of, for pulling out an over-punctual gray-hair or two. Even
then I had to resort to heroic measures, tying the screaming child's
hands tight to his side with a bath-towel and having the tremulous
Struthers hold his poor little head flat against the kitchen table.

It was about as painful, I suppose, as extracting a tooth, but I
finally got a grip on that swollen legume and pulled it from its
inflamed pocket of flesh. I felt as relieved and triumphant as an
obstetrician after a hard case, and meekly handed over to Dinkie
anything his Royal Highness desired, even to his fifth cookie and the
entire contents of my sewing-basket, which under ordinary circumstances
is strictly taboo. But once the ear-passage was clear the pain went
away, and Dinkie, at the end of a couple of hours, was himself again.

But Peter has left a hole in our lives. I keep feeling that he's
merely out on the land and will be coming in with that quiet and
remote smile of his and talking like mad through a meal that I always
had an incentive for making a little more tempting than the ordinary
grub-rustling of a clodhopper.

The only person about Alabama Ranch who seems undisturbed by Peter's
departure is Whinstane Sandy. He reminds me of a decrepit but
robustious old rooster repossessing himself of a chicken-run after the
decapitation of an arrogant and envied rival. He has with a dour sort
of blitheness connected up the windmill pump, in his spare time, and
run a pipe in through the kitchen wall and rigged up a sink, out of a
galvanized pig-trough. It may not be lovely to the eye, but it will
save many a step about this shack of ours. And the steps count, now
that the season's work is breaking over us like a Jersey surf!

_Thursday