hurrying over to Calgary, and Edmonton, flying east to Winnipeg,
scurrying off to the Coast, poring over township maps and blue-prints
and official-looking letters from land associations and banks and loan
companies. I had been called in to sign papers, with bread-dough on my
arms, and asked to witness signatures, with Dinkie on my hip, and
commanded by my absent hearth-mate to send on certain documents by the
next mail. I had also gathered up scattered sheets of paper covered
with close-penciled rows of figures, and had felt that Dinky-Dunk for a
year back had been giving more time to his speculations than to his
home and his ranch. I had seen the lines deepen a little on that lean
and bony face of his and the pepper-and-salt above his ears turning
into almost pure salt. And I'd missed, this many a day, the old boyish
note in his laughter and the old careless intimacies in his talk. And
being a woman of almost ordinary intelligence--preoccupied as I was
with those three precious babies of mine--I had arrived at the not
unnatural conclusion that my spouse was surrendering more and more to
that passion of his for wealth and power.

Wealth and power, of course, are big words in the language of any man.
But I had more than an inkling that my husband had been taking a
gambler's chance to reach the end in view. And now, in that twilit
shadow-huddled cubby-hole of a room, it came over me, all of a heap,
that having taken the gambler's chance, we had met a fate not uncommon
to gamblers, and had lost.

"So we're bust!" I remarked, without any great show of emotion,
feeling, I suppose, that without worldly goods we might consistently
be without elegance. And in the back of my brain I was silently
revising our old Kansas pioneer couplet into

In land-booms we trusted
And in land-booms we busted.

But it wasn't a joke. You can't have the bottom knocked out of your
world, naturally, and find an invisible Nero blithely fiddling on your
heart-strings. And I hated to see Dinky-Dunk sitting there with that
dead look in his eyes. I hated to see him with his spirit broken, with
that hollow and haggard misery about the jowls, which made me think of
a hound-dog mourning for a dead master.

But I knew better than to show any pity for Dinky-Dunk at such a time.
It would have been effective as a stage-picture, I know, my reaching
out and pressing his tired head against a breast sobbing with
compre