o see that it's true what Dinky-Dunk said about business
looming bigger in men's lives than women are apt to remember. He's
working hard, and his neck's so thin that his Adam's apple sticks out
like a push-button, but he gets his reward in finding his crop running
much higher than he had figured. He's as keen as ever he was for power
and prosperity. He wants success, and night and day he's scheming for
it. Sometimes I wonder if he didn't deliberately _use_ his cousin
Allie in this juggling back of Casa Grande into his own hands. Yet
Dinky-Dunk, with all his faults, is not, and could not be, circuitous.
I feel sure of that.

He became philosophical, the other day when I complained about the
howling of the coyotes, and protested it was these horizon-singers
that kept the prairie clean. He even argued that the flies which seem
such a pest to the cattle in summer-time are a blessing in disguise,
since the unmolested animals over-eat when feed is plentiful and get
black-rot. So out of suffering comes wisdom and out of endurance comes
fortitude!

_Thursday the Sixth_

On Tuesday morning we had our first snow of the season, or, rather,
before the season. It wasn't much of a snow-storm, but Dinkie was
greatly worked up at the sight of it and I finally put on his little
reefer and his waders and let him go out in it. But the weather had
moderated, the snow turned to slush, and when I rescued Dinkie from
rolling in what looked to him like a world of ice-cream he was a very
wet boy.

On Tuesday night Dinkie, usually so sturdy and strong, woke up with a
tight little chest-cough that rather frightened me. I went over to his
crib and covered him up. But when he wakened me again, a couple of
hours later, the cough had grown tighter. It turned into a sort of
sharp bark. And this time I found Dinkie hot and feverish. So I got
busy, rubbing his chest with sweet oil and turpentine until the skin
was pink and giving him a sip or two of cherry pectoral which I still
had on the upper shelf of the cupboard.

When morning came he was no better. He seemed in a stupor, rousing only
to bark into his pillow. I called Dinky-Dunk in, before he left in the
pouring rain for Casa Grande, and he said, almost indifferently, "Yes,
the boy's got a cold all right." But that was all.

When breakfast was over I tried Dinkie with hot gruel, but he declined
it. He refused to eat, in fact, and remembering what Peter had on