aid with a hesitation that was slightly
puzzling to me.

"Then how about the cattle and things?"

"What cattle?"

"The cattle we've kept on it to escape the wild land tax? Aren't those
all legally mine?"

It sounded rapacious, I suppose, under the circumstances. It must have
seemed like looting on a battlefield. But I wasn't thinking entirely
about myself, even though poor old Dinky-Dunk evidently assumed so,
from the look of sudden questioning that came into his stricken eyes.

"Yes, they're yours," he almost listlessly responded.

"Then, as I've already said, let's look this thing fairly and squarely
in the face. We've taken a gambler's chance on a big thing, and we've
lost. We've lost our pile, as they phrase it out here, but if what you
say is true, we haven't lost our home, and what is still more
important, we haven't lost our pride."

My husband looked down at his plate.

"That's gone, too," he slowly admitted.

"It doesn't sound like my Dinky-Dunk, a thing like that," I promptly
admonished. But I'd spoken before I caught sight of the tragic look in
his eyes as he once more looked up at me.

"If those politicians had only kept their word, we'd have had our
shipyard deal to save us," he said, more to himself than to me. Yet
that, I knew, was more an excuse than a reason.

"And if the rabbit-dog hadn't stopped to scratch, he might have caught
the hare!" I none too mercifully quoted. My husband's face hardened as
he sat staring across the table at me.

"I'm glad you can take it lightly enough to joke over," he remarked,
as he got up from his chair. There was a ponderous sort of bitterness
in his voice, a bitterness that brought me up short. I had to fight
back the surge of pity which was threatening to strangle my voice,
pity for a man, once so proud of his power, standing stripped and
naked in his weakness.

"Heaven knows I don't want to joke, Honey-Chile," I told him. "But
we're not the first of these wild-catting westerners who've come a
cropper. And since we haven't robbed a bank, or--"

"It's just a little worse than that," cut in Dinky-Dunk, meeting my
astonished gaze with a sort of Job-like exultation in his own misery.
I promptly asked him what he meant. He sat down again, before
speaking.

"I mean that I've lost Allie's money along with my own," he very
slowly and distinctly said to me. And we sat there, staring at each
other, for all the world like a couple of penguins on a sub-Arctic
s