she doesn't like our West she says she'll amble on to Arizona,
or try California for the winter." He looked away, and smiled rather
wanly. "She's counting on the big game shooting we can give her!"

"Grizzly, and buffalo, and that sort of thing?"

"I suppose so!"

"And she's on her way out here?"

"She's on her way out here to inspect a ranch which doesn't exist!"

I sat for a full minute gaping into Dinky-Dunk's woebegone face. And
still again I had considerable thinking to do.

"Then we'll _make_ it exist," I finally announced. But Dinky-Dunk,
staring gloomily off into space, wasn't even interested. They had
stunned the spirit out of him. He wasn't himself. They'd put him where
even a well-turned Scotch scone couldn't appeal to him.

"Listen," I solemnly admonished. "If this Cousin Allie of yours is
coming out here for a ranch, she's got to be presented with one."

"It sounds easy!" he said, not without mockery.

"And apparently the only way we can see that she's given her money's
worth is to hand Casa Grande over to her. Surely if she takes this,
bag and baggage, she ought to be half-satisfied."

Dinky-Dunk looked up at me as though I were assailing him with the
ravings of a mad-woman. He knew how proud I had always been of that
prairie home of ours.

"Casa Grande is yours--yours and the kiddies," he reminded me. "You've
at least got that, and God knows you'll need it now, more than ever,
God knows I've at least kept my hands off _that_!"

"But don't you see it can't be ours, it can't be a home, when there's
a debt of honor between us and every acre of it."

"You're in no way involved in that debt," cried out my lord and
master, with a trace of the old battling light in his eyes.

"I'm so involved in it that I'm going to give up the glory of a
two-story house with hardwood floors and a windmill and a laundry
chute and a real bathroom, before that English cousin of yours can
find out the difference between a spring-lamb and a jack-rabbit!" I
resolutely informed him. "And I'm going to do it without a whimper. Do
you know what we're going to do, O lord and master? We're going to
take our kiddies and our chattels and our precious selves over to that
Harris Ranch, and there we're going to begin over again just as we did
nearly four years ago!" Dinky-Dunk tried to stop me, but I warned him
aside. "Don't think I'm doing anything romantic. I'm doing something
so practical that the more I think of it the more