_Saturday the Twenty-ninth_
To-day has been one of the hottest days of the year. It may be good for the wheat, but I can't say that it seems good for me. All day long I've been fretting for far-away things, for foolish and impossible things. I tried reading Keats, but that only made me worse than ever. I've been longing for a glimpse of the Luxembourg Gardens in spring, with all the horse-chestnuts in bloom. I've been wondering how lovely it would be to drift into the Blue Grotto at Capri and see the azure sea-water drip from the trailing boat-oars. I've been burning with a hunger to see a New England orchard in the slanting afternoon sunlight of an early June afternoon. The hot white light of this open country makes my eyes ache and seems to dry my soul up. I can't help thinking of cool green shadows, and musky little valleys of gloom with a brook purling over mossy stones. I long for the solemn greenery of great elms, aisles and aisles of cathedral-like gloom and leaf-filtered sunlight. I'd love to hear an English cuckoo again, and feel the soft mild sea-air that blows up through Louis's dear little Devonshire garden. But what's the use!
I went to the piano and pounded out _Kennst Du Das Land_ with all my soul, and I imagine it did me good. It at least bombarded the silence out of Casa Grande. The noise of life is so far away from you on the prairie! It is not utterly silent, just that dreamy and disembodied sigh of wind and grass against which a human call targets like a leaden bullet against metal. It is almost worse than silence.
_Sunday the Thirtieth_
My mood is over. Early, early this morning I slipped out of bed and watched day break. I saw the first faint orange rim along the limitless sky-line, and then the pearly pink above it, and all the sweet dimness and softness and mystery of God's hand pulling the curtains of morning apart. And then the rioting orchestras of color struck up, and I leaned out of the window bathed in glory as the golden disk of the sun showed over the dewy prairie-edge. Oh, the grandeur of it! And oh, the God-given freshness of that pellucid air! I love my land! I love it!
_Tuesday the First_
I have married a _man_! My Dinky-Dunk is not a softy. I had that proved to me yesterday, when I put Paddy in the buckboard and drove out to where the men were working in the hay. I was taking their dinner out to them, neatly packed in the chuck-box. One of the new men, who'd been hired for the rush, had been overworking his team. The brute had been prodding them with a pitchfork, instead of using a whip. Dinky-Dunk saw the marks, and noticed one of the horses bleeding. But he didn't interfere until he caught the man in the act of jabbing the tines into Maid Marian's flank. Then he jumped for him, just as I drove up. He cursed that man, cursed and damned him most dreadfully and pulled him down off the hay-rack. Then they fought.
They fought like two wildcats. Dinky-Dunk's nose bled and his lip was cut. But he knocked the other man flat, and when he tried to get up he knocked him again. It seemed cruel; it was revolting. But something in me rejoiced and exulted as I saw that hulk of an animal thresh and stagger about the hay-stubble. I tried to wipe the blood away from Dinky-Dunk's nose. But he pushed me back and said this was no place for a woman. I had no place in his universe, at that particular time. But Dinky-Dunk can fight, if he has to. He's sa magerful a mon! He's afraid of nothing.
But that was nearly a costly victory. Both the new men of course threw up their jobs, then and there. Dinky-Dunk paid them off, on the spot, and they started off across the open prairie, without even waiting for their meal. Dinky-Dunk, as we sat down on the dry grass and ate together, said it was a good riddance, and he was just saying I could only have the left-hand side of his mouth to kiss for the next week when he suddenly dropped his piece of custard-pie, stood up and stared toward the east. I did the same, wondering what had happened.
I could see a long thin slanting column of smoke driving across the hot noonday air. Then my heart stopped beating. _It was the prairie on fire._
I had heard a great deal about fire-guards and fire-guarding, three rows about crops and ten about buildings; and I knew that Olie hadn't yet finished turning all those essential furrows. And if that column of smoke, which was swinging up through the silvery haze where the indigo vault of heaven melted into the dusty whiteness of the parched grasslands, had come from the mouth of a siege-gun which was cannonading us where we stood, it couldn't have more completely chilled my blood. For I knew that east wind would carry the line of fire crackling across the prairie floor to Dinky-Dunk's wheat, to the stables and out-buildings, to Casa Grande itself, and all our scheming and planning and toiling and moiling would go up in one yellow puff of smoke. And once under way, nothing could stop that widening river of flame.
It was Dinky-Dunk who jumped to life as though he had indeed been cannonaded. In one bound he was at the buckboard and was snatching out the horse-blanket that lay folded up under the seat. Then he unsnapped the reins from Paddy's bridle, snapping them on the blanket, one to the buckle and the other to the strap-end. In another minute he had the hobble off Paddy and had swung me up on that astonished pinto's back. The next minute he himself was on Maid Marian, poking one end of the long rein into my hand and telling me to keep up with him.
We rode like mad. I scarcely understood what it meant, at the time, but I at least kept up with him. We went floundering through one end of a slough until the blanket was wet and heavy and I could hardly hold it. But I hung on for dear life. Then we swung off across the dry grass toward that advancing semicircle of fire, as far apart as the taut reins would let us ride. Dinky-Dunk took the windward side. Then on we rushed, along that wavering frontier of flame, neck to neck, dragging the wet blanket along its orange-tinted crest, flattening it down and wiping it out as we went. We made the full circle, panting; saw where the flames had broken out again, and swung back with our dragging blanket. But when one side was conquered another side would revive, and off we'd have to go again, until my arm felt as though it were going to be pulled out of its socket.
But we won that fight, in the end. I slipped down off Paddy's back and lay full length on the sod, weak, shaking, wondering why the solid ground was rocking slowly from side to side like a boat. But Dinky-Dunk didn't even observe me. He was fighting out the last patch of fire, on foot.
When he came over to where I was waiting for him he was as sooty and black as a boiler-maker. He dropped down beside me, breathing hard. We sat there holding each other's hand, for several minutes, in utter silence. Then he said, rather thickly: "Are you all right?" And I told him that of course I was all right. Then he said, without looking at me, "I forgot!" Then he got Paddy and patched up the harness and took me home in the buckboard.
But all the rest of the day he hung about the shack, as solemn as an owl. And once in the night he got up and lighted the lamp and came over and studied my face. I blinked up at him sleepily, for I was dog-tired and had been dreaming that we were back in Paris at the Bal des Quatz Arts and were about to finish up with an early breakfast at the Madrid. He looked so funny with his rumpled up hair and his faded pajamas that I couldn't help laughing a little as he blew out the light and got back into bed.
"Dinky-Dunk," I said, as I turned over my pillow and got comfy again, "wouldn't it have been hell if all our wheat had been burned up?" I forget what Duncan said, for in two minutes I was asleep again.
_Monday the Seventh_
The dry spell has been broken, and broken with a vengeance. One gets pretty well used to high winds, in the West. There used to be days at a time when that unending high wind would make me think something was going to happen, filling me with a vague sense of impending calamity and making me imagine a big storm was going to blow up and wipe Casa Grande and its little coterie off the map. But we've had a real wind-storm, this time, with rain and hail. Dinky-Dunk's wheat looks sadly draggled out and beaten down, but he says there wasn't enough hail to hurt anything; that the straw will straighten up again, and that this downpour was just what he wanted. Early in the afternoon, on looking out the shack door, I saw a tangle of clouds on the sky-line. They seemed twisted up like a skein of wool a kitten had been playing with. Then they seemed to marshal themselves into one solid line and sweep up over the sky, getting blacker and blacker as they came. Olga ran in with her yellow hair flying, slamming and bolting the stable-doors, locking the chicken-coop, and calling out for me to get my clothes off the line or they'd be blown to pieces. Even then I could feel the wind. It whipped my own hair loose, and flattened my skirt against my body, and I had to lean forward to make any advance against it.