Canada -- Fiction; Frontier and pioneer life -- Prairie Provinces -- Fiction
Olie and Terry seem convinced of the fact that Dinky-Dunk's farming has
been a success. We have saved all our wheat crop, and it's a whopper.
Terry, with his crazy Celtic enthusiasms, says that by next year they'll
be calling Dinky-Dunk the Wheat King of the West. Olga and Percy went
buggy riding this afternoon. I wish I had some sort of scales to weight
my Snoozerette. I know he's doubled in the last three weeks.
_Sunday the Twenty-fifth_
My Dinky-Dunk is home again. He looks a little tired and hollow-eyed,
but when the Boy crowed and smiled up at him his poor tired face
softened so wonderfully that it brought the tears to my eyes. I finally
persuaded him to stop petting Babe and pay a little attention to me.
After supper he opened up his extra hand-bag and hauled out the heaps of
things he'd brought Babe and me. Then I sat on his knee and held his
ears and made him blow away the smoke, every shred of it, so I could
kiss him in my own particular places.
_Tuesday the Twenty-seventh_
Dinky-Dunk has sailed off to Buckhorn to do some telegraphing he should
have done Saturday night. My suspicions about his slyness, by the way,
were quite unfounded. It was the guileless-eyed Terry who led those
railway officials out to the spot where he'd already secretly tested for
water and found signs of it. And Terry can't even understand why
Dinky-Dunk is so toweringly angry about it all!
_Wednesday the Twenty-eighth_
When Dinky-Dunk came in last night, after his drive out from Buckhorn,
there was a look on his face that rather frightened me. I backed him up
against the door, after he'd had a peep at the Boy, and said, "Let me
smell your breath, sir!" For with that strange light in his eyes I
surely thought he'd been drinking. "Lips that touch liquor," I sang,
"shall never touch mine!"
But I was mistaken. And Dinky-Dunk only laughed in a quiet inward
rumbling sort of way that was new to him. "I believe I am drunk, Boca
Chica," he solemnly confessed, "drunk as a lord!" Then he took both my
hands in his.
"D'you know what's going to happen?" he demanded. And of course I
didn't. Then he hurled it point-blank at me.
"_The railway's going to come!_"
"Come where?" I gasped.
"Come here, right across our land! It's settled. And there's no mistake
about it this time. Inside of ten months there'll be choo-choo cars
steaming past Casa Grande!"
"Skookum!" I shouted.
"And there'll be a station within a mile of where you stand! And inside
of two years this seventeen or eighteen hundred acres of land will be
worth forty dollars an acre, easily, and perhaps even fifty. And what
that means you can figure out for yourself!"
"Whoopee!" I gasped, trying in vain to figure out how much forty times
seventeen hundred was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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