Canada -- Fiction; Frontier and pioneer life -- Prairie Provinces -- Fiction
I woke up early. Dinky-Dunk had forgotten about my hand, and it was
cold. In the East there was a low bar of ethereally pale silver, which
turned to amber, and then to ashes of roses, and then to gold. I saw one
sublime white star go out, in the West, and then behind the bars of gold
the sky grew rosy with morning until it was one Burgundian riot of
bewildering color. I sat up and watched it. Then I reached over and
shook Dinky-Dunk. It was too glorious a daybreak to miss. He looked at
me with one eye open, like a sleepy hound.
"You must see it, Dinky-Dunk! It's so resplendent it's positively
vulgar!"
He sat up, stared at the pageantry of color for one moment, and then
wriggled down into his blanket again. I tickled his nose with a blade of
sweet-grass. Then I washed my face in the dew, the same as we did in
Christ-Church Meadow that glorious May-Day in Oxford. By the time
Dinky-Dunk woke up I had the coffee boiling and the bacon sizzling in
the pan. It was the most celestial smell that ever assailed human
nostrils, and I blush with shame at the thought of how much I ate at
that breakfast, sitting flat on an empty oat-sack and leaning against a
wagon-wheel. By eight o'clock we were in the metropolis of Buckhorn and
busy gathering up our things there. And they made a very respectable
wagon-load.
_Thursday the Second_
I have been practising like mad learning to play the mouth-organ. I
bought it in Buckhorn, without letting Dinky-Dunk know, and all day
long, when I knew it was safe, I've been at it. So to-night, when I had
my supper-table all ready, I got the ladder that leaned against one of
the granaries and mounted the nearest hay-stack. There, quite out of
sight, I waited until Dinky-Dunk came in with his team. I saw him go
into the shack and then step outside again, staring about in a brown
study. Then I struck up _Traumerei_.
You should have seen that boy's face! He looked up at the sky, as though
my poor little harmonica were the aerial outpourings of archangels. He
stood stock-still, drinking it in. Then he bolted for the stables,
thinking it came from there. It took him some time to corner me up on my
stack-top. Then I slid down into his arms. And I believe he loves that
mouth-organ music. After supper he made me go out and sit on the oat-box
and play my repertory. He says it's wonderful, from a distance. But that
mouth-organ's rather brassy, and it makes my lips sore. Then, too, my
mouth isn't big enough for me to "tongue" it properly. When I told
Dinky-Dunk this he said:
"Of course it isn't! What d'you suppose I've been calling you Boca Chica
for?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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