"And that's to keep your soul alive, in the meantime," he announced. I scolded him for being so extravagant, when he needed every dollar he could lay his hands on. But he wouldn't listen to me. In fact, it only started an outburst. "My God, Gee-Gee," he cried, "haven't you given up enough for me? Haven't you sacrificed enough in coming out here to the end of nowhere and leaving behind everything that made life decent?" "Why, Honey Chile, didn't I get _you_?" I demanded. But even that didn't stop him. "Don't you suppose I ever think what it's meant to you, to a woman like you? There are certain things we can't have, but there are some things we're going to have. This next ten or twelve months will be hard, but after that there's going to be a change--if the Lord's with me, and I have a white man's luck!" "And supposing we have bad luck?" I asked him. He was silent for a moment or two. "We can always give up, and go back to the city," he finally said. "Give up!" I said with a whoop. "Give up? Not on your life, Mister Dour Man! We're not going to be Dixonites! We're going to win out!" And we were together in a death-clinch, hugging the breath out of each other, when Olie came in to ask if he hadn't better get the stock stabled, as there was bad weather coming. _Monday the Eleventh_ We are having the first real blizzard of the winter. It began yesterday, as Olie intimated, and for all the tail-end of the day my Dinky-Dunk was on the go, in the bitter cold, looking after fuel and feed and getting things ship-shape, for all the world like a skipper who's read his barometer and seen a hurricane coming. There had been no wind for a couple of days, only dull and heavy skies with a disturbing sense of quietness. Even when I heard Olie and Dinky-Dunk shouting outside, and shoring up the shack-walls with poles, I could not quite make out what it meant. Then the blizzard came. It came down out of the northwest, like a cloudburst. It hummed and sang, and then it whined, and then it screamed, screamed in a high falsetto that made you think poor old Mother Earth was in her last throes! The snow was fine and hard, really minute particles of ice, and not snow at all, as we know it in the East, little sharp-angled diamond-points that stung the skin like fire. It came in almost horizontal lines, driving flat across the unbroken prairie and defying anything made of God or man to stop it. Nothing did stop it. Our shack and the bunk-house and stables and hay-stacks tore a few pin-feathers off its breast, though; and those few feathers are drifts higher than my head, heaped up against each and all of the buildings.