have it before the
year's out," was his retort. He told me, when the air had cleared a
little, that he'd have to open an office in Calgary as soon as
harvesting was over. There was already too much at stake to take
chances. Then he asked me if there were any circumstances under which
I'd be willing to sell Casa Grande. And I told him, quite promptly and
quite definitely, that there was none.

"Then how about the old Harris Ranch?" he finally inquired.

"But why should we sell that?" I asked. Alabama Ranch, I knew, was in
my name, and I had always regarded it as a sort of nest-egg for the
children. It was something put by for a rainy day, something to fall
back on, if ill-luck ever overtook us again.

"Because I can double and treble every dollar we get out of it, inside
of a year," averred Dinky-Dunk.

"But how am I to know that?" I contended, hating to seem hard and
selfish and narrow in the teeth of an ambitious man's enterprise.

"You'd have to take my word for it," retorted my husband.

"But we've more than ourselves to consider," I contended, knowing he'd
merely scoff at that harping on the old string of the children.

"That's why I intend to get out of this rut!" he cried with unexpected
bitterness. And a few minutes later he made the suggestion that he'd
deed Casa Grande entirely over to me if I'd consent to the sale of
Alabama Ranch and give him a chance to swing the bigger plans he
intended to swing.

The suggestion rather took my breath away. My rustic soul, I suppose,
is stupidly averse to change. But I realize that when you travel in
double-harness you can't forever pull back on your team-mate. So I've
asked Dinky-Dunk to give me a few days to think the thing over.

_Wednesday the Second_

Casa Grande has had an invasion of visitors. It was precious old Percy
and his Olga who blew in on us, after being swallowed up by the Big
Silence for almost four long years. They came without warning, which
is the free and easy way of the westerner, appearing in a
mud-splattered and dust-covered Ford that had carried them blithely
over two hundred and thirty miles of prairie trails. And with them
they brought a quartet of rampageous young buckaroos who promptly
turned our sedate homestead into a rodeo.

Percy himself is browner and stouter and more rubicund than I might
have expected, with just a sprinkling of gray under his lopsided
Stetson to announce that Time hasn't been standing still for any of