last year's summer hat on her head and a look of placid
admiration on her face. The shack seemed very quiet. It seemed so
disturbingly quiet that I even forgot about the hat.

"Where's Dinkie?" I demanded, as I deposited the Twins in their
swing-box.

"He play somew'ere roun'," announced Ikkie, secreting the purloined
head-gear and circling away from the forbidden dressing-table.

"But where?" I asked, with exceptional sharpness, for my eye had
already traversed the most of that shack and had encountered no sign
of him.

That sloe-eyed breed didn't know just where, and apparently didn't
care. He was playing somewhere outside, with three or four old wooden
decoy-ducks. That was all she seemed to know. But I didn't stop to
question her. I ran to the door and looked out. Then my heart began
going down like an elevator, for I could see nothing of the child. So
I made the rounds of the shack again, calling "Dinkie!" as I went.

Then I looked through the bunk-house, and even tried the cellar. Then
I went to the rainwater tub, with my heart up in my throat. He wasn't
there, of course. So I made a flying circle of the out-buildings. But
still I got no trace of him.

I was panting when I got back to the shack, where Iroquois Annie was
fussing stolidly over the stove-fire. I caught her by the snake-like
braid of her hair, though I didn't know I was doing it, at the moment,
and swung her about so that my face confronted hers.

"Where's my boy?" I demanded in a sort of shout of mingled terror and
rage and dread. "Where is he, you empty-eyed idiot? _Where is he?_"

But that half-breed, of course, couldn't tell me. And a wave of sick
fear swept over me. My Dinkie was not there. He was nowhere to be
found. He was lost--lost on the prairie. And I was shouting all this
at Ikkie, without being quite conscious of what I was doing.

"And remember," I hissed out at her, in a voice that didn't sound like
my own as I swung her about by her suddenly parting waist, "if
anything has happened to that child, _I'll kill you!_ Do you
understand, I'll kill you as surely as you're standing in those
shoes!"

I went over the shack, room by room, for still the third time. Then I
went over the bunk-house and the other buildings, and every corner of
the truck-garden, calling as I went.

But still there was no answer to my calls. And I had to face the
steel-cold knowledge that my child was lost. That little toddler,
scarcely more than a baby,