ight just as well get back to bed," repeated Dinky-Dunk, rather
impatiently. And that was the spark which set off the mine, which
pushed me clear over the edge of reason. I'd held myself in for so
long, during weeks and weeks of placid-eyed self-repression, that when
the explosion did come I went off like a Big Bertha. I turned on my
husband with a red light dancing before my face and told him he was a
beast and a heartless brute. He tried to stop me, but it was no use. I
even said that this was a hell of a country, where a white woman had
to live like a Cree squaw and a child had to die like a sick hound in
a coulee. And I said a number of other things, which must have cut to
the raw, for even in the uncertain lamplight I could see that
Dinky-Dunk's face had become a kind of lemon-color, which is the
nearest to white a sunburned man seems able to turn.

"I'll get a doctor, if you want one," he said, with an
over-tried-patience look in his eyes.

"_I_ don't want a doctor," I told him, a little shrill-voiced with
indignation. "It's the child who wants one."

"I'll get your doctor," he repeated as he began dressing, none too
quickly. And it took him an interminable time to get off, for it was
raining cats and dogs, a cold, sleety rain from the northeast, and the
shafts had to be taken off the buckboard and a pole put in, for it
would require a team to haul anything on wheels to Buckhorn, on such a
night.

It occurred to me, as I stood at the window and saw Dinky-Dunk's
lantern wavering about in the rain while he was getting the team and
hooking them on to the buckboard, that it would be only the decent
thing to send him off with a cup of hot coffee, now that I had the
kettle boiling. But he'd martyrize himself, I knew, by refusing it,
even though I made it. And he was already sufficiently warmed by the
fires of martyrdom.

Yet it was an awful night, I realized when I stood in the open door
and stared after him as he swung out into the muddy trail with the
stable lantern lashed to one end of his dashboard. And I felt sorry,
and a little guilty, about the neglected cup of coffee.

I went back to little Dinkie, and found him asleep. So I sat down
beside him. I sat there wrapped up in one of Dinky-Dunk's four-point
Hudson-Bays, deciding that if the child's cough grew tighter I'd rig
up a croup-tent, as I'd once seen Chinkie's doctor do with little
Gimlets. But Dinkie failed to waken. And I fell asleep myself, and
didn