A warm Chinook has licked up the last of the snow. Even Dinky-Dunk admits that spring is coming. For three solid hours an awakened blue-bottle has been buzzing against the pane of my bedroom window. I wonder if most of us aren't like that fly, mystified by the illusion of light that fails to lead to liberty? This morning I caught sight of Dinky-Dunk in his fur coat, climbing into the buckboard. I shall always hate to see him in that rig. It makes me think of a certain night. And we hate to have memory put a finger on our mental scars. When I was a girl Aunt Charlotte's second fiend of a husband locked me up in that lonely Derby house of theirs because I threw pebbles at the swans. Then off they drove to dinner somewhere and left me a prisoner there, where I sat listening to the bells of All Saints as the house gradually grew dark. And ever since then bells at evening have made me feel lonely and left me unhappy.
But the renaissance of the buckboard means that spring is here again. And for my Dinky-Dunk that means harder work. He's what they call a "rustler" out here. He believes in speed. He doesn't even wait until the frost is out of the ground before he starts to seed--just puts a drill over a two-inch batter of thawed-out mud, he's so mad about getting early on the land. He says he wants early wheat or no wheat. But he has to have help, and men are almost impossible to get. He had hoped for a gasoline tractor, but it can't be financed this spring, he has confessed to me. And I know, in my secret heart of hearts, that the tractor would have been here if it hadn't been for my piano!
There are still hundreds and hundreds of acres of prairie sod to "break" for spring wheat. Dinky-Dunk declares that he's going to risk everything on wheat this year. He says that by working two outfits of horses he himself can sow forty acres a day, but that means keeping the horses on the trot part of the time. He is thinking so much about his crop that I accused him of neglecting me.
"Is the varnish starting to wear off?" I inquired with a secret gulp of womanish self-pity. He saved the day by declaring I was just as crazy and just as adorable as I ever was. Then he asked me, rather sadly, if I was bored. "Bored?" I said, "how could I be bored with all these discomforts? No one is ever bored until they are comfortable!" But the moment after I'd said it I was sorry.
