The Prairie Wife

Arthur Stringer

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• Publié par: nuseng
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 32
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Prairie Wife, by Arthur Stringer This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Prairie Wife Author: Arthur Stringer Illustrator: H. T. Dunn Release Date: July 19, 2006 [EBook #18875] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRAIRIE WIFE *** Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net The Prairie Wife I stooped over the trap-door and lifted it up. "Get down there quick!" — Page 109, The Prairie Wife. THE PRAIRIE WIFE By ARTHUR STRINGER With Frontispiece in Color by H . T . D U N PUBLISHERS P UBLISHED BY A. L. BURT COMPANY – – A RRANGEMENT WITH NEW YORK THE B OBBS, MERRILL COMPANY C OPYRIGHT 1915 THE C URTIS PUBLISHING C OMPANY C OPYRIGHT 1915 THE BOBBS-MERRILL C OMPANY TO VAN WHO KNOWS AND LOVES THE WEST AS WE LOVE HIM! Contents THURSDAY THE N INETEENTH SATURDAY THE TWENTY-FIRST MONDAY THE TWENTY-THIRD WEDNESDAY THE TWENTY-FIFTH THURSDAY THE TWENTY-SIXTH SATURDAY THE TWENTY-EIGHTH WEDNESDAY THE FIRST THURSDAY THE SECOND FRIDAY THE THIRD SATURDAY THE FOURTH MONDAY THE SIXTH WEDNESDAY THE EIGHTH SATURDAY THE TENTH SUNDAY THE ELEVENTH MONDAY THE TWELFTH SUNDAY THE EIGHTEENTH MONDAY THE N INETEENTH TUESDAY THE TWENTIETH THURSDAY THE TWENTY-SECOND SATURDAY THE TWENTY-FOURTH 1 16 33 41 48 57 61 64 67 68 73 80 88 91 93 101 103 105 115 119 TUESDAY THE TWENTY-SEVENTH THURSDAY THE TWENTY-NINTH FRIDAY THE FIFTH SUNDAY THE SEVENTH TUESDAY THE N INTH SATURDAY THE TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY THE TWENTY-NINTH MONDAY THE SEVENTH FRIDAY THE ELEVENTH SUNDAY THE THIRTEENTH WEDNESDAY THE SIXTEENTH SUNDAY THE TWENTIETH SUNDAY THE TWENTY-SEVENTH WEDNESDAY THE THIRTIETH THURSDAY THE THIRTY-FIRST SUNDAY THE THIRD THURSDAY THE SEVENTH SATURDAY THE N INTH MONDAY THE ELEVENTH TUESDAY THE N INETEENTH SUNDAY THE THIRTY-FIRST TUESDAY THE N INTH WEDNESDAY THE SEVENTEENTH THURSDAY THE TWENTY-FIFTH TUESDAY THE SECOND THURSDAY THE FOURTH WEDNESDAY THE SEVENTEENTH SATURDAY THE TWENTY-SEVENTH TUESDAY THE SIXTH MONDAY THE TWELFTH TUESDAY THE TWENTIETH MONDAY THE TWENTY-SIXTH WEDNESDAY THE TWENTY-EIGHTH MONDAY THE SECOND THURSDAY THE FIFTH TUESDAY THE TENTH MONDAY THE SIXTEENTH TUESDAY THE TWENTY-FOURTH FRIDAY THE THIRD THURSDAY THE N INTH WEDNESDAY THE FIFTEENTH FRIDAY THE SEVENTEENTH 128 133 136 137 138 142 150 152 153 155 156 157 158 159 160 167 171 172 175 182 186 188 189 190 191 193 194 195 198 199 202 205 207 209 210 214 217 220 222 224 228 230 SATURDAY THE N INETEENTH FRIDAY THE TWENTY-EIGHTH SATURDAY THE TWENTY-NINTH SUNDAY THE THIRTIETH TUESDAY THE FIRST MONDAY THE SEVENTH SUNDAY THE THIRTEENTH MONDAY THE TWENTY-EIGHTH SATURDAY THE SECOND WEDNESDAY THE SIXTH TUESDAY THE TWELFTH THURSDAY THE FOURTEENTH WEDNESDAY THE FIFTH SUNDAY THE N INTH MONDAY THE TENTH TUESDAY THE ELEVENTH WEDNESDAY THE THIRTEENTH THURSDAY THE FOURTEENTH FRIDAY THE FIFTEENTH SATURDAY THE SIXTEENTH MONDAY THE SEVENTEENTH WEDNESDAY THE N INETEENTH FRIDAY THE TWENTY-FIRST MONDAY THE TWELFTH WEDNESDAY THE FOURTEENTH THURSDAY THE FIFTEENTH FRIDAY THE SIXTEENTH SUNDAY THE EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY THE TWENTY-FIFTH TUESDAY THE TWENTY-SEVENTH WEDNESDAY THE TWENTY-EIGHTH FRIDAY THE THIRTIETH SUNDAY THE FIRST 231 233 234 236 237 243 247 249 251 252 254 255 256 260 262 264 265 267 269 272 275 276 277 290 292 295 298 307 308 309 310 313 314 THE PRAIRIE WIFE Thursday the Nineteenth [Pg 1] Splash!... That's me, Matilda Anne! That's me falling plump into the pool of matrimony before I've had time to fall in love! And oh, Matilda Anne, Matilda Anne, I've got to talk to you! You may be six thousand miles away, but still you've got to be my safety-valve. I'd blow up and explode if I didn't express myself to some one. For it's so lonesome out here I could go and commune with the gophers. This isn't a twenty-part letter, my dear, and it isn't a diary. It's the coral ring I'm cutting my teeth of desolation on. For, every so long, I've simply got to sit down and talk to some one, or I'd go mad, clean, stark, staring mad, and bite the tops off the sweet-grass! It may even happen this will never be sent to you. But I like to think of you reading it, some day, page by page, when I'm fat [Pg 2] and forty, or, what's more likely, when Duncan has me chained to a corral-post or finally shut up in a padded cell. For you were the one who was closest to me in the old days, Matilda Anne, and when I was in trouble you were always the staff on which I leaned, the calm-eyed Tillie-on-the-spot who never seemed to fail me! And I think you will understand. But there's so much to talk about I scarcely know where to begin. The funny part of it all is, I've gone and married the Other Man . And you won't understand that a bit, unless I start at the beginning. But when I look back, there doesn't seem to be any beginning, for it's only in books that things really begin and end in a single lifetime. Howsomever, as Chinkie used to say, when I left you and Scheming Jack in that funny little stone house of yours in Corfu, and got to Palermo, I found Lady Agatha and Chinkie there at the Hotel des Palmes and the yacht being coaled from a tramp steamer's bunkers in the harbor. So I went on with them to Monte Carlo. We had a terrible trip all the way up to the Riviera, and I was terribly sea- [Pg 3] sick, and those lady novelists who love to get their heroines off on a private yacht never dream that in anything but duckpond weather the ordinary yacht at sea is about the meanest habitation between Heaven and earth. But it was at Monte Carlo I got the cable from Uncle Carlton telling me the Chilean revolution had wiped out our nitrate mine concessions and that your poor Tabby's last little nest-egg had been smashed. In other words, I woke up and found myself a beggar, and for a few hours I even thought I'd have to travel home on that Monte Carlo Viaticum fund which so discreetly ships away the stranded adventurer before he musses up the Mediterranean scenery by shooting himself. Then I remembered my letter of credit, and firmly but sorrowfully paid off poor Hortense, who through her tears proclaimed that she'd go with me anywhere, and without any thought of wages (imagine being hooked up by a maid to whom you were under such democratizing obligations!) But I was firm, for I [Pg 4] knew the situation, might just as well be faced first as last. So I counted up my letter of credit and found I had exactly six hundred and seventy-one dollars, American money, between me and beggary. Then I sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was code) and later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates all the while to the Hotel de L'Athénée, the long boxes duly piled up in tiers, like coffins at the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness, called on me, in state. She came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow landau of hers, where she looked for all the world like an oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of the danger of international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo me away from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav—which made me quite calmly and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and put him in the shoe [Pg 5] business in some nice New England town! From Monte Carlo I scooted right up to Paris. Two days later, as I intended to write you but didn't, I caught the boat-train for Cherbourg. And there at the rail as I stepped on the Baltic was the Other Man, to wit, Duncan Argyll McKail, in a most awful-looking yellow plaid English mackintosh. His face went a little blank as he clapped eyes on me, for he'd dropped up to Banff last October when Chinkie and Lady Agatha and I were there for a week. He'd been very nice, that week at Banff, and I liked him a lot. But when Chinkie saw him "going it a bit too strong," as he put it, and quietly tipped Duncan Argyll off as to Theobald Gustav, the aforesaid D. A. bolted back to his ranch without as much as saying good-by to me. For Duncan Argyll McKail isn't an Irishman, as you might in time gather from that name of his. He's a Scotch-Canadian, and he's nothing but a broken-down civil engineer who's taken up farming in the Northwest. But I could see right away that he was a gentleman (I hate that word, but where'll you get another one to take its place?) and had known nice people, even before I [Pg 6] found out he'd taught the Duchess of S. to shoot big-horn. He'd run over to England to finance a cooperative wheat-growing scheme, but had failed, because everything is so unsettled in England just now. But you're a woman, and before I go any further you'll want to know what Duncan looks like. Well, he's not a bit like his name. The West has shaken a good deal of the Covenanter out of him. He's tall and gaunt and wide-shouldered, and has brown eyes with hazel specks in them, and a mouth exactly like Holbein's "Astronomer's," and a skin that is almost as disgracefully brown as an Indian's. On the whole, if a Lina Cavalieri had happened to marry a Lord Kitchener, and had happened to have a thirty-year-old son, I feel quite sure he'd have been the dead spit, as the Irish say, of my own Duncan Argyll. And Duncan Argyll, alias Dinky-Dunk, is rather reserved and quiet and, I'm afraid, rather masterful, but not as Theobald Gustav might have been, for with all his force the modern German, it seems to me, is like the bagpipes in being somewhat lacking in [Pg 7] suavity. And all the way over Dinky-Dunk was so nice that he almost took my breath away. He was also rather audacious, gritting his teeth in the face of the German peril, and I got to like him so much I secretly decided we'd always be go