Pet and Patty sniffed the wind and whinnied with joy. They arched their necks and pawed at the ground because they were eager to go. Pa was whistling while he climbed to the wagon-seat and took up the reins. Then he looked down at Laura, who was looking up at him, and he stopped whistling and said: “Want to go along, Laura? You and Mary?”
Ma said they could. They climbed up the wheels, clinging to the spokes with their bare toes, and they sat on the high wagon-seat beside Pa. Pet and Patty started with a little jump, and the wagon went jolting down the road that Pa’s wagon wheels had made.
They went down between the bare, reddish-yellow walls of earth, all ridged and wrinkled by forgotten rains. Then they went on, across the rolling land of the creek bottoms. Masses of trees covered some of the low, rounded hills, and some of them were grassy, open spaces. Deer were lying in the shadows of the trees, and deer were grazing in the sunshine on the green grass. They lifted their heads and pricked their ears, and stood chewing and watching the wagon with their soft, large eyes.
All along the road the wild larkspur was blossoming pink and blue and white, birds balanced on yellow plumes of goldenrod, and butterflies were fluttering. Starry daisies lighted the shadows under trees, squirrels chattered on branches overhead, white-tailed rabbits hopped along the road, and snakes wriggled quickly across it when they heard the wagon coming.
Deep in the lowest valley the creek was running, in the shadow of dirt bluffs. When Laura looked up those bluffs, she couldn’t see the prairie grass at all. Trees grew up the bluffs where the earth had crumbled, and where the bare dirt was so steep that trees couldn’t grow on it bushes held on desperately with their roots. Half-naked roots were high above Laura’s head.
“Where are the Indian camps?” Laura asked Pa. He had seen the Indians’ deserted camps, here among the bluffs. But he was too busy to show them to her now. He must get the rocks to build the fireplace.
“You girls can play,” he said, “but don’t go out of my sight and don’t go into the water. And don’t play with snakes. Some of the snakes down here are poison.”
So Laura and Mary played by the creek, while Pa dug the rocks he wanted and loaded them into the wagon.
They watched long-legged water-bugs skate over the glassy-still pools. They ran along the bank to scare the frogs, and laughed when the green-coated frogs with their white vests plopped into the water. They listened to the wood-pigeons call among the trees, and the brown thrush singing. They saw the little minnows swimming all together in the shallow places where the creek ran sparkling. The minnows were thin gray shadows in the rippling water, only now and again one minnow flashed the sunshine from its silvery belly.
There was no wind along the creek. The air was still and drowsy-warm. It smelled of damp roots and mud, and it was full of the sound of rustling leaves and of the water running.
In the muddy places where deer’s tracks were thick and every hoof-print held water, swarms of mosquitoes rose up with a keen, sharp buzzing. Laura and Mary slapped at mosquitoes on their faces and necks and hands and legs, and wished they could go wading. They were so hot and the water looked so cool. Laura was sure that it would do no harm just to dip one foot in, and when Pa’s back was turned she almost did it.
“Laura,” said Pa, and she snatched the naughty foot back.
“If you girls want to go wading,” Pa said, “you can do it in that shallow place. Don’t go in over your ankles.”
Mary waded only a little while. She said the gravel hurt her feet, and she sat on a log and patiently slapped at mosquitoes. But Laura slapped and kept on wading. When she stepped, the gravel hurt her feet. When she stood still, the tiny minnows swarmed about her toes and nibbled them with their tiny mouths. It was a funny, squiggling feeling. Laura tried and tried to catch a minnow, but she only got the hem of her dress wet.
Then the wagon was loaded. Pa called, “Come along, girls!” and they climbed to the wagon-seat again and rode away from the creek. Up through the woods and hills they rode again, to the High Prairie where the winds were always blowing and the grasses seemed to sing and whisper and laugh. They had had a wonderful time in the creek bottoms. But Laura liked the High Prairie best. The prairie was so wide and sweet and clean.
That afternoon Ma sat sewing in the shade of the house, and Baby Carrie played on the quilt beside her, while Laura and Mary watched Pa build the fireplace.
First he mixed clay and water to a beautiful thick mud, in the mustangs’ water bucket. He let Laura stir the mud while he laid a row of rocks around three sides of the space he had cleared by the house-wall. Then with a wooden paddle he spread the mud over the rocks. In the mud he laid another row of rocks, and plastered them over the top and down on the inside with more mud.
He made a box on the ground; three sides of the box were made of rocks and mud, and the other side was the log wall of the house.
With rocks and mud and more rocks and more mud, he built the walls as high as Laura’s chin. Then on the walls, close against the house, he laid a log. He plastered the log all over with mud.
After that, he built up rocks and mud on top of that log. He was making the chimney now, and he made it smaller and smaller.
He had to go to the creek for more rocks. Laura and Mary could not go again, because Ma said the damp air might give them a fever. Mary sat beside Ma and sewed another block of her nine-patch quilt, but Laura mixed another bucketful of mud.
Next day Pa built the chimney as high as the house-wall. Then he stood and looked at it. He ran his fingers through his hair.
“You look like a wild man, Charles,” Ma said. “You’re standing your hair all on end.”
“It stands on end, anyway, Caroline,” Pa answered. “When I was courting you, it never would lie down, no matter how much I slicked it with bear grease.”
He threw himself down on the grass at her feet. “I’m plumb tuckered out, lifting rocks up there.”
“You’ve done well to build that chimney up so high, all by yourself,” Ma said. She ran her hand through his hair and stood it up more than ever. “Why don’t you make it stick-and-daub the rest of the way?” she asked him.
“Well, it would be easier,” he admitted. “I’m blamed if I don’t believe I will!”
He jumped up. Ma said, “Oh, stay here in the shade and rest awhile.” But he shook his head.
“No use lazing here while there’s work to be done, Caroline. The sooner I get the fireplace done, the sooner you can do your cooking inside, out of the wind.”
He hauled saplings from the woods, and he cut and notched them and laid them up like the walls of the house, on top of the stone chimney. As he laid them, he plastered them well with mud. And that finished the chimney.
Then he went into the house, and with his ax and saw he cut a hole in the wall. He cut away the logs that had made the fourth wall at the bottom of the chimney. And there was the fireplace.
It was large enough for Laura and Mary and Baby Carrie to sit in. Its bottom was the ground that Pa had cleared of grass, and its front was the space where Pa had cut away the logs. Across the top of that space was the log that Pa had plastered all over with mud.
On each side Pa pegged a thick slab of green oak against the cut ends of the logs. Then by the upper corners of the fireplace he pegged chunks of oak to the wall, and on these he laid an oak slab and pegged it firmly. That was the mantel-shelf.
As soon as it was done, Ma set in the middle of the mantel-shelf the little china woman she had brought from the Big Woods. The little china woman had come all the way and had not been broken. She stood on the mantelshelf with her little china shoes and her wide china skirts and her tight china bodice, and her pink cheeks and blue eyes and golden hair all made of china.
Then Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura stood and admired that fireplace. Only Carrie did not care about it. She pointed at the little china woman and yelled when Mary and Laura told her that no one but Ma could touch it.
“You’ll have to be
careful with your fire, Caroline,” Pa said. “We don’t want sparks going up the chimney to set the roof on fire. That cloth would burn, easy. I’ll split out some clapboards as soon as I can, and make a roof you won’t have to worry about.”
So Ma carefully built a little fire in the new fireplace, and she roasted a prairie hen for supper. And that evening they ate in the house.
They sat at table, by the western window. Pa had quickly made the table of two slabs of oak. One end of the slabs stuck in a crack of the wall, and the other end rested on short, upright logs. Pa had smoothed the slabs with his ax, and the table was very nice when Ma spread a cloth over it.
The chairs were chunks of big logs. The floor was the earth that Ma had swept clean with her willow-bough broom. On the floor, in the corners, the beds were neat under their patchwork quilts. The rays of the setting sun came through the window and filled the house with golden light.
Outside, and far, far away to the pink edge of the sky, the wind went blowing and the wild grasses waved.
Inside, the house was pleasant. The good roast chicken was juicy in Laura’s mouth. Her hands and face were washed, her hair was combed, her napkin was tied around her neck. She sat up straight on the round end of log and used her knife and fork nicely, as Ma had taught her. She did not say anything, because children must not speak at table until they are spoken to, but she looked at Pa and Ma and Mary and at Baby Carrie in Ma’s lap, and she felt contented. It was nice to be living in a house again.
Chapter 10
A Roof and a Floor
All day long, every day, Laura and Mary were busy. When the dishes were washed and the beds made, there was always plenty to do and to see and to listen to.
They hunted for birds’ nests in the tall grass and when they found them the mother birds squawked and scolded. Sometimes they touched a nest gently, and all in an instant a nest full of downiness became a nest full of wide-gaping beaks, hungrily squawking. Then the mother bird scolded like anything, and Mary and Laura quietly went away because they did not want to worry her too much.
In the tall grass they lay still as mice and watched flocks of little prairie chickens running and pecking around their anxiously clucking, smooth brown mothers. They watched striped snakes rippling between the grass stems or lying so still that only their tiny flickering tongues and glittering eyes showed that they were alive. They were garter snakes and would not hurt anybody, but Laura and Mary did not touch them. Ma said snakes were best left alone, because some snakes would bite, and it was better to be safe than sorry.
And sometimes there’d be a great gray rabbit, so still in the lights and shadows of a grass clump that you were near enough to touch him before you saw him. Then, if you were very quiet, you might stand a long time looking at him. His round eyes stared at yours without meaning anything. His nose wiggled, and sunlight was rosy through his long ears, that had delicate veins in them and the softest short fur on their outsides. The rest of his fur was so thick and soft that at last you couldn’t help trying, very carefully, to touch it.
Then he was gone in a flash and the place where he had been sitting was hollowed and smooth and still warm from his warm behind.
All the time, of course, Laura or Mary was minding Baby Carrie, except when she had her afternoon nap. Then they sat and soaked in the sunshine and the wind until Laura forgot that the baby was sleeping. She jumped up and ran and shouted till Ma came to the door and said, “Dear me, Laura, must you yell like an Indian? I declare,” Ma said, “if you girls aren’t getting to look like Indians! Can I never teach you to keep your sunbonnets on?”
Pa was up on the house wall beginning the roof. He looked down at them and laughed.
“One little Indian, two little Indians, three little Indians,” he sang, softly. “No, only two.”
“You make three,” Mary said to him. “You’re brown, too.”
“But you aren’t little, Pa,” said Laura. “Pa, when are we going to see a papoose? “
“Goodness!” Ma exclaimed. “What do you want to see an Indian baby for? Put on your sunbonnet, now, and forget such nonsense.”
Laura’s sunbonnet hung down her back. She pulled it up by its strings, and its sides came past her cheeks. When her sunbonnet was on she could see only what was in front of her, and that was why she was always pushing it back and letting it hang by its strings tied around her throat. She put her sunbonnet on when Ma told her to, but she did not forget the papoose.
This was Indian country and she didn’t know why she didn’t see Indians. She knew she would see them sometime, though. Pa said so, but she was getting tired of waiting.
Pa had taken the canvas wagon-top off the house, and now he was ready to put the roof on. For days and days he had been hauling logs from the creek bottoms and splitting them into thin, long slabs. Piles of slabs lay all around the house and slabs stood against it.
“Come out of the house, Caroline,” he said. “I don’t want to risk anything falling on you or Carrie.”
“Wait, Charles, till I put away the china shepherdess,” Ma answered. In a minute she came out, with a quilt and her mending and Baby Carrie. She spread the quilt on the shady grass by the stable, and sat there to do her mending and watch Carrie play.
Pa reached down and pulled up a slab. He laid it across the ends of the sapling rafters. Its edge stuck out beyond the wall. Then Pa put some nails in his mouth and took his hammer out of his belt, and he began to nail the slab to the rafters.
Mr. Edwards had lent him the nails. They had met in the woods, where they were both chopping down trees, and Mr. Edwards had insisted that Pa borrow nails for the roof.
“That’s what I call a good neighbor!” Pa said when he told Ma about it.
“Yes,” said Ma. “But I don’t like to be beholden, not even to the best of neighbors.”
“Nor I,” Pa replied. “I’ve never been beholden to any man yet, and I never will be. But neighborliness is another matter, and I’ll pay him back every nail as soon as I can make the trip to Independence.”
Now Pa carefully took the nails one by one from his mouth, and with ringing blows of the hammer he drove them into the slab. It was much quicker than drilling holes and whittling pegs and driving them into the holes. But every now and then a nail sprang away from the tough oak when the hammer hit it, and if Pa was not holding it firmly, it went sailing through the air.
Then Mary and Laura watched it fall and they searched in the grass till they found it. Sometimes it was bent. Then Pa carefully pounded it straight again. It would never do to lose or waste a nail.
When Pa had nailed down two slabs, he got up on them. He laid and nailed more slabs, all the way up to the top of the rafters. The edge of each slab lapped over the edge of the slab below it.
Then he began again on the other side of the house, and he laid the roof all the way up from that side. A little crack was left between the highest slabs. So Pa made a little trough of two slabs, and he nailed this trough firmly, upside down over the crack.
The roof was done. The house was darker than it had been, because no light came through the slabs. There was not one single crack that would let rain come in.
“You have done a splendid job, Charles,” Ma said, “and I’m thankful to have a good roof over my head.”
“You shall have furniture, too, as fine as I can make it,” Pa replied. “I’ll make a bedstead as soon as the floor is laid.”
He began again to haul logs. Day after day he hauled logs. He did not even stop hauling logs to go hunting; he took his gun on the wagon and brought back at night whatever meat he had shot from the wagon-seat.
When he had hauled enough logs to make the floor, he began to split them. He split each log straight down the middle. Laura liked to sit on the woodpile and watch him.
First, with a mighty blow of his ax he split the butt of the log. Into the crack he slipped the thin edge of an iron wedge. Then he wrenched the ax out of the log, and he drove the wedge deeper into the
crack. The tough wood split a little farther.
All the way up the log Pa fought that tough oak. He struck with his ax into the crack. He drove blocks of wood into it, and moved the iron wedge higher. Little by little he followed the crack up the log.
He swung the ax high, and brought it down with a great swing and a grunt from his chest. “Ugh!” The ax whizzed and struck, plung! It always struck exactly where Pa wanted it to.
At last, with a tearing, cracking sound, the whole log split. Its two halves lay on the ground, showing the tree’s pale insides and the darker streak up its middle. Then Pa wiped the sweat from his forehead, he took a fresh grip on the ax, and he tackled another log.
One day the last log was split, and next morning Pa began to lay the floor. He dragged the logs into the house and laid them one by one, flat side up. With his spade he scraped the ground underneath, and fitted the round side of the log firmly down into it. With his ax he trimmed away the edge of bark and cut the wood straight, so that each log fitted against the next, with hardly a crack between them.
Then he took the head of the ax in his hand, and with little, careful blows he smoothed the wood. He squinted along the log to see that the surface was straight and true. He took off last little bits, here and there. Finally he ran his hand over the smoothness, and nodded.
“Not a splinter!” he said. “That’ll be all right for little bare feet to run over.”
He left that log fitted into its place, and dragged in another.
When he came to the fireplace, he used shorter logs. He left a space of bare earth for a hearth, so that when sparks or coals popped out of the fire they would not burn the floor.
One day the floor was done. It was smooth and firm and hard, a good floor of solid oak that would last, Pa said, forever.
Little House on the Prairie Page 6
