So that was all right. The panther was dead. Laura asked if a panther would carry off a little papoose and kill and eat her, too, and Pa said yes. Probably that was why the Indian had killed that panther.
Chapter 21
Indian Jamboree
Winter ended at last. There was a softer note in the sound of the wind, and the bitter cold was gone. One day Pa said he had seen a flock of wild geese flying north. It was time to take his furs to Independence.
Ma said, “The Indians are so near!”
“They are perfectly friendly,” said Pa. He often met Indians in the woods where he was hunting. There was nothing to fear from Indians.
“No,” Ma said. But Laura knew that Ma was afraid of Indians. “You must go, Charles,” she said. “We must have a plow and seeds. And you will soon be back again.”
Before dawn next morning Pa hitched Pet and Patty to the wagon, loaded his furs into it, and drove away.
Laura and Mary counted the long, empty days. One, two, three, four, and still Pa had not come home. In the morning of the fifth day they began earnestly to watch for him.
It was a sunny day. There was still a little chill in the wind, but it smelled of spring. The vast blue sky resounded to the quacks of wild ducks and the honk-honk-honking of wild geese. The long, black-dotted lines of them were all flying north.
Laura and Mary played outdoors in the wild, sweet weather. And poor Jack watched them and sighed. He couldn’t run and play any more, because he was chained. Laura and Mary tried to comfort him, but he didn’t want petting. He wanted to be free again, as he used to be.
Pa didn’t come that morning; he didn’t come that afternoon. Ma said it must have taken him a long time to trade his furs.
That afternoon Laura and Mary were playing hop-scotch. They marked the lines with a stick in the muddy yard. Mary really didn’t want to hop; she was almost eight years old and she didn’t think that hop-scotch was a ladylike play. But Laura teased and coaxed, and said that if they stayed outdoors they would be sure to see Pa the minute he came from the creek bottoms. So Mary was hopping.
Suddenly she stopped on one foot and said, “What’s that?”
Laura had already heard the queer sound and she was listening to it. She said, “It’s the Indians.”
Mary’s other foot dropped and she stood frozen still. She was scared. Laura was not exactly scared, but that sound made her feel funny. It was the sound of quite a lot of Indians, chopping with their voices. It was something like the sound of an ax chopping, and something like a dog barking, and it was something like a song, but not like any song that Laura had ever heard. It was a wild, fierce sound, but it didn’t seem angry.
Laura tried to hear it more clearly. She couldn’t hear it very well, because hills and trees and the wind were in the way, and Jack was savagely growling.
Ma came outdoors and listened a minute. Then she told Mary and Laura to come into the house. Ma took Jack inside, too, and pulled in the latch-string.
They didn’t play any more. They watched at the window, and listened to that sound. It was harder to hear, in the house. Sometimes they couldn’t hear it; then they heard it again. It hadn’t stopped.
Ma and Laura did the chores earlier than usual. They locked Bunny and the cow and calf in the stable, and took the milk to the house. Ma strained it and set it away. She drew a bucket of fresh water from the well, while Laura and Mary carried in wood. All the time that sound went on; it was louder, now, and faster. It made Laura’s heart beat fast.
They all went into the house and Ma barred the door. The latch-string was already in. They wouldn’t go out of the house till morning.
The sun slowly sank. All around the edge of the prairie the edge of the sky flushed pink. Firelight flickered in the dusky house and Ma was getting supper, but Laura and Mary silently watched from the window. They saw the colors fade from everything. The land was shadowy and the sky was clear, pale gray. All the time that sound came from the creek bottoms, louder and louder, faster and faster. And Laura’s heart beat faster and louder.
How she shouted when she heard the wagon! She ran to the door and jumped up and down, but she couldn’t unbar it. Ma wouldn’t let her go out. Ma went out, to help Pa bring in the bundles.
He came in with his arms full, and Laura and Mary clung to his sleeves and jumped on his feet. Pa laughed his jolly big laugh. “Hey! hey! don’t upset me!” he laughed. “What do you think I am? A tree to climb?”
He dropped the bundles on the table, he hugged Laura in a big bear hug, and tossed her and hugged her again. Then he hugged Mary snugly in his other arm.
“Listen, Pa,” Laura said. “Listen to the Indians. Why are they making that funny noise?”
“Oh, they’re having some kind of jamboree,” Pa said. “I heard them when I crossed the creek bottoms.”
Then he went out to unhitch the horses and bring in the rest of the bundles. He had got the plow; he left it in the stable, but he brought all the seeds into the house for safety. He had sugar, not any white sugar this time, but brown. White sugar cost too much. But he had brought a little white flour. There were cornmeal and salt and coffee and all the seeds they needed. Pa had even got seed potatoes. Laura wished they might eat the potatoes but they must be saved to plant.
Then Pa’s face beamed and he opened a small paper sack. It was full of crackers. He set it on the table, and he unwrapped and set beside it a glass jar full of little green cucumber pickles.
“I thought we’d all have a treat,” he said.
Laura’s mouth watered, and Ma’s eyes shone softly at Pa. He had remembered how she longed for pickles.
That wasn’t all. He gave Ma a package and watched her unwrap it and in it was enough pretty calico to make her a dress.
“Oh, Charles, you shouldn’t! It’s too much!” she said. But her face and Pa’s were two beams of joy.
Now he hung up his cap and his plaid coat on their pegs. His eyes looked sidewise at Laura and Mary, but that was all. He sat down and stretched out his legs to the fire.
Mary sat down, too, and folded her hands in her lap. But Laura climbed onto Pa’s knee and beat him with her fists. “Where is it? Where is it? Where’s my present?” she said, beating him.
Pa laughed his big laugh, like great bells ringing, and he said, “Why, I do believe there is something in my blouse pocket.”
He took out an oddly shaped package, and very, very slowly he opened it.
“You first, Mary,” he said, “because you are so patient.” And he gave Mary a comb for her hair. “And here, flutterbudget! this is for you,” he said to Laura.
The combs were exactly alike. They were made of black rubber and curved to fit over the top of a little girl’s head. And over the top of the comb lay a flat piece of black rubber, with curving slits cut in it, and in the very middle of it a little five-pointed star was cut out. A bright colored ribbon was drawn underneath, and the color showed through.
The ribbon in Mary’s comb was blue, and the ribbon in Laura’s comb was red.
Ma smoothed back their hair and slid the combs into it, and there in the golden hair, exactly over the middle of Mary’s forehead, was a little blue star. And in Laura’s brown hair, over the middle of her forehead, was a little red star.
Laura looked at Mary’s star, and Mary looked at Laura’s, and they laughed with joy. They had never had anything so pretty.
Ma said, “But, Charles, you didn’t get yourself a thing!”
“Oh, I got myself a plow,” said Pa. “Warm weather’ll be here soon now, and I’ll be plowing.”
That was the happiest supper they had had for a long time. Pa was safely home again. The fried salt pork was very good, after so many months of eating ducks and geese and turkeys and venison. And nothing had ever tasted so good as those crackers and the little green sour pickles.
Pa told them about all the seeds. He had got seeds of turnips and carrots and onions and cabbage. He had got peas and beans. And corn and wh
eat and tobacco and the seed potatoes. And watermelon seeds. He said to Ma, “I tell you, Caroline, when we begin getting crops off this rich land of ours, we’ll be living like kings!”
They had almost forgotten the noise from the Indian camp. The window shutters were closed now, and the wind was moaning in the chimney and whining around the house. They were so used to the wind that they did not hear it. But when the wind was silent an instant, Laura heard again that wild, shrill, fast-beating sound from the Indian camps.
Then Pa said something to Ma that made Laura sit very still and listen carefully. He said that folks in Independence said that the government was going to put the white settlers out of the Indian Territory. He said the Indians had been complaining and they had got that answer from Washington.
“Oh, Charles, no!” Ma said. “Not when we have done so much.”
Pa said he didn’t believe it. He said, “They always have let settlers keep the land. They’ll make the Indians move on again. Didn’t I get word straight from Washington that this country’s going to be opened for settlement any time now?”
“I wish they’d settle it and stop talking about it,” Ma said.
After Laura was in bed she lay awake a long time, and so did Mary. Pa and Ma sat in the firelight and candlelight, reading. Pa had brought a newspaper from Kansas, and he read it to Ma. It proved that he was right, the government would not do anything to the white settlers.
Whenever the sound of the wind died away, Laura could faintly hear the noise of that wild jamboree in the Indian camp. Sometimes even above the howling of the wind she thought she still heard those fierce yells of jubilation. Faster, faster, faster they made her heart beat. “Hi! Hi! Hi-yi! Hah! Hi! Hah!”
Chapter 22
Prairie Fire
Spring had come. The warm winds smelled exciting, and all outdoors was large and bright and sweet. Big white shining clouds floated high up in clear space. Their shadows floated over the prairie. The shadows were thin and brown, and all the rest of the prairie was the pale, soft colors of dead grasses.
Pa was breaking the prairie sod, with Pet and Patty hitched to the breaking-plow. The sod was a tough, thick mass of grass-roots. Pet and Patty slowly pulled with all their might and the sharp plow slowly turned over a long, unbroken strip of that sod.
The dead grass was so tall and thick that it held up the sod. Where Pa had plowed, he didn’t have a plowed field. The long strips of grass-roots lay on top of grass, and grass stuck out between them.
But Pa and Pet and Patty kept on working. He said that sod potatoes and sod corn would grow this year, and next year the roots and the dead grasses would be rotted. In two or three years he would have nicely plowed fields. Pa liked the land because it was so rich, and there wasn’t a tree or a stump or a rock in it.
Now a great many Indians came riding along the Indian trail. Indians were everywhere. Their guns echoed in the creek bottoms where they were hunting. No one knew how many Indians were hidden in the prairie which seemed so level but wasn’t. Often Laura saw an Indian where no one had been an instant before.
Indians often came to the house. Some were friendly, some were surly and cross. All of them wanted food and tobacco, and Ma gave them what they wanted. She was afraid not to. When an Indian pointed at something and grunted, Ma gave him that thing. But most of the food was kept hidden and locked up.
Jack was cross all the time, even with Laura. He was never let off the chain, and all the time he lay and hated the Indians. Laura and Mary were quite used to seeing them now. Indians didn’t surprise them at all. But they always felt safer near Pa or Jack.
One day they were helping Ma get dinner. Baby Carrie was playing on the floor in the sunshine, and suddenly the sunshine was gone.
“I do believe it is going to storm,” Ma said, looking out of the window. Laura looked, too, and great black clouds were billowing up in the south, across the sun.
Pet and Patty were coming running from the field, Pa holding to the heavy plow and bounding in long leaps behind it.
“Prairie fire!” he shouted. “Get the tub full of water! Put sacks in it! Hurry!”
Ma ran to the well, Laura ran to tug the tub to it. Pa tied Pet to the house. He brought the cow and calf from the picket-line and shut them in the stable. He caught Bunny and tied her fast to the north corner of the house. Ma was pulling up buckets of water as fast as she could. Laura ran to get the sacks that Pa had flung out of the stable.
Pa was plowing, shouting at Pet and Patty to make them hurry. The sky was black now, the air was as dark as if the sun had set. Pa plowed a long furrow west of the house and south of the house, and back again east of the house. Rabbits came bounding past him as if he wasn’t there.
Pet and Patty came galloping, the plow and Pa bounding behind them. Pa tied them to the other north corner of the house. The tub was full of water. Laura helped Ma push the sacks under the water to soak them.
“I couldn’t plow but one furrow; there isn’t time,” Pa said. “Hurry, Caroline. That fire’s coming faster than a horse can run.”
A big rabbit bounded right over the tub while Pa and Ma were lifting it. Ma told Laura to stay at the house. Pa and Ma ran staggering to the furrow with the tub.
Laura stayed close to the house. She could see the red fire coming under the billows of smoke. More rabbits went leaping by. They paid no attention to Jack and he didn’t think about them; he stared at the red under sides of the rolling smoke and shivered and whined while he crowded close to Laura.
The wind was rising and wildly screaming. Thousands of birds flew before the fire, thousands of rabbits were running.
Pa was going along the furrow, setting fire to the grass on the other side of it. Ma followed with a wet sack, beating at the flames that tried to cross the furrow. The whole prairie was hopping with rabbits. Snakes rippled across the yard. Prairie hens ran silently, their necks outstretched and their wings spread. Birds screamed in the screaming wind.
Pa’s little fire was all around the house now, and he helped Ma fight it with the wet sacks. The fire blew wildly, snatching at the dry grass inside the furrow. Pa and Ma thrashed at it with the sacks, when it got across the furrow they stamped it with their feet. They ran back and forth in the smoke, fighting that fire. The prairie fire was roaring now, roaring louder and louder in the screaming wind. Great flames came roaring, flaring and twisting high. Twists of flame broke loose and came down on the wind to blaze up in the grasses far ahead of the roaring wall of fire. A red light came from the rolling black clouds of smoke overhead.
Mary and Laura stood against the house and held hands and trembled. Baby Carrie was in the house. Laura wanted to do something, but inside her head was a roaring and whirling like the fire. Her middle shook, and tears poured out of her stinging eyes. Her eyes and her nose and her throat stung with smoke.
Jack howled. Bunny and Pet and Patty were jerking at the ropes and squealing horribly.
The orange, yellow, terrible flames were coming faster than horses can run, and their quivering light danced over everything.
Pa’s little fire had made a burned black strip. The little fire went backing slowly away against the wind, it went slowly crawling to meet the racing furious big fire. And suddenly the big fire swallowed the little one.
The wind rose to a high, crackling, rushing shriek, flames climbed into the crackling air. Fire was all around the house.
Then it was over. The fire went roaring past and away.
Pa and Ma were beating out little fires here and there in the yard. When they were all out, Ma came to the house to wash her hands and face. She was all streaked with smoke and sweat, and she was trembling.
She said there was nothing to worry about. “The back-fire saved us,” she said, “and all’s well that ends well.”
The air smelled scorched. And to the very edge of the sky, the prairie was burned naked and black. Threads of smoke rose from it. Ashes blew on the wind. Everything felt different and miserable. B
ut Pa and Ma were cheerful because the fire was gone and it had not done any harm.
Pa said that the fire had not missed them far, but a miss is as good as a mile. He asked Ma, “If it had come while I was in Independence, what would you have done?”
“We would have gone to the creek with the birds and the rabbits, of course,” Ma said.
All the wild things on the prairie had known what to do. They ran and flew and hopped and crawled as fast as they could go, to the water that would keep them safe from fire. Only the little soft striped gophers had gone down deep into their holes, and they were the first to come up and look around at the bare, smoking prairie.
Then out of the creek bottoms the birds came flying over it, and a rabbit cautiously hopped and looked. It was a long, long time before the snakes crawled out of the bottoms and the prairie hens came walking.
The fire had gone out among the bluffs. It had never reached the creek bottoms or the Indian camps.
That night Mr. Edwards and Mr. Scott came to see Pa. They were worried because they thought that perhaps the Indians had started that fire on purpose to burn out the white settlers.
Pa didn’t believe it. He said the Indians had always burned the prairie to make green grass grow more quickly, and traveling easier. Their ponies couldn’t gallop through the thick, tall, dead grass. Now the ground was clear. And he was glad of it, because plowing would be easier.
While they were talking, they could hear drums beating in the Indian camps, and shouts. Laura sat still as a mouse on the doorstep and listened to the talk and to the Indians. The stars hung low and large and quivering over the burned prairie, and the wind blew gently in Laura’s hair.
Little House on the Prairie Page 13
