By the Shores of Silver Lake Read online

  The man who had rung the bell told Ma, “Yes, ma’am! We’ve got room for you.” He put the satchels behind the desk and said, “Maybe you’d like to wash up, ma’am, before you eat?”

  In a little room there was a washstand. A large china pitcher stood in a big china bowl, and a roller towel hung on the wall. Ma wet a clean handkerchief and washed Grace’s face and hands and her own. Then she emptied the bowl into a pail beside the washstand and filled the bowl with fresh water for Mary and again for Laura. The cold water felt good on their dusty, sooty faces, and in the bowl it turned quite black. There was only a little water for each; then the pitcher was empty. Ma set it neatly in the bowl again when Laura was through. They all wiped on the roller towel. A roller towel was very convenient because its ends were sewed together and it ran around on its roller so that everyone could find a dry place.

  Now the time had come to go into the dining room. Laura dreaded that, and she knew that Ma did, too. It was hard to face so many strangers.

  “You all look clean and nice,” Ma said. “Now remember your manners.” Ma went first, carrying Grace. Carrie followed her, then Laura went, leading Mary. The noisy clatter of eating became hushed when they went into the dining room, but hardly any of the men looked up. Somehow Ma found empty chairs; then they were all sitting in a row at the long table.

  All over the table, thick on the white cloth, stood screens shaped like beehives. Under every screen was a platter of meat or a dish of vegetables. There were plates of bread and of butter, dishes of pickles, pitchers of syrup, and cream pitchers and bowls of sugar. At each place was a large piece of pie on a small plate. The flies crawled and buzzed over the wire screens, but they could not get at the food inside.

  Every one was very kind and passed the food. All the dishes kept coming from hand to hand up and down the table to Ma. Nobody talked except to mutter, “You’re welcome, ma’am,” when Ma said, “Thank you.” A girl brought her a cup of coffee.

  Laura cut Mary’s meat into small pieces for her and buttered her bread. Mary’s sensitive fingers managed her knife and fork perfectly, and did not spill anything.

  It was a pity that the excitement took away their appetites. The dinner cost twenty-five cents, and they could eat all they wanted to eat; there was plenty of food. But they ate only a little. In a few minutes all the men finished their pie and left, and the girl who had brought the coffee began to stack up the plates and carry them into the kitchen. She was a big, good-natured girl with a broad face and yellow hair.

  “I guess you folks are going out to homestead?” she asked Ma.

  “Yes,” Ma said.

  “Your man working on the railroad?”

  “Yes,” Ma said. “He’s coming here to meet us this afternoon.”

  “I thought that’s the way it was,” the girl said. “It’s funny your coming out here this time of year, most folks come in the spring. Your big girl’s blind, ain’t she? That’s too bad. Well, the parlor’s on the other side of the office; you folks can set in there if you want to, till your man comes.”

  The parlor had a carpet on the floor and flowered paper on the walls. The chairs were cushioned in dark red plush. Ma sank into the rocking chair with a sigh of relief.

  “Grace does get heavy. Sit down, girls, and be quiet.”

  Carrie climbed into a big chair near Ma, and Mary and Laura sat on the sofa. They were all quiet, so that Grace would go to sleep for her afternoon nap.

  The center table had a brass-bottomed lamp on it. Its curved legs ended in glass balls on the carpet. Lace curtains were looped back from the window, and between them Laura could see the prairie, and a road going away across it. Perhaps that was the road that Pa would come on. If it was, they would all go away on that road, and somewhere, far beyond the end of it that Laura could see, some day they would all be living on the new homestead.

  Laura would rather not stop anywhere. She would rather go on and on, to the very end of the road, wherever it was.

  All that long afternoon they sat quiet in that parlor while Grace slept, and Carrie slept a little, and even Ma dozed. The sun was almost setting when a tiny team and wagon came into sight on the road. It slowly grew larger. Grace was awake now, and they all watched from the window. The wagon grew life-size, and it was Pa’s wagon, and Pa was in it.

  Because they were in a hotel, they could not run out to meet him. But in a moment he came in saying, “Hullo! Here’s my girls!”

  Chapter 5

  Railroad Camp

  Early next morning they were all in the wagon going west. Grace sat between Ma and Pa on the spring seat, and Carrie and Laura sat with Mary between them on a board across the wagon box.

  Traveling on the cars was rich and swift but Laura preferred the wagon. For this one day’s trip, Pa had not put on the cover. The whole sky was overhead and the prairie stretched away on all sides with farms scattered over it. The wagon went slowly, so there was time to see everything. And they could all talk comfortably together.

  The only noise was the horses’ feet clop-clopping and the little creaking sounds of the wagon.

  Pa said that Uncle Hi had finished his first contract and was moving to a new camp farther west. He said, “The men have cleared out already. There’s only a couple of teamsters left beside Docia’s folks. They’ll have the last of the shanties down and be hauling off the lumber in a couple of days.”

  “Are we moving on then, too?” Ma asked.

  “In a couple of days, yes,” Pa answered. He had not looked for a homestead yet. He would get one farther west.

  Laura did not find much to see out loud for Mary. The horses followed the road that went straight across the prairie. Always beside it was the railroad grade of raw earth. To the north the fields and houses were the same as at home, except that they were newer and smaller.

  The freshness of the morning wore off. All the time little jolts and jiggles came up from the wagon through the hard board that they were sitting on. It seemed that the sun had never climbed so slowly. Carrie sighed. Her peaked little face was pale. But Laura could do nothing for her. Laura and Carrie must sit on the ends of the board where the jiggling was hardest because Mary must be in the middle.

  At last the sun was overhead, and Pa stopped the horses by a little creek. It was good to feel still. The little creek talked to itself, the horses munched their oats in the feedbox at the back of the wagon, and on the warm grass Ma spread a cloth and opened the lunch box. There was bread and butter and good hardboiled eggs, with pepper and salt in a paper, to dip the bitten eggs into.

  Noon ended too soon. Pa led the horses to drink from the creek, while Ma and Laura picked up the eggshells and bits of paper, to leave the place tidy. Pa hitched the horses to the wagon again and sang out, “All aboard!”

  Laura and Carrie wished they could walk for a while. But they did not say so. They knew that Mary could not keep up with the wagon, and they could not let her sit in it alone and blind. They helped her climb up, and sat down beside her on the board.

  The afternoon was longer than the morning. Once Laura said, “I thought we were going west.”

  “We are going west, Laura,” Pa said, surprised.

  “I thought it would be different,” Laura explained.

  “Just you wait till we get out beyond settled country!” said Pa.

  Once Carrie sighed, “I’m tired.” But she straightened up quickly and said, “Not so very tired.” Carrie did not mean to complain.

  One little jolt is nothing at all. They had hardly noticed two miles and a half of little jolts when they rode to town from Plum Creek. But all the little jolts from sunrise to noon, and then all the little jolts from noon to sunset, are tiring.

  Dark came, and still the horses plodded on, and the wheels kept turning and the hard board went on jarring. Stars were overhead. The wind was chilly. They would all have been asleep if the jolting board had let them sleep. For a long time nobody said anything. Then Pa said, “There’s the light of th
e shanty.”

  Far ahead there was a little twinkle on the dark land. The stars were larger but their light was cold. The tiny twinkle was warm.

  “It’s a little yellow spark, Mary,” Laura said. “It’s shining from far away in the dark to tell us to keep on coming, there’s a house there, and folks.”

  “And supper,” said Mary. “Aunt Docia’s keeping supper hot for us.”

  Very slowly the light twinkled larger. It began to shine steady and round. After a long time it was square cornered.

  “You can see it’s a window now,” Laura told Mary. “It’s in a long, low, house. There are two other long, low dark houses in the dark. That’s all I can see.”

  “That’s all of the camp,” Pa said. He told the horses, “Whoa.”

  The horses stopped right then, without another step. The jiggling and jolting stopped. Everything stopped; there was only the still, cold dark. Then lamplight flared out of a doorway and Aunt Docia was saying, “Come right in, Caroline and girls! Hurry and put up your team, Charles; supper’s waiting!”

  The chilly dark had settled in Laura’s bones. Mary and Carrie moved stiffly too, and they stumbled, yawning. In the long room, the lamp shone on a long table and benches and rough board walls. It was warm there and smelled of supper on the stove. Aunt Docia said, “Well, Lena and Jean, aren’t you going to say anything to your cousins?”

  “How do you do?” Lena said. Laura and Mary and Carrie all said, “How do you do?”

  Jean was only a little boy, eleven years old. But Lena was a year older than Laura. Her eyes were black and snappy, her hair was black as black can be, and it curled naturally. The short wisps curled around her forehead, the top of her head was wavy, and the ends of her braids were round curls. Laura liked her.

  “Do you like to ride horseback?” she asked Laura. “We’ve got two black ponies. We ride them, and I can drive them too. Jean can’t because he’s too little. Pa won’t let him take the buggy. But I can, and tomorrow I’m going for the washing and you can come if you want to, do you?”

  “Yes!” Laura said. “If Ma’ll let me.” She was too sleepy to ask how they could go in a buggy for the washing. She was so sleepy that she could hardly stay awake to eat supper.

  Uncle Hi was fat and good-natured and easygoing. Aunt Docia talked very fast. Uncle Hi tried to calm her down, but every time he tried, Aunt Docia only talked faster. She was angry because Uncle Hi had worked hard all summer and had nothing to show for it.

  “He’s worked like a nailer all summer!” she said. “He’s even worked his own teams on the grade, and both of us saving and scrimping and pinching till the job was finished, and now it’s finished and the company says we owe them money! They say we’re in debt to them for our summer’s hard work! And on top of that they want us to take another contract, and Hi takes it! That’s what he does! He takes it!”

  Uncle Hi tried to calm her down again, and Laura tried to stay awake. All the faces wavered and the voice raveled out thin; then her neck jerked her head up. When supper was over, she staggered up to help do the dishes, but Aunt Docia told her and Lena to run along to bed.

  There was no room in Aunt Docia’s beds for Laura and Lena, nor for Jean. He was going to stay in the bunkhouse with the men, and Lena said, “Come along, Laura! We’re going to sleep in the office tent!”

  Outdoors was very large and dim and chilly. The bunkhouse lay low and dark under the big sky, and the little office tent was ghostly in the starlight. It seemed far away from the lamplit shanty.

  The tent was empty. There was only grass underfoot and canvas walls sloping up to a peak overhead. Laura felt lost and lonesome. She would not have minded sleeping in the wagon, but she did not like to sleep on the ground in a strange place, and she wished that Pa and Ma were there.

  Lena thought it was great fun to sleep in the tent. She flopped down right away, on a blanket spread on the ground. Laura mumbled sleepily, “Don’t we undress?”

  “What for?” Lena said. “You only have to put on your clothes again in the morning. Besides, there aren’t any covers.”

  So Laura lay down on the blanket and was sound asleep. Suddenly she jerked awake with a frightful start. From the huge blackness of the night came again a wild, shrill howl.

  It was not an Indian. It was not a wolf. Laura did not know what it was. Her heart stopped beating, “Aw, you can’t scare us!” Lena called out. She said to Laura, “It’s Jean, trying to scare us.”

  Jean yelled again, but Lena shouted, “Run away, little boy! I wasn’t brought up in the woods to be scared by an owl!”

  “Yah!” Jean called back. Laura began to unstiffen and fell asleep.

  Chapter 6

  The Black Ponies

  Sunshine, coming through the canvas onto Laura’s face, woke her. She opened her eyes just as Lena opened hers, and looking at each other they laughed.

  “Hurry up! We’re going for the washing!” Lena sang out, jumping up.

  They hadn’t undressed, so they did not need to dress. They folded the blanket and their bedroom work was done. They went skipping out into the large, breezy morning.

  The shanties were small under the sunny sky. East and west ran the railroad grade and the road; northward the grasses were tossing tawny seed plumes. Men were tearing down one of the shanties with a pleasant racket of clattering boards. On picket lines in the blowing grasses, the two black ponies, with blowing black manes and tails, were grazing.

  “We’ve got to eat breakfast first,” Lena said. “Come on, Laura! Hurry!”

  Everyone except Aunt Docia was already at the table. Aunt Docia was frying pancakes.

  “Get yourselves washed and combed, you lie-abeds! Breakfast’s on the table and no thanks to you, lazy miss!” Aunt Docia, laughing, gave Lena a spank as Lena went by. This morning she was as good-natured as Uncle Hi.

  Breakfast was jolly. Pa’s great laugh rang out like bells. But afterward what stacks of dishes there were to wash!

  Lena said the dishes were nothing to what she had been doing; dishes three times a day for forty-six men, and between times the cooking. She and Aunt Docia had been on their feet from before sunrise till late at night, and still they couldn’t keep up with all the work. That’s why Aunt Docia had hired the washing out. This was the first time that Laura had ever heard of hiring out the washing. A homesteader’s wife did Aunt Docia’s washing; she lived three miles away so they’d have a six-mile drive.

  Laura helped Lena carry the harness to the buggy, and lead the willing ponies from their picket lines. She helped put the harness on them, the bits into their mouths, the hames on the collars clasping their warm black necks, and the tailpieces under their tails. Then Lena and Laura backed the ponies in beside the buggy pole, and fastened the stiff bather traces to the whiffletrees. They climbed into the buggy and Lena took the lines.

  Pa had never let Laura drive his horses. He said she was not strong enough to hold them if they ran away.

  As soon as Lena had the lines, the black ponies started gaily trotting. The buggy wheels turned swiftly, the fresh wind blew. Birds fluttered and sang and flew dipping over the tops of the blowing grasses. Faster and faster went the ponies, faster went the wheels. Laura and Lena laughed with joy.

  The trotting ponies touched noses, gave a little squeal and ran.

  Up sailed the buggy, almost jerking the seat from under Laura. Her bonnet flapped behind her tugging at its strings around her throat. She clutched onto the seat’s edge. The ponies were stretched out low, running with all their might.

  “They’re running away!” Laura cried out.

  “Let ’em run!” Lena shouted, slapping them with the lines. “They can’t run against anything but grass! Hi! Yi! Yi, yi, yee-ee!” she yelled at the ponies.

  Their long black manes and tails streamed on the wind, their feet pounded, the buggy sailed. Everything went rushing by too fast to be seen. Lena began to sing:

  “I know a young man fair to see,

  Ta
ke care! Oh, take care!

  And he can very obliging be.

  Beware! Oh, beware!”

  Laura had not heard the song before, but she was soon singing the refrain with all her voice.

  “Take care, dear girl, he’s a-fooling you!

  Take care! Oh, take care!

  Trust him not for he won’t prove true,

  Beware! Oh, beware!”

  “Hi, yi, yi, yi yipee-ee!” they yelled. But the ponies couldn’t go faster, they were going as fast as they could.

  “I wouldn’t marry a farmer (Lena sang)

  He’s always in the dirt,

  I’d rather marry a railroad man

  Who wears a striped shirt!

  “Oh, a railroad man, a railroad man,

  A railroad man for me!

  I’m going to marry a railroad man,

  A railroader’s bride I’ll be!”

  “I guess I better breathe them,” she said. She pulled at the lines till she made the ponies trot, and then they slowed to a walk. Everything seemed quiet and slow.

  “I wish I could drive,” Laura said. “I always wanted to, but Pa won’t let me.”

  “You can drive a ways,” Lena offered generously.

  Just then the ponies touched noses again, squealed, and ran.

  “You can drive on the way home!” Lena promised. Singing and whooping, they went racing on across the prairie. Every time Lena slowed the ponies to get their breath, they got it and ran again. In no time at all, they reached the homesteader’s claim shanty.

  It was a tiny room, boarded up-and-down, and its roof sloped all one way, so that it looked like half of a little house. It was not as big as the wheat stacks beyond it, where men were threshing wheat with a noisy, chaff-puffing machine. The homesteader’s wife came out to the buggy, lugging the basket of washing. Her face and arms and her bare feet were as brown as leather from the sun. Her hair straggled uncombed and her limp dress was faded and not clean.