By the Shores of Silver Lake Read online

  “We’ll have to go east somewhere to spend the winter,” he said to Ma. “This shanty’s too thin for zero weather, even if the company’d let us stay in it, and even if we had any coal.”

  “Oh, Charles,” Ma said, “you haven’t even found the homestead yet, and if we have to spend the money you’ve earned, just living till spring—”

  “I know. But what can we do?” said Pa. “I can find the homestead all right before we leave, and file on it next spring. Maybe next summer I can get a job to live on and pay for the lumber to build us a shanty. I could make a sod shanty, but even so it will take all we’ve got to live till spring, with the prices of supplies out here, and coal. No, we’d better go east for the winter.”

  It was so hard to get ahead. Laura tried to cheer up, but she couldn’t. She did not want to go back east again. She hated to leave Silver Lake to go east. They had got as far as Silver Lake and she wanted to hang on there, not to be pushed back. But if they must be, they must; next spring they could start again. It would do no good to complain.

  “Don’t you feel well, Laura?” Ma asked her.

  “Oh, yes, Ma!” she answered. But she felt so heavy and dark that trying to be cheerful only made her more miserable.

  The company man had come to check Pa’s bookkeeping, and the last wagons from the west were going by. Even the lake was almost empty of birds and the sky was bare, except for one hurrying streak of flyers. Ma and Laura mended the wagon-cover and baked bread for the long drive.

  That evening Pa came whistling from the store, and blew into the shanty like a breeze.

  “How’d you like to stay here all winter, Caroline?” he sang out. “In the surveyors’ house!”

  “Oh, Pa! Can we?” Laura cried.

  “You bet we can!” said Pa. “If your Ma wants to. It’s a good, sound, weather-tight house, Caroline. The head surveyor was at the store just now, and he says they thought they had to stay and they laid in coal and provisions enough to last them through, but if I’ll take charge and be responsible for the company tools till spring, they’ll go out for the winter. The company man’s agreed.

  “There’s flour and beans and salt meat and potatoes, and even some canned stuff, he told me. And coal. We can have the whole of it for nothing, just for staying out here this winter. We can use the stable for the cow and team. I told him I’d let him know early tomorrow morning. What do you say, Caroline?”

  They all looked at Ma and waited. Laura could hardly keep still in her excitement. To stay at Silver Lake! Not to have to go back east, after all! Ma was disappointed; she had been wanting to go back to settled country. But she said, “It does seem Providential, Charles. There’s coal, you say?”

  “I wouldn’t think of staying without it,” said Pa. “But the coal’s there.”

  “Well, supper’s on the table,” said Ma. “Wash up and eat before it gets cold. It does look like a good chance, Charles.”

  At supper they talked of nothing else. It would be pleasant to live in a snug house; the shanty was cold with wind blowing through its cracks, though the door was shut and a fire was in the stove.

  “Don’t it make you feel rich—” Laura began.

  “‘Doesn’t,’” said Ma.

  “Doesn’t it make you feel rich, Ma, just to think of the whole winter’s provisions laid in, already?” said Laura.

  “Not a penny going out till spring,” said Pa.

  “Yes, Laura, it does,” Ma smiled. “You’re right, Charles, of course; we must stay.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Caroline,” Pa said. “In some ways maybe we’d better not. So far as I know, we won’t have a neighbor nearer than Brookings. That’s sixty miles. If anything happened—”

  A knock at the door startled them all. In answer to Pa’s “Come in!” a big man opened the door. He was bundled in thick coats and a muffler. His short beard was black, his cheeks were red, and his eyes were as black as the eyes of the little papoose in Indian Territory whom Laura had never forgotten.

  “Hullo, Boast!” Pa said. “Come up to the fire; it’s chilly tonight. This is my wife and girls. Mr. Boast has filed on a homestead out here, and he’s been working on the grade.”

  Ma gave Mr. Boast a chair by the fire and he held his hands out to the warmth. One hand was bandaged. “Did you hurt your hand?” Ma asked kindly.

  “Only a sprain,” said Mr. Boast, “but the heat feels good on it.” Turning to Pa he went on, “I’m needing some help, Ingalls. You remember my team that I sold Pete? He paid me part down and said he’d pay the rest next payday. But he’s kept putting it off, and now I’m darned if he hasn’t skipped out with the team. I’d go after him and take them, but his son’s with him and they’d put up a fight. I don’t want trouble with two toughs at once, and me with a lame hand.”

  “There’s enough of us around yet to tend to it,” said Pa.

  “I don’t mean that,” said Mr. Boast. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Then just where do I come in?” Pa asked.

  “I was thinking. There’s no law out here, no way to collect a debt, no officers, not even a county. But maybe Pete don’t know that.”

  “Oho!” said Pa. “You want me to make out some papers to serve on him?”

  “I’ve got a man that’ll act as sheriff and serve them,” Mr. Boast said. His eyes twinkled as much as Pa’s, but the twinkles were not alike. Mr. Boast’s eyes twinkled small and black, Pa’s twinkled wide and blue.

  Pa laughed out loud and slapped his knee. “What a joke! Lucky I’ve got some legal cap left. I’ll make out your papers, Boast! Go get your sheriff!”

  Mr. Boast hurried away while Ma and Laura hastily cleared the table. Pa squared up to it and wrote on a large sheet of paper, red-lined down the sides.

  “There!” he said finally, “that looks important. And finished just in time.”

  Mr. Boast was knocking at the door. Another man was with him, wrapped in a big overcoat, a cap pulled low over his eyes and a muffler wrapped around his neck and across his mouth.

  “Here you are, Sheriff!” Pa said to him. “Serve this writ of attachment and bring back the team or the money, dead or alive, with costs of this suit at law!” Their laughter seemed to shake the shanty.

  Pa looked at the cap and muffler that hid the man’s face. “Lucky for you it’s a cold night, Sheriff!” he said.

  When the two men shut the door behind them, and Pa stopped laughing, he said to Ma, “That was the head surveyor, or I’ll eat my hat!” He slapped his thigh and roared again.

  In the night Mr. Boast’s voice and Pa’s woke Laura. At the door Mr. Boast was saying, “I saw your light and stopped by to tell you it worked. Pete was so scared he’d have turned over the money and the team both. That crook’s got reason to be scared of the law. Here are the costs, Ingalls. The surveyor wouldn’t take any; he said the fun of it more than paid him.”

  “You keep his share,” said Pa. “I’ll take mine. The dignity of this court must be upheld!”

  When Mr. Boast laughed, Laura and Mary and Carrie and Ma all burst out laughing. They couldn’t help it. Pa’s laugh was like great bells ringing; it made you feel warm and happy. But Mr. Boast’s laugh made everybody laugh.

  “Hush, you’ll wake Grace,” Ma said.

  “What’s the joke?” Carrie asked. She had been asleep and had only heard Mr. Boast laugh.

  “What are you laughing at?” Mary asked her.

  “Mr. Boast’s laugh tickles,” Carrie said.

  In the morning Mr. Boast came to breakfast. The camp was gone and there was nowhere else to eat. The surveyors started east that morning in their buggy, and the last teamster passed. Mr. Boast was the last man to go; he had had to wait until his hand was better so that he could drive his team. His hand was worse that morning because it had been chilled in the night, but he started east anyway. He was going to Iowa to be married.

  “If you folks are going to stay here all winter, I don’t know but I’ll bring Ellie back
and stay too,” he said, “if we can make it before winter sets in.”

  “Be glad to have you, Boast,” said Pa. Ma said, “We would, indeed.”

  Then they watched Mr. Boast’s wagon going, and heard its rattling die away on the wagon track to the east.

  The whole prairie was empty now and not even one flock of birds was in the cold sky.

  As soon as Mr. Boast’s wagon was out of sight, Pa brought his team and wagon to the door.

  “Come, Caroline!” he called. “Nobody’s left in camp but us, and this is moving day!”

  Chapter 14

  The Surveyors’ House

  There was no need to pack anything, for the surveyors’ house stood on the north shore of the lake not half a mile from the shanty. Laura could hardly wait to see it. When she had helped to put everything neatly into the wagon, and Mary and Carrie and Ma and Grace were in it, Laura said to Pa, “Please, can’t I run ahead?”

  “‘May’ Laura,” Ma said. “Really, Charles, don’t you think—”

  “Nothing can hurt her,” Pa said. “We’ll have her in sight all the way. Follow the lake shore, Flutterbudget, and don’t worry, Caroline; we’ll be there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  So Laura ran ahead. Straight against the steady wind she ran. Her shawl flapped in the wind behind her and the cold of the wind poured through her. She felt her blood thin and chill in the wind, and then she felt it warm and pulsing strong, and her breath throbbed hard in her chest.

  She passed the spoiled spots where the camp had been. The earth was hard under her pounding feet, and rough with dead grass. No one else was anywhere near. Everybody had gone now. The prairie, the whole vast prairie, and the great sky and the wind were clear and free.

  Even the wagon was left behind now. But it was coming. Laura looked back, and Pa waved to her. When she stopped running she could hear the sound of the wind in the grasses and the lippety-lapping of the lake water. She hoppity-skipped on the short dry grass along the shore. She could shout if she wanted to. No one else was there. She shouted, “It’s ours! All ours!”

  The shout seemed loud in her throat, but in the air it was thin. The wind took it away perhaps. Or the stillness of the empty land and sky would not be disturbed.

  The surveyors’ boots had worn a path through the grasses. It was smooth and soft to Laura’s feet. She bent her shawled head to the wind and padded along the path, hurrying. It would be fun to see the surveyors’ house all by herself.

  It stood up in front of her suddenly. It was a big house, a real house with two stories, and glass windows. Its up-and-down boards were weathering from yellow to gray, and every crack was battened, as Pa had said. The door had a china knob. It opened into the lean-to over the back door.

  Laura opened the door and peeped in. Then she pushed the door back, along the curved mark it had worn in the board floor, and she went in. This house had board floors; not as comfortable to bare feet as the earth floor of the shanty, but not so much work to keep clean.

  The largeness of the empty house seemed to wait and listen. It seemed to know that Laura was there, but it had not made up its mind about her. It would wait and see. Against its walls the wind made a lonely sound, but that was outside the house. She tiptoed across the lean-to and opened a door on its farther side.

  Laura looked at the large front room. Its board walls were still yellow inside, and sunshine from its west window slanted yellow on the floor. A cool light came in from the window to the east beside the front door. The surveyors had left their stove! It was a larger stove than the one that Ma had brought from Plum Creek; it had six lids on top and two oven doors, and it stood all set up with its stovepipe in place.

  Spaced on the wall beyond it were three doors. All of them were shut.

  Laura tiptoed across the wide floor, and softly opened one door. There was a small room, with a bedstead in it. This room had a window, too.

  Softly Laura opened the middle door. She was surprised. Steeply up in front of her went a stair, just the width of the door. She looked up, and saw the underside of a slanting roof high overhead. She went up a few steps, and a big attic opened out on both sides of the stairs. It was twice as big as the large room downstairs. A window in each gable end lighted the whole empty place under the roof.

  That made three rooms already, and still there was another door. Laura thought that there must have been a great many surveyors to need so much space. This would be by far the largest house she had ever lived in.

  She opened the third door. A squeal of excitement came out of her mouth and startled the listening house. There before her eyes was a little store. All up the walls of that small room were shelves, and on the shelves were dishes, and pans and pots, and boxes, and cans. All around under the shelves stood barrels and boxes.

  The first barrel was nearly full of flour. The second held corn meal. The third had a tight lid, and it was full of pieces of fat, white pork held down in brown brine. Laura had never seen so much salt pork at one time. There was a wooden box full of square soda crackers, and a box full of big slabs of salted fish. There was a large box of dried apples, and two sacks full of potatoes, and another big sack nearly full of beans.

  The wagon was at the door. Laura ran out, shouting, “Oh, Ma, come quick and see! There’s so many things—And a big attic, Mary! And a stove, and crackers, soda crackers!”

  Ma looked at everything and she was pleased. “It’s very nice, I’m sure,” she said. “And so clean. We can get settled here in a jiffy. Bring me the broom, Carrie.”

  Pa didn’t even have to set up a stove. He put Ma’s stove in the lean-to outside the back door, where the coal was. Then while Pa built a fire they arranged the table and chairs in the large front room. Ma set Mary’s rocking chair by the open oven door. Already that good stove was giving off heat, and in the warm corner Mary sat holding Grace and amusing her, to keep her out of the way while Ma and Laura and Carrie were busy.

  Ma made the big bed on the bedstead in the bedroom. She hung her clothes and Pa’s on nails in the wall there, and covered them neatly with a sheet. Upstairs in the large, low attic Laura and Carrie made two neat beds on the bedsteads there, one for Carrie and the other for Laura and Mary. Then they carried their clothes and their boxes upstairs; they hung the clothes on the gable wall by one window, and under it they set their boxes.

  Everything was neat now, so they went downstairs to help Ma get supper. Pa came in bringing a large, shallow packing box.

  “What’s that for, Charles?” Ma asked, and Pa said, “This is Grace’s trundle bed!”

  “It’s the only thing we needed!” Ma exclaimed.

  “The sides are high enough to hold her covers tucked in,” said Pa.

  “And low enough to go under our bed in the daytime, like any trundle bed,” said Ma.

  Laura and Carrie made up a little bed for Grace in the packing box, and slid it under the big bed, and pulled it out again for the night. The moving-in was done.

  Supper was a feast. The surveyors’ pretty dishes made the table gay. Little sour cucumber pickles, from a jar the surveyors had left, made the warmed-over roast duck and fried potatoes taste different. And after they were eaten, Ma stepped into the pantry and brought out—“Guess what?” she said.

  She set before each of them a little dish of canned peaches, and two soda crackers! “We’ll have a treat,” she said, “to celebrate living in a house again.”

  It was fine to be eating in such a large place, with a board floor, and the glass windows glittering black against the night outside. Slowly, slowly they ate the smooth, cool peaches and the sweet golden juice, and carefully licked their spoons.

  Then the dishes were quickly cleared away and washed in the handy pantry. The table’s leaves were dropped, the red-and-white checked cloth spread, and the bright-shining lamp set on its center. Ma settled with Grace in the rocking chair, and Pa said, “This makes a fellow feel like music. Bring me the fiddle box, Laura!”

  He ti
ghtened and tuned the strings and rosined the bow. Winter evenings were coming again when Pa played the fiddle. He looked around contentedly at them all and at the good walls that would keep them comfortable.

  “I must manage something for curtains,” Ma said.

  Pa paused with the bow poised above the fiddle. “Don’t you realize, Caroline, that our nearest neighbor to the east is sixty miles away and our nearest west is forty miles? When winter shuts down, they might as well be farther off. We’ve got the world to ourselves! I saw only one flock of wild geese today, flying high and fast. They weren’t stopping at any lakes; not they! They were hurrying south. Looked to me like the last flock of the season. So even the geese have left us.”

  His fiddle bow touched the strings and he began to play. Softly Laura began to sing:

  “One night when the winds blew bitter,

  Blew bitter across the wild moor,

  Young Mary she came with her child,

  Wandering home to her own father’s door,

  Crying, Father, O pray let me in!

  Take pity on me I implore

  Or the child in my arms will die

  From the winds that blow across the wild moor.

  But her father was deaf to her cries

  Not a voice nor a sound reached the door

  But the watch dogs did howl

  And the village bells tolled

  And the winds blew across the—”

  Pa stopped. “That song doesn’t fit!” he exclaimed. “What was I thinking of! Now here’s something worth singing.”

  Merrily the fiddle sang and Pa sang with it. Laura and Mary and Carrie sang too, with all their might.

  “I’ve traveled about a bit in my time

  And of troubles I’ve seen a few

  But found it better in every clime