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“You do!”
“I don’t!”
“You’re just as scared of town as I am,” said Mary.
Laura did not answer. After a while she took hold of her sunbonnet strings and pulled the bonnet up over her head.
“Anyway, there’s two of us,” Mary said.
They went on and on. After a long time they saw town. It looked like small blocks of wood on the prairie. When the road slipped down, they saw only grasses again and the sky. Then they saw the town again, always larger. Smoke went up from its stovepipes.
The clean, grassy road ended in dust. This dusty road went by a small house and then past a store. The store had a porch with steps going up to it.
Beyond the store there was a blacksmith shop. It stood back from the road, with a bare place in front of it. Inside it a big man in a leather apron made a bellows puff! puff! at red coals. He took a white-hot iron out of the coals with tongs, and swung a big hammer down on it, whang! Dozens of sparks flew out tiny in the daylight.
Beyond the bare place was the back of a building. Mary and Laura walked close to the side of this building. The ground was hard there. There was no more grass to walk on. In front of this building, another wide, dusty road crossed their road. Mary and Laura stopped. They looked across the dust at the fronts of two more stores. They heard a confused noise of children’s voices. Pa’s road did not go any farther.
“Come on,” said Mary, low. But she stood still. “It’s the school where we hear the hollering. Pa said we would hear it.”
Laura wanted to turn around and run all the way home.
She and Mary went slowly walking out into the dust and turned toward that noise of voices. They went padding along between two stores. They passed piles of boards and shingles; that must be the lumber-yard where Pa got the boards for the new house. Then they saw the schoolhouse.
It was out on the prairie beyond the end of the dusty road. A long path went toward it through the grass. Boys and girls were in front of it.
Laura went along the path toward them and Mary came behind her. All those girls and boys stopped their noise and looked. Laura kept on going nearer and nearer all those eyes, and suddenly, without meaning to, she swung the dinner-pail and called out, “You all sounded just like a flock of prairie chickens!”
They were surprised. But they were not as much surprised as Laura. She was ashamed, too. Mary gasped, “Laura!” Then a freckled boy with fire-colored hair yelled, “Snipes, yourselves! Snipes! Snipes! Long-legged snipes!”
Laura wanted to sink down and hide her legs. Her dress was too short, it was much shorter than the town girls’ dresses. So was Mary’s. Before they came to Plum Creek, Ma had said they were outgrowing those dresses. Their bare legs did look long and spindly, like snipes’ legs.
All the boys were pointing and yelling, “Snipes! Snipes!”
Then a red-headed girl began pushing those boys and saying: “Shut up! You make too much noise! Shut up, Sandy!” she said to the red-headed boy, and he shut up. She came close to Laura and said:
“My name is Christy Kennedy, and that horrid boy is my brother Sandy, but he doesn’t mean any harm. What’s your name?”
Her red hair was braided so tightly that the braids were stiff. Her eyes were dark blue, almost black, and her round cheeks were freckled. Her sunbonnet hung down her back.
“Is that your sister?” she said. “Those are my sisters.” Some big girls were talking to Mary. “The big one’s Nettie, and the black-haired one’s Cassie, and then there’s Donald and me and Sandy. How many brothers and sisters have you?”
“Two,” Laura said. “That’s Mary, and Carrie’s the baby. She has golden hair, too. And we have a bulldog named Jack. We live on Plum Creek. Where do you live?”
“Does your Pa drive two bay horses with black manes and tails?” Christy asked.
“Yes,” said Laura. “They are Sam and David, our Christmas horses.”
“He comes by our house, so you came by it, too,” said Christy. “It’s the house before you come to Beadle’s store and post-office, before you get to the blacksmith shop. Miss Eva Beadle’s our teacher. That’s Nellie Oleson.”
Nellie Oleson was very pretty. Her yellow hair hung in long curls, with two big blue ribbon bows on top. Her dress was thin white lawn, with little blue flowers scattered over it, and she wore shoes.
She looked at Laura and she looked at Mary, and she wrinkled up her nose.
“Hm!” she said. “Country girls!”
Before anyone else could say anything, a bell rang. A young lady stood in the schoolhouse doorway, swinging the bell in her hand. All the boys and girls hurried by her into the schoolhouse.
She was a beautiful young lady. Her brown hair was frizzed in bangs over her brown eyes, and done in thick braids behind. Buttons sparkled all down the front of her bodice, and her skirts were drawn back tightly and fell down behind in big puffs and loops. Her face was sweet and her smile was lovely.
