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He drove away with the stranger and it was some time before he came walking home.
“Brrrr! It’s getting colder,” he said, dropping his coat and mittens on a chair and bending over the stove to warm himself before he unwound his muffler. “Well, it’s a good job done.
“That teamster’s the last one out. He came all the way from the Jim River and didn’t find a soul. Everyone along the line is going. Last night, when dark caught him, he saw a light about two miles north of the grade and drove to it on the chance of finding a place to stay all night.
“Well, Caroline, he found a claim shanty and an old man all by himself. His name is Woodworth. He has consumption, and came out here to take the prairie-climate cure. He’s been living on his claim all summer and was going to stay all winter.
“Well, he’s so feeble, the teamster tried to get him to go out. Told him it’s his last chance, but Woodworth wouldn’t go. So when the teamster saw our smoke this morning, he stopped to see if he couldn’t get somebody to help him persuade the old man.
“Caroline, he was skin and bones. But bound and determined to stick to the prairie cure. Said it was the one cure the doctors recommended as pretty near a surefire thing.”
“Folks come from all over the world to take it,” said Ma.
“Yes, I know, Caroline. It’s true enough, I guess, these prairies are about the only thing that cures consumption. But if you’d seen him, Caroline. No, he wasn’t in any shape to stay alone in a claim shanty, fifteen miles from a neighbor. The place for him is with his own folks.
“Anyhow, the teamster and I packed him up and loaded him and his things into the wagon. Lifted him in, as easy as if he was Carrie, here. In the end he was glad to be going. He’ll be a sight more comfortable with his folks in the east.”
“He’ll nearly freeze to death, riding in a wagon this cold day,” Ma said, putting more coal on the fire.
“He’s dressed warmly, wearing a good overcoat. We wrapped him in blankets besides and heated a bag of oats for his feet. He’ll make it all right. That teamster is one fine fellow.”
Thinking of that old man going out with the last teamster, Laura really knew how deserted the country was. It would take them two long days to get to the Big Sioux River. All the way between the Big Sioux and the Jim, there was nobody at all except them, there in the surveyors’ house.
“Pa, did you see wolf tracks this morning?” Laura asked.
“Yes, plenty of them, all around the stable,” said Pa. “Big tracks too. Must be buffalo wolves. But they couldn’t get in. All the birds have gone south, and the antelope were scared away by the men working on the grade, so the wolves will have to move on too. They won’t stay where they can’t kill anything to eat.”
After breakfast he went to the stable, and as soon as the housework was done Laura put on her shawl and went too. She wanted to see the wolf tracks.
She had never seen such huge ones, and deep. Those wolves must be very big and heavy. “Buffalo wolves are the largest wolves on the prairie and very fierce,” Pa told her. “I’d hate to meet one without a gun.”
He was looking the stable over carefully, to see that every board was nailed fast. He drove in more nails, to make the walls solid, and he put an extra bolt on the door. “If one gets broken, the other might hold,” he said.
Snow began to fall while Laura handed him nails and he hammered them in. The wind blew strong and keen, but it was a straight wind, not a blizzard wind. Still it was so cold that they could not talk.
At supper in the warm house Pa said, “I don’t believe the winters are going to be so bad out here. Seems like the blizzards sort of draw down through western Minnesota. We are farther west out here, and they say that three degrees west is as good as one degree south.”
After supper they all gathered in the warmth of the stove. Ma rocked Grace slowly to and fro, and Laura brought Pa the fiddle box. Now the happy winter evenings were begun.
“Hail Columbia, happy land!
(Pa sang with the fiddle)
Hail, ye heroes, Heaven-born band! Firm, united let us be,
Rallying ’round our liberty,
As a band of brothers joined
Peace and safety we shall find.”
He looked at Mary sitting quietly with beautiful empty eyes and folded hands in her rocking chair by the oven. “What shall I play for you, Mary?”
“I would like to hear ‘Highland Mary,’ Pa.” Softly Pa played a verse. “Now, Mary! Help sing!” he said, and they sang together.
“How sweetly bloomed the gay, green birk,
How rich the hawthorn’s blossom,
