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“I didn’t bring popcorn,” said Mr. Boast. Then he cried out, “Nell, you rascal!”
“You two go on with your game!” Mrs. Boast told him, laughing at him with her blue eyes. “You’re much too busy to notice us.”
“Yes, Charles,” said Ma. “Don’t let us disturb your checkers.”
“I’ve got you beat anyway, Boast,” said Pa.
“Not yet you haven’t,” Mr. Boast contradicted.
Ma dipped the snowy kernels from the kettle into a milkpan, and Laura carefully salted them. They popped another kettleful, and the pan would hold no more. Then Mary and Laura and Carrie had a plateful of the crispy crackly melting-soft corn, and Pa and Ma and Mr. and Mrs. Boast sat around the pan, eating and talking and laughing, till chore-time and suppertime and the time when Pa would play the fiddle.
“Every Christmas is better than the Christmas before,” Laura thought. “I guess it must be because I’m growing up.”
Chapter 22
Happy Winter Days
The Christmasy feeling lasted day after day. Every morning Mrs. Boast did her breakfast work quickly and came to spend her time with “the other girls,” as she said. She was always merry and full of fun and always so pretty, with her soft dark hair and laughing blue eyes and the bright color in her cheeks.
That first week the sun shone brightly, there was no wind, and in six days the snow was all gone. The prairie showed bare and brown, and the air seemed warm as milk. Mrs. Boast had cooked the New Year’s dinner.
“You can all crowd into my little place for once,” she said.
She let Laura help her move things. They put the table on the bed and opened the door wide against the wall. Then they set the table in the exact middle of the house. One corner of it almost touched the stove, and the other end was almost against the bed. But there was room for them all to come in, single file, and sit around it. Mrs. Boast sat by the stove and served the food from its hot top.
First, there was oyster soup. In all her life Laura had never tasted anything so good as that savory, fragrant, sea-tasting hot milk, with golden dots of melted cream and black specks of pepper on its top, and the little dark canned oysters at its bottom. She sipped slowly, slowly from her spoon, to keep that taste going over her tongue as long as she could.
And with this soup, there were little round oyster crackers. The little oyster crackers were like doll-crackers, and they tasted better because they were so light and small.
When the last drop of soup was gone, and the last crackers divided and crunched, there were hot biscuits with honey, and dried-raspberry sauce. And then a big dishpan full of tender salty popcorn, that had been keeping hot on the back of the stove.
That was the New Year’s dinner. It was light but filling. There was something fashionable about it because it was so odd and new, so different, and so daintily served on Mrs. Boast’s pretty dishes and brand-new tablecloth.
Afterward they sat talking in the little house, with the soft air coming in and beyond the open door, the brown prairie stretching far away and the soft blue sky curving down to meet it.
“I’ve never tasted finer honey, Mrs. Boast,” said Pa. “I’m glad you brought it out from Iowa.”
“The oysters too,” said Ma. “I don’t know when I’ve had such a treat as this dinner.”
“It’s a good beginning for 1880,” Pa declared. “The seventies haven’t been so bad, but it looks like the eighties’ll be better. If this is a sample of a Dakota winter, we’re all lucky we came west.”
“This is certainly a fine country,” Mr. Boast agreed. “I’m glad I’ve got my claim filed on a hundred and sixty acres of it, and I wish you had, Ingalls.”
“I’ll have it before I’m a week older,” said Pa. “I’ve been waiting for the land office to open at Brookings, to save me more than a week’s travel to Yankton and back. They said the Brookings office would open the first of the year, and by Jove, with weather like this I’m starting tomorrow! If Caroline says so.”
“I do, Charles,” Ma said quietly. Her eyes, her whole face, were shining with gladness because now, so soon, Pa would surely have their homestead.
“That settles it,” said Pa. “Not that I figure there’s any danger of being too late, but it might as well be done and over with.”
“The sooner the better, Ingalls,” Mr. Boast said. “I tell you, you’ve got no notion what the rush is going to be this spring.”
“Well, nobody’ll be there quicker than I’ll be,” Pa answered. “Starting before sun-up, I ought to show up at the land office bright and early day after tomorrow morning. So if you folks want to send any let
ters back to Iowa, get ’em fixed up and I’ll take ’em along and mail them in Brookings.”
That ended New Year’s dinner. Mrs. Boast and Ma were writing letters that afternoon, and Ma packed a lunch for Pa to take with him. But at nightfall a wind full of snow was blowing and frost began to creep up the windowpanes again.
“This is no kind of weather to go anywhere,” Pa said. “Don’t worry about the homestead, Caroline. I’ll get it.”
