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“Keep the horseshoe hung over the door!
It will bring you good luck evermore.
If you would be happy and free from all care,
Keep the horseshoe hung over the door!”
“It sounds rather heathenish to me, Charles,” Ma said.
“Well, anyway,” Pa replied, “I wouldn’t wonder if we do pretty well here, Caroline. In time we’ll build more rooms on this house, and maybe have a driving team and buggy. I’m not going to plow up much grass. We’ll have a garden and a little field, but mostly raise hay and cattle. Where so many buffalo ranged, must be a good country for cattle.”
The dishes were done. Laura carried the dishpan some distance from the back door and flung the water far over the grass where tomorrow’s sun would dry it. The first stars were pricking through the pale sky. A few lights twinkled yellow in the little town, but the whole great plain of the earth was shadowy. There was hardly a wind, but the air moved and whispered to itself in the grasses. Laura almost knew what it said. Lonely and wild and eternal were land and water and sky and the air blowing.
“The buffalo are gone,” Laura thought. “And now we’re homesteaders.”
Chapter 31
Mosquitoes
“We must build a stable for the horses,” Pa said. “It won’t always be warm enough for them to stay outdoors and a bad storm might come even in summer. They must have shelter.”
“Ellen too, Pa?” Laura asked.
“Cattle are better off outdoors in the summer,” Pa told her. “But I like to have horses in a stable at night.”
Laura held boards for Pa. She handed him tools and brought nails while he built the stable, at the west of the house against the little hill. It would be sheltered there on the west and the north, when the cold winter winds were blowing.
The days were warm. Mosquitoes came out of the Big Slough at sundown and sang their high, keen song all night as they swarmed around Ellen, biting her and sucking the blood until she ran around and around on her picket rope. They went into the stable and bit the horses until they pulled at their halters and stamped. They came into the claim shanty and bit everyone there until great blotches raised on faces and hands.
Their singing and the sting of their bites made night a torment.
“This will never do,” Pa said. “We must have mosquito bar on the windows and door.”
“It’s the Big Slough,” Ma complained. “The mosquitoes come from there. I wish we were farther away from it.”
But Pa liked the Big Slough. “There are acres and acres of hay there, that anyone can have for the cutting,” he told Ma. “No one will ever take up homesteads in the Big Slough. There is only upland hay on our place, but with the Big Slough so near, we can always cut hay there and have all we need.
“Besides, all the prairie grass is full of mosquitoes too. I’ll go to town today and get some mosquito bar.”
Pa brought yards of pink mosquito bar from town and strips of lumber to make a frame for a screen door.
While he made the door, Ma tacked mosquito bar over the windows. Th
en she tacked it to the door frame and Pa hung the screen door.
That night he built a smudge of old, damp grass, so the smoke would drift before the stable door. Mosquitoes would not go through the smoke.
Pa made another smudge so Ellen could stand in its smoke and she went at once and stayed there.
Pa made sure there was no dry grass near the smudges and built them up so they would last all night.
“There!” he said, “I guess that fixes the mosquitoes.”
Chapter 32
Evening Shadows Fall
Sam and David stood quietly, resting in the stable, with the smoke screen before the door. Ellen, on her picket rope, lay comfortably in the smoke from the smudge. No mosquitoes could get at them.
