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“Candy!” Carrie and Grace answered together.
“Better than that!” said Pa.
“A letter?” Ma asked.
“A paper,” Mary guessed. “Maybe The Advance.”
Laura was watching Pa’s pocket. She was certain that something, not Pa’s hand, was moving inside it.
“Let Mary see it first,” Pa warned the others. He took his hand from his pocket. There on his palm lay a tiny blue and white kitten.
He laid it carefully in Mary’s hand. She stroked its soft fur with a finger tip. Gently she touched its tiny ears and its nose and its wee paws.
“A kitten,” she said wonderingly. “Such a very little kitten.”
“Its eyes aren’t open yet,” Laura told her. “Its baby fur is as blue as tobacco smoke, and its face and its breast and its paws and the very tip of its tail are white. Its claws are the tiniest wee white things.”
“It’s too small to take from its mother,” Pa said. “But I had to take it while I had the chance, before somebody else did. Whiting had the cat sent out to them from the East. She had five kittens, and they sold four of them today for fifty cents apiece.”
“You didn’t pay fifty cents for this kitten, Pa?”
Laura asked him, wide-eyed.
“Yes, I did,” said Pa.
Quickly Ma said, “I don’t blame you, Charles. A cat in this house will be well worth it.”
“Can we raise such a little kitten?” Mary asked anxiously.
“Oh, yes,” Ma assured them. “We will have to feed it often, wash its eyes carefully, and keep it warm. Laura, find a small box and pick out the softest, warmest scraps from the scrap bag.”
Laura made a snug, soft nest for the kitten in a pasteboard box, while Ma warmed some milk. They all watched while Ma took the kitten in her hand and fed it, a drop of milk at a time, from a teaspoon. The kitten’s wee paws clutched at the spoon and its pink mouth tried to suck, and drop by drop it sucked in the warm milk, though some ran down its chin. Then they put it in its nest, and under Mary’s warm hand it snuggled down to sleep.
“It has nine lives like any cat, and it will live all right,” said Ma. “You’ll see.”
Chapter 4
The Happy Days
Pa said that the new town was growing fast. New settlers were crowding in, hurrying to put up buildings to shelter them. One evening Pa and Ma walked to town to help organize a church, and soon a foundation was laid for a church building. There were not carpenters enough to do all the building that was wanted, so Pa got carpenter work to do.
Every morning he did the chores and walked to town, taking a lunch in a tin pail. He began working promptly at seven o’clock, and by taking only a short nooning he was through work at half past six, and home again for a late supper. And every week he was earning fifteen dollars.
That was a happy time, for the garden was growing well, the corn and oats were thriving, the calf was weaned so that now there was skim-milk for cottage cheese and there was cream to make butter and buttermilk, and best of all, Pa was earning so much money.
Often while Laura worked in the garden, she thought of Mary’s going to college. It was nearly two years since they had heard there was a college for the blind in Iowa. Every day they had thought of that, and every night they prayed that Mary might go. The sorest grief in Mary’s blindness was that it hindered her studying. She liked so much to read and learn, and she had always wanted to be a schoolteacher. Now she could never teach school. Laura did not want to, but now she must; she had to be able to teach school as soon as she grew old enough, to earn money for Mary’s college education.
“Never mind,” she thought, while she hoed, “I can see.”
She saw the hoe, and the colors of the earth, and all the leafy little lights and shadows of the pea vines. She had only to glance up, and she saw miles of blowing grasses, the far blue skyline, the birds flying, Ellen and the calves on the green slope, and the different blues of the sky, the snowy piles of huge summer clouds. She had so much, and Mary saw only darkness.
She hoped, though she hardly dared to, that perhaps Mary might go to college that fall. Pa was making so much money. If Mary could only go now, Laura would study with all her might, she would work so hard that surely she could teach school as soon as she was sixteen years old, and then her earnings would keep Mary in college.
They all needed dresses and they all needed shoes, and Pa always had to buy flour and sugar and tea and salt meat. There was the lumber bill for the new half of the house, and coal must be bought for winter, and there were taxes. But this year there was the garden, and the corn and oats. By year after next, almost all they ate could be raised from the land.
If they had hens and a pig, they would even have meat. This was settled country now, hardly any game was left, and they must buy meat or raise it. Perhaps next year Pa could buy hens and a pig. Some settlers were bringing them in.
One evening Pa came home beaming.
