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On Sunday morning there was Sunday School and church, and every pleasant Sunday afternoon there was the sleigh-ride party. Prince and Lady came down the street with their full strings of sweet-toned bells gaily ringing, and stopped at the door for Laura, and she went with Almanzo in the little cutter behind the prettiest and fastest-stepping horses in the Sunday parade.
But best of all were the mornings and the evenings at home. Laura realized that she had never appreciated them until now. There were no sullen silences, no smoldering quarrels, no ugly outbreaks of anger.
Instead there was work with pleasant talk, there were happy little jokes and evenings of cosy studying and reading, and the music of Pa’s fiddle. How good it was to hear the old familiar tunes as the fiddle sang them in the warm, lamplighted room of home. Often Laura thought how happy and how fortunate she was. Nothing anywhere could be better than being at home with the home folks, she was sure.
Chapter 13
Springtime
On a Friday afternoon in April Laura and Ida and Mary Power walked slowly home from school. The air was soft and moist, the eaves were dripping, and the snow was slushy underfoot.
“Spring is almost here again,” Ida said. “Only three more weeks of school.”
“Yes, and then we’ll be moving out to the claim again,” said Mary. “You will, too, Laura, won’t you?”
“I suppose so,” Laura answered. “I declare, it seems the winter’s hardly begun, and now it’s gone.”
“Yes, if this warm spell lasts the snow will be gone tomorrow,” Mary said. That meant that there would be no more sleigh rides.
“It’s nice on the claim,” Laura said. She thought of the new calves and the baby chicks, and the garden growing, of lettuce and radishes and spring onions, and violets and the wild roses in June, and of Mary’s coming home from college.
With Carrie she crossed the slushy street and went into the house. Both Pa and Ma were in the sitting room, and there in Mary’s rocking chair sat a stranger. As Laura and Carrie stood hesitating near the door, he rose from his seat and smiled at them.
“Don’t you know me, Laura?” he asked.
Then Laura did know him. She remembered his smile, so like Ma’s.
“Oh, Uncle Tom! It’s Uncle Tom!” she cried.
Pa laughed. “I told you she’d know you, Tom.” And Ma smiled, so like his smile while he shook hands with Laura and Carrie.
Carrie did not remember him; she had
been only a baby in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. But Laura had been five years old when they went to the sugaring-off dance at Grandma’s, and Uncle Tom had been there. He’d been so quiet that she had hardly thought of him since then, but now she remembered the news that Aunt Docia had told of him when she stopped at the house by Plum Creek in Minnesota.
He was a small, quiet man with a gentle smile. Looking at him across the supper table, Laura could hardly believe that for years he had been a foreman of logging crews, taking the log drives out of the Big Woods and down the rivers. Although he was so small and soft-spoken, he had bossed the rough men and handled the dangerous log drives fearlessly. Laura remembered Aunt Docia’s telling how he plunged in among the floating logs of a drive and, clinging to them, had dragged an injured man from the river to safety; this, though he could not swim.
Now he had much to tell Pa and Ma and Laura. He told of his wife Aunt Lily and their baby Helen. He told of Uncle Henry’s family, Aunt Polly, Charley and Albert. After they left Silver Lake they had not gone to Montana, after all. They had stopped in the Black Hills. They were all there yet, except Cousin Louisa. She had married and gone on to Montana. As for Aunt Eliza and Uncle Peter, they were still living in eastern Minnesota, but Alice and Ella and Cousin Peter were somewhere in Dakota territory.
Carrie and Grace listened wide-eyed. Carrie remembered nothing of all these people, and Grace had never seen the Big Woods, nor a sugaring-off dance, nor known the Christmases when Uncle Peter and Aunt Eliza came visiting with the cousins Alice and Ella and Peter. Laura felt sorry for her little sister who had missed so much.
Suppertime passed quickly, and when the evening lamp was lighted and the family gathered around Uncle Tom in the sitting room, Pa still kept him speaking of the lumber camps and log drives, of roaring rivers and the wild, burly men of the logging camps. He told of them mildly, speaking in a voice as soft as Ma’s, and smiling her gentle smile.
Pa said to him, “So this is your first trip west,” and Uncle Tom answered quietly, “Oh, no. I was with the first white men that ever laid eyes on the Black Hills.”
Pa and Ma were struck dumb for a moment. Then Ma asked. “Whatever were you doing there, Tom?”
“Looking for gold,” said Uncle Tom.
“Too bad you didn’t find a few gold mines,” Pa joked.
“Oh, we did,” Uncle Tom said. “Only it didn’t do us any good.”
“Mercy on us!” Ma softly exclaimed. “Do tell us all about it.”
“Well, let’s see. We started out from Sioux City, eight years ago,” Uncle Tom began. “In October of ’74. Twenty-six of us men, and one man brought along his wife and their nine-year-old boy.”
They traveled in covered wagons, with ox teams, and some saddle horses. Each man had a Winchester and small arms, and ammunition enough to last for eight months. They loaded supplies of flour, bacon, beans, and coffee into the wagons, and depended on hunting for most of their meat. Hunting was good; they got plenty of elk, antelope, and deer. The greatest trouble was lack of water on the open prairie. Luckily it was in early winter; there was plenty of snow, and they melted it at night to fill the water barrels.
