Ma sighed a long, long sigh. She hugged Laura tight in one arm and Mary tight in the other arm, and through the window they watched those Indians going away, one behind the other, on the dim trail toward the west. Then Ma sat down on the bed and hugged Laura and Mary tighter, and trembled. She looked sick.
“Do you feel sick, Ma?” Mary asked her.
“No,” said Ma. “I’m just thankful they’re gone.”
Laura wrinkled her nose and said, “They smell awful.”
‘That was the skunk skins they wore,” Ma said.
Then they told her how they had left Jack and had come into the house because they were afraid the Indians would hurt her and Baby Carrie. Ma said they were her brave little girls.
“Now we must get dinner,” she said. “Pa will be here soon and we must have dinner ready for him. Mary, bring me some wood. Laura, you may set the table.”
Ma rolled up her sleeves and washed her hands and mixed cornbread, while Mary brought the wood and Laura set the table. She set a tin plate and knife and fork and cup for Pa, and the same for Ma, with Carrie’s little tin cup beside Ma’s. And she set tin plates and knives and forks for her and Mary, but only their one cup between the plates.
Ma made the cornmeal and water into two thin loaves, each shaped in a half circle. She laid the loaves with their straight sides together in the bake-oven, and she pressed her hand flat on top of each loaf. Pa always said he did not ask any other sweetening, when Ma put the prints of her hands on the loaves.
Laura had hardly set the table when Pa was there. He left a big rabbit and two prairie hens outside the door, and stepped in and laid his gun on its pegs. Laura and Mary ran and clutched him, both talking at once.
“What’s all this? What’s all this?” he said, rumpling their hair. “Indians? So you’ve seen Indians at last, have you, Laura? I noticed they have a camp in a little valley west of here. Did Indians come to the house, Caroline?”
“Yes, Charles, two of them,” Ma said. “I’m sorry, but they took all your tobacco, and they ate a lot of cornbread. They pointed to the cornmeal and made signs for me to cook some. I was afraid not to. Oh Charles! I was afraid!”
“You did the right thing,” Pa told her. “We don’t want to make enemies of any Indians.” Then he said, “Whew! what a smell.”
“They wore fresh skunk skins,” said Ma. “And that was all they wore.”
“Must have been thick while they were here,” Pa said.
“It was, Charles. We were short of cornmeal, too.”
“Oh well. We have enough to hold out awhile yet. And our meat is running all over the country. Don’t worry, Caroline.”
“But they took all your tobacco.”
“Never mind,” Pa said. “I’ll get along without tobacco till I can make that trip to Independence. The main thing is to be on good terms with the Indians. We don’t want to wake up some night with a band of the screeching dev—”
He stopped. Laura dreadfully wanted to know what he had been going to say. But Ma’s lips were pressed together and she shook a little shake of her head at Pa.
“Come on, Mary and Laura!” Pa said. “We’ll skin that rabbit and dress the prairie hens while that cornbread bakes. Hurry! I’m hungry as a wolf!”
They sat on the woodpile in the wind and sunshine and watched Pa work with his hunting-knife. The big rabbit was shot through the eye, and the prairie hens’ heads were shot clean away. They never knew what hit them, Pa said.
Laura held the edge of the rabbit skin while Pa’s keen knife ripped it off the rabbit meat. “I’ll salt this skin and peg it out on the house wall to dry,” he said. “It will make a warm fur cap for some little girl to wear next winter.”
But Laura could not forget the Indians. She said to Pa that if they had turned Jack loose, he would have eaten those Indians right up.
Pa laid down the knife. “Did you girls even think of turning Jack loose?” he asked, in a dreadful voice.
Laura’s head bowed down and she whispered, “Yes, Pa.”
“After I told you not to?” Pa said, in a more dreadful voice.
Laura couldn’t speak, but Mary choked, “Yes, Pa.”
For a moment Pa was silent. He sighed a long sigh like Ma’s sigh after the Indians went away.
“After this,” he said, in a terrible voice, “you girls remember always to do as you’re told. Don’t you even think of disobeying me. Do you hear?”