Usually everyone knew what Ma meant when she said in her gentle way, “Charles.” But this time Laura and Carrie and Pa all looked at her wondering. Ma shook her head just the least bit at Pa.
Then Pa looked straight at Laura and said, “You girls keep away from the camp. When you go walking, don’t go near where the men are working, and you be sure you’re back here before they come in for the night. There’s all kinds of rough men working on the grade and using rough language, and the less you see and hear of them the better. Now remember, Laura. And you too, Carrie.” Pa’s face was very serious.
“Yes, Pa,” Laura promised, and Carrie almost whispered, “Yes, Pa.” Carrie’s eyes were large and frightened. She did not want to hear rough language, whatever rough language might be. Laura would have liked to hear some, just once, but of course she must obey Pa.
So that afternoon when they set out for their walk they went away from the shanties. They set out along the lake shore toward the Big Slough.
The lake lay at their left shimmering in the sunshine. Little silvery waves rose and fell and lapped upon the shore as the wind ruffled the blue water. The shore was low, but firm and dry, with little grasses growing to the water’s edge. Across the glittering lake, Laura could see the east bank and the south bank, rising up as tall as she was. A little slough came into the lake from the northeast, and Big Slough went on toward the southwest in a long curve of tall wild grasses.
Laura and Mary and Carrie walked slowly along on the green shore by the rippling silver-blue water, toward the wild Big Slough. The grasses were warm and soft to their feet. The wind blew their flapping skirts tight against their bare legs and ruffled Laura’s hair. Mary’s sunbonnet and Carrie’s were tied firmly under their chins, but Laura swung hers by its strings. Millions of rustling grass-blades made one murmuring sound, and thousands of wild ducks and geese and herons and cranes and pelicans were talking sharply and brassily in the wind.
All those birds were feeding among the grasses of the sloughs. They rose on flapping wings and settled again, crying news to each other and talking among themselves among the grasses, and eating busily of grass roots and tender water plants and little fishes.
The lake shore went lower and lower toward Big Slough, until really there was no shore. The lake melted into the slough, making small ponds surrounded by the harsh, rank slough grass that stood five and six feet tall. Little ponds glimmered between the grasses and on the water the wild birds were thick.
As Laura and Carrie pushed into the slough grasses, suddenly harsh wings ripped upward and round eyes glittered; the whole air exploded in a noise of squawking, quacking, quonking. Flattening their webbed feet under their tails, ducks and geese sped over the grass-tops and curved down to the next pond.
Laura and Carrie stood still. The coarse-stemmed slough grass rose above their heads and made a rough sound in the wind. Their bare feet sank slowly into ooze.
“Oo, the ground is all soft,” Mary said, turning back quickly. She did not like mud on her feet.
“Go back, Carrie!” Laura cried. “You’ll mire down! The lake is in here among the grasses!”
The soft, cool mud sucked around her ankles as she stood, and before her the little ponds glimmered among the tall grasses. She wanted to go on and on, into the slough among the wild birds, but she could not leave Mary and Carrie. So she turned back with them to the hard, higher prairie where waist-high grasses were nodding and bending in the wind, and the short, curly buffalo grass grew in patches.
Along the edge of the slough they picked flaming red tiger lilies, and on higher ground they gathered long branching stems of purple buffalo bean pods. Grasshoppers flew up like spray before their feet in the grasses. All kinds of little birds fluttered and flew and twittered balancing in the wind on the tall, bending grass stems, and prairie hens scuttled everywhere.
“Oh, what a wild, beautiful prairie!” Mary sighed with happiness. “Laura, have you got your sunbonnet on?”
Guiltily Laura pulled up her sunbonnet from where it hung by its strings down her neck. “Yes, Mary,” she said.
Mary laughed. “You just now put it on. I heard you!”
It was late afternoon when they turned back. The little shanty, with its roof slanting all one way, stood all by itself and small at the edge of Silver Lake. Tiny in the doorway, Ma shaded her eyes with her hand to look for them, and they waved to her.
They could see the whole camp, scattered along the lake shore north of the shanty. First was the store where Pa was working with the big feed store behind it. Then the stable for the work teams. The stable was built into a swell of the prairie, and its roof was thatched with slough grass. Beyond it was the long, low bunkhouse where the men slept, and still farther away was Cousin Louisa’s long boarding-house shanty, with supper smoke already rising from its stovepipe.
Then for the first time Laura saw a house, a real house, standing all by itself on the lake’s northern shore.
“I wonder what that house can be and who lives there,” she said. “It isn’t a homestead because there’s no stable and no land plowed.”
She had told Mary all that she saw, and Mary said, “What a pretty place it is with the clean, new shanties and the grass and the water. There’s no use wondering about that house; we can ask Pa about it. Here comes another flock of wild ducks.”
Flock after flock of ducks and long lines of wild geese were coming down from the sky and settling to stay all night on the lake. And the men were making a racket of voices as they came from their work. In the shanty’s doorway again,
Ma waited till they reached her, windblown and full of the fresh air and sunshine, bringing her their armfuls of tiger lilies and purple bean pods.
Then Carrie put the big bouquet in a pitcher of water while Laura set the table for supper. Mary sat in her rocking chair with Grace in her lap and told her about the ducks quacking in the Big Slough and the great flocks of wild geese going to sleep in the lake.
Chapter 9
Horse Thieves
One night at supper Pa spoke hardly at all. He only answered questions. At last Ma asked, “Aren’t you feeling well, Charles?”
“I’m all right, Caroline,” Pa answered.
“Then what is the matter?” Ma demanded.