The Long Winter (Little House 6)

Laura was taking up the biscuits when the front door opened and Pa called, “Look, Caroline! See who’s come home with me?”

Grace stopped her headlong rush toward Pa and backed, staring, her fingers in her mouth. Ma put her gently aside as she stepped to the doorway with the dish of mashed potatoes in her hand.

“Why, Mr. Edwards!” Ma said.

“I told you we’d see him again, after he saved our homestead for us,” said Pa.

Ma set the potatoes on the table. “I have wanted so much to thank you for helping Mr. Ingalls file on his claim,” she said to Mr. Edwards.

Laura would have known him anywhere. He was the same tall, lean, lounging wildcat from Tennessee. The laughing lines in his leather-brown face were deeper, a knife scar was on his cheek that had not been there before, but his eyes were as laughing and lazy and keen as she remembered them. “Oh, Mr. Edwards!” she cried out.

“You brought our presents from Santa Claus,” Mary remembered.

“You swam the creek,” Laura said. “And you went away down the Verdigris River…”

Mr. Edwards scraped his foot on the floor and bowed low. “Mrs. Ingalls and girls, I surely am glad to see you all again.”

He looked into Mary’s eyes that did not see him and his voice was gentle when he said, “Are these two handsome young ladies your small little girls that I dandled on my knee, Ingalls, down on the Verdigris?”

Mary and Laura said that they were and that Carrie had been the baby then.

“Grace is our baby now,” Ma said, but Grace would not go to meet Mr. Edwards. She would only stare at him and hang on to Ma’s skirts.

“You’re just in time, Mr. Edwards,” Ma said hospitably. “I’ll have dinner on the table in one minute,” and Pa urged, “Sit right up, Edwards, and don’t be bashful! There’s plenty of it, such as it is!”

Mr. Edwards admired the well-built, pleasant house and heartily enjoyed the good dinner. But he said he was going on west with the train when it pulled out. Pa could not persuade him to stay longer.

“I’m aiming to go far west in the spring,” he said. “This here country, it’s too settled-up for me. The politicians are a-swarming in already, and ma’am if’n there’s any worst pest than grasshoppers it s

urely is politicians. Why, they’ll tax the lining out’n a man’s pockets to keep up these here county-seat towns! I don’t see nary use for a county, nohow. We all got along happy and content without ’em.

“Feller come along and taxed me last summer. Told me I got to put in every last least thing I had. So I put in Tom and Jerry, my horses, at fifty dollars apiece, and my oxen yoke, Buck and Bright, I put in at fifty, and my cow at thirty-five.

“‘Is that all you got?’ he says. Well, I told him I’d put in five children I reckoned was worth a dollar apiece.

“‘Is that all?’ he says. ‘How about your wife?’ he says.

“‘By Mighty!’ I says to him. ‘She says I don’t own her and I don’t aim to pay no taxes on her,’ I says. And I didn’t.”

“Why, Mr. Edwards, it is news to us that you have a family,” said Ma. “Mr. Ingalls said nothing of it.”

“I didn’t know it myself,” Pa explained. “Anyway, Edwards, you don’t have to pay taxes on your wife and children.”

“He wanted a big tax list,” said Mr. Edwards. “Politicians, they take pleasure a-prying into a man’s affairs and I aimed to please ’em. It makes no matter. I don’t aim to pay taxes. I sold the relinquishment on my claim and in the spring when the collector comes around I’ll be gone from there. Got no children and no wife, nohow.”

Before Pa or Ma could speak, the train whistle blew loud and long. “There’s the call,” said Mr. Edwards, and got up from the table.

“Change your mind and stay awhile, Edwards,” Pa urged him. “You always brought us luck.”

But Mr. Edwards shook hands all around and last with Mary who sat beside him.

“Good-by all!” he said, and going quickly out of the door he ran toward the depot.

Grace had looked and listened wide-eyed all the time without trying to say a word. Now that Mr. Edwards had vanished so suddenly, she took a deep breath and asked, “Mary, was that the man who saw Santa Claus?”

“Yes,” Mary said. “That was the man who walked to Independence, forty miles, in the rain and saw Santa Claus there and brought back the Christmas presents for Laura and me when we were little girls.”

“He has a heart of gold,” said Ma.