The Long Winter (Little House 6)

“We brought sixty bushels of wheat,” Almanzo told him.

“You don’t say! And I thought it was a wild-goose chase.” Royal put coal on the fire. “How much did you pay for it?”

“A dollar and a quarter.” Almanzo had got his boots off.

“Whew!” Royal whistled. “That the best you could do?”

“Yes,” Almanzo said shortly, peeling down layers of socks.

Then Royal noticed what he was doing and saw the pail full of snow. He exclaimed, “What’s that snow for?”

“What do you suppose?” Almanzo snorted. “To thaw my feet.”

His feet were bloodless-white and dead to the touch. Royal helped him rub them with snow, in the coldest corner of the room, until they began to tingle with a pain that made his stomach sick. Tired as he was, he could not sleep that night with the feverish pain of his feet and he was glad because the pain meant that they were not dangerously frozen. All the days and nights of that blizzard his feet were so swollen and painful that he had to borrow Royal’s boots when it was his turn to do the chores. But when the blizzard stopped, in the late afternoon of the fourth day, he was able to get into his own boots and go down the street.

It was good to be out in the fresh, clean cold, to see sunshine and hear only the straight wind after hearing the storm so long. But the strength of that wind would wear a man out, and before he had gone a block he was so chilled that he was glad enough to blow into Fuller’s Hardware store.

The place was crowded. Nearly every man in town was there and they were talking angrily in growing excitement.

“Hello, what’s up?” Almanzo asked.

Mr. Harthorn turned round to him. “Say, you charge Loftus anything for hauling that wheat? Cap Garland, here, says he didn’t.”

Cap’s grin lighted up his face. “Hello, Wilder! You soak it to that skinflint, why don’t you? I was fool enough to tell him we made that trip for the fun of it. I wish now I’d charged him all he’s got.”

“What’s all this about?” Almanzo demanded. “No, I’m not charging a red cent. Who says we took that trip for pay?”

Gerald Fuller told him, “Loftus is charging three dollars a bushel for that wheat.”

They all began to talk again, but Mr. Ingalls rose up thin and tall from the box by the stove. His face had shrunken to hollows and jutting cheekbones above his brown beard, and his blue eyes glittered bright.

“We aren’t getting anywhere with all this talk,” he said. “I say, let’s all go reason with Loftus.”

“Now you’re talking!” another man sang out. “Come on, boys! We’ll help ourselves to that wheat!”

“Reason with him, I said,” Mr. Ingalls objected to that. “I’m talking about reason and justice.”

“Maybe you are,” someone shouted. “I’m talking about something to eat, and by the Almighty! I’m not going back to my youngsters without it! Are the rest of you fellows?”

“No! No!” several agreed with him. Then Cap spoke up.

“Wilder and I have got something to say about this. We brought in the wheat. We didn’t haul it in to make trouble.”

“That’s so,” Gerald Fuller said. “See here, boys, we don’t want any trouble in town.”

“I don’t see any sense of flying off the handle,” said Almanzo. He was going on, but one of the men interrupted him.

“Yes, and you’ve got plenty to eat! Both you and Fuller. I’m not going home without—”

“How much you got to eat at your house, Mr. Ingalls?” Cap interrupted him.

“Not a thing,” Mr. Ingalls answered. “We ground up the last wheat we had, yesterday. Ate it this morning.”

“There you are!” said Almanzo. “Let Mr. Ingalls engineer this.”

“All right, I’ll take the lead,” Mr. Ingalls agreed. “The rest of you boys come along and we’ll see what Loftus has to say.”

They all tramped along after him single file over the snowdrifts. They crowded into the store where Loftus, when they began coming in, went behind his counter. There was no wheat in sight. Loftus had moved the sacks into his back room.