“I don’t know,” Almanzo replied. After a pause he said in disgust, “She is afraid of horses.” Laura said nothing, and in a moment he continued, “I wouldn’t have brought her the first time, but I overtook her walking in the road. She was walking all the way to town to see someone, but she said she’d rather go along with us. Sundays at her house are so long and lonely that I felt sorry for her, and she seemed to enjoy the drive so much. I didn’t know you girls disliked each other.”
Laura was amazed, that a man who knew so much about farming and horses could know so little about a girl like Nellie. But she said only, “No, you wouldn’t know, because you did not go to school with us. I will tell you what I’d like to do, I’d like to take Ida driving.”
“We will, sometime,” Almanzo agreed. “But today is pretty fine, just by ourselves.”
It was a beautiful afternoon. The sun was almost too warm, and Almanzo said that the colts were so well broken now that they could raise the buggy top. So together, each with a hand, they raised it and pressed the hinge of the braces straight to hold it up. Then they rode in its shade with the gentle wind blowing through the open sides.
After that day, nothing was ever said about the next Sunday, but always at two o’clock Almanzo drove around the corner of Pearson’s livery barn, and Laura was ready when he stopped at the door. Pa would look up from his paper and nod good-by to her, then go on reading, and Ma would say, “Don’t be out too late, Laura.” June came and the wild prairie roses bloomed. Laura and Almanzo gathered them beside the road and filled the buggy with the fragrant blossoms.
Then one Sunday at two o’clock the corner of Pearson’s barn remained empty. Laura could not imagine what might have happened, till suddenly the colts were at the door, and Ida was in the buggy, laughing merrily. Almanzo had gone by the Reverend Brown’s, and persuaded Ida to come. Then for a surprise, he had crossed the Big Slough west of the town road; this brought them to Pa’s land a little south of the house, and while Laura watched toward the north, they had come up from the opposite direction.
They drove that day to Lake Henry, and it was the merriest of drives. The colts behaved beautifully. They stood quietly while Ida and Laura filled their arms with the wild roses and climbed back into the buggy. They nibbled at the bushes by the road while Almanzo and the girls watched the little waves ripple along the shores of the lakes on either hand.
The road was so narrow and so low that Laura said, “I should think the water might be over the road sometimes.”
“Not since I have known it,” Almanzo answered, “but perhaps, many years or ages ago, the two lakes were one.”
Then for a while, they sat in silence and Laura thought how wild and beautiful it must have been when the twin lakes were one, when buffalo and antelope roamed the prairie around the great lake and came there to drink, when wolves and coyotes and foxes lived on the banks and wild geese, swans, herons, cranes, ducks, and gulls nested and fished and flew there in countless numbers.
“Why did you sigh?” Almanzo asked.
“Did I?” said Laura. “I was thinking that wild things leave when people come. I wish they wouldn’t.”
“Most people kill them,” he said.
“I know,” Laura said. “I can’t understand why.”
“It is beautiful here,” said Ida, “but we are a long way from home and I promised Elmer I’d go to church with him tonight.”
Almanzo tightened the reins and spoke to the colts while Laura asked, “Who’s Elmer?”
“He is a young man who has a claim near Father Brown’s and he boards at our place,” Ida told her. “He wanted me to go walking with him this afternoon, but I thought I’d rather go with you, this once. You’ve never seen Elmer… McConnell,” she remembered to add.
“There are so many new people, and I can’t keep track even of the ones I know,” Laura said.
“Mary Power is going with the new clerk in Ruth’s bank,” Ida told her.
“But Cap!” Laura exclaimed. “What about Cap Garland?”
“Cap’s smitten with a new girl who lives west of town,” Almanzo told them.
“Oh, I think it’s a pity we don’t all go in a crowd any more,” Laura lamented. “What fun the sleighing parties were, and now everyone’s paired off.”
“Oh, well,” Ida said. “‘In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.’”
“Yes, or it’s this,” and Laura sang,
“Oh whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad,
Oh whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad,
Though father and mither and a’ should gae mad,
Oh whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad.”
“Would you?” Almanzo asked.
“Of course not!” Laura answered. “That’s only a song.”