Up rose the sun with no effort at all, while they kept walking as fast as they could, north on the prairie road toward the south end of Main Street.
The town was so changed that it seemed like a new place. Two whole blocks on the west side of Main Street were solidly filled with new, yellow-pine buildings. A new board sidewalk was in front of them. Pa and Laura did not have time to cross the street to it. They hurried, Indian file, along the narrow dusty path on the other side of the street.
On this side, the prairie still covered all the vacant lots, right up to Pa’s stable and his office-building at the corner of Main and Second Streets. But beyond them, on the other side of Second Street, the studding of a new building stood on the corner lot. Beyond
it, the path hurried past vacant lots again till it came to Clancy’s new store.
The inside of the store was all new, and still smelled of pine shavings. It had, too, the faint starchy smell of bolts of new cloth. Behind two long counters, all along both walls ran long shelves, stacked to the ceiling with bolts of muslin and calicoes and lawns, challis and cashmeres and flannels and even silks.
There were no groceries, and no hardware, no shoes or tools. In the whole store there was nothing but dry goods. Laura had never before seen a store where nothing was sold but dry goods.
At her right hand was a short counter-top of glass, and inside it were cards of all kinds of buttons, and papers of needles and pins. On the counter beside it, a rack was full of spools of thread of every color. Those colored threads were beautiful in the light from the windows.
The sewing machine stood just behind the front end of the other counter, near that window. Its nickel parts and its long needle glittered and its varnished wood shone. A spool of white thread stood up on its thin black ridge. Laura would not have touched it for anything.
Mr. Clancy was unrolling bolts of calico before two customers, men in very dirty shirts. A large, fat woman with tight-combed black hair was pinning pattern pieces of newspaper to a length of checked calico spread on the counter near the sewing machine. Pa took off his hat and said good morning to her. He said, “Mrs. White, here’s my girl, Laura.”
Mrs. White took the pins out of her mouth and said, “I hope you’re a fast, neat sewer. Can you baste bias facings and make good firm buttonholes?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Laura said.
“Well, you can hang your bonnet on that nail there, and I’ll get you started,” said Mrs. White.
Pa gave Laura a helping smile, and then he was gone.
Laura hoped that her trembly feeling would wear off, in time. She hung up her bonnet, tied on her apron, and put her finger into the thimble. Mrs. White handed her pieces of a shirt to baste together, and told her to take the chair in the window by the sewing machine.
Quickly Laura drew the straight-backed chair back a little way, so that the sewing machine partly hid her from the street. She bent her head over her work and basted rapidly.
Mrs. White did not say a word. Anxiously and nervously she kept fitting the pattern-pieces to the goods and cutting out shirt after shirt with long shears. As soon as Laura finished basting a shirt, Mrs. White took it from her and gave her another to baste. After a time, she sat down at the machine. She whirled its wheel with her hand, and then her feet working fast on the pedal underneath kept the wheel whirring. The racketing hum of the machine filled Laura’s head like the buzzing of a gigantic bumblebee. The wheel was a blur and the needle was a streak of light. Mrs. White’s plump hands scrambled on the cloth, feeding it rapidly under the needle.
Laura basted as fast as she could. She put the basted shirt on the shrinking pile at Mrs. White’s left hand, seized pieces of the next one from the counter and basted it. Mrs. White took basted shirts from the pile, sewed them on the machine and piled them at her right hand.
There was a pattern in the way the shirts went, from the counter to Laura to a pile, from the pile to Mrs. White and through the machine to another pile. It was something like the circles that men and teams had made on the prairie, building the railroad. But only Laura’s hands moved, driving the needle as fast as they could along the seams.
Her shoulders began to ache, and the back of her neck. Her chest was cramped and her legs felt tired and heavy. The loud machine buzzed in her head.
Suddenly the machine stopped, still. “There!” Mrs. White said. She had sewed the last basted shirt.
Laura had to gather a sleeve and to baste the armhole and the underarm seam. And the pieces of one more shirt lay waiting on the counter.
“I’ll baste that one,” Mrs. White said, snatching it up. “We’re behindhand.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Laura said. She felt she should have worked faster, but she had done the best she could.
A big man looked in at the door. His dusty face was covered with an unshaved stubble of red beard. He called, “My shirts ready, Clancy?”
“Be ready right after noon,” Mr. Clancy answered.
When the big man had gone on, Mr. Clancy asked Mrs. White when his shirts would be done. Mrs. White said she did not know which were. Then Mr. Clancy swore.
Laura scrooged small in her chair, basting as fast as she could. Mr. Clancy snatched shirts from the pile and almost threw them at Mrs. White. Still shouting and swearing, he said she’d get them done before dinner or he’d know the reason why.
“I’ll not be driven and hounded!” Mrs. White blazed. “Not by you nor any other shanty Irishman!”
Laura hardly heard what Mr. Clancy said then. She wanted desperately to be somewhere else. But Mrs. White told her to come along to dinner. They went into the kitchen behind the store, and Mr. Clancy came raging after them.
The kitchen was hot and crowded and cluttered. Mrs. Clancy was putting dinner on the table, and three little girls and a boy were pushing each other off their chairs. Mr. and Mrs. Clancy and Mrs. White, all quarreling at the top of their voices, sat down and ate heartily. Laura could not even understand what they were quarreling about. She could not tell whether Mr. Clancy was quarreling with his wife or her mother, nor whether they were quarreling with him or with each other.