And sometimes there’d be a great gray rabbit, so still in the lights and shadows of a grass clump that you were near enough to touch him before you saw him. Then, if you were very quiet, you might stand a long time looking at him. His round eyes stared at yours without meaning anything. His nose wiggled, and sunlight was rosy through his long ears, that had delicate veins in them and the softest short fur on their outsides. The rest of his fur was so thick and soft that at last you couldn’t help trying, very carefully, to touch it.
Then he was gone in a flash and the place where he had been sitting was hollowed and smooth and still warm from his warm behind.
All the time, of course, Laura or Mary was minding Baby Carrie, except when she had her afternoon nap. Then they sat and soaked in the sunshine and the wind until Laura forgot that the baby was sleeping. She jumped up and ran and shouted till Ma came to the door and said, “Dear me, Laura, must you yell like an Indian? I declare,” Ma said, “if you girls aren’t getting to look like Indians! Can I never teach you to keep your sunbonnets on?”
Pa was up on the house wall beginning the roof. He looked down at them and laughed.
“One little Indian, two little Indians, three little Indians,” he sang, softly. “No, only two.”
“You make three,” Mary said to him. “You’re brown, too.”
“But you aren’t little, Pa,” said Laura. “Pa, when are we going to see a papoose? “
“Goodness!” Ma exclaimed. “What do you want to see an Indian baby for? Put on your sunbonnet, now, and forget such nonsense.”
Laura’s sunbonnet hung down her back. She pulled it up by its strings, and its sides came past her cheeks. When her sunbonnet was on she could see only what was in front of her, and that was why she was always pushing it back and letting it hang by its strings tied around her throat. She put her sunbonnet on when Ma told her to, but she did not forget the papoose.
This was Indian country and she didn’t know why she didn’t see Indians. She knew she would see them sometime, though. Pa said so, but she was getting tired of waiting.
Pa had taken the canvas wagon-top off the house, and now he was ready to put the roof on. For days and days he had been hauling logs from the creek bottoms and splitting them into thin, long slabs. Piles of slabs lay all around the house and slabs stood against it.
“Come out of the house, Caroline,” he said. “I don’t want to risk anything falling on you or Carrie.”
“Wait, Charles, till I put away the china shepherdess,” Ma answered. In a minute she came out, with a quilt and her mending and Baby Carrie. She spread the quilt on the shady grass by the stable, and sat there to do her mending and watch Carrie play.
Pa reached down and pulled up a slab. He laid it across the ends of the sapling rafters. Its edge stuck out beyond the wall. Then Pa put some nails in his mouth and took his hammer out of his belt, and he began to nail the slab to the rafters.
Mr. Edwards had lent him the nails. They had met in the woods, where they were both chopping down trees, and Mr. Edwards had insisted that Pa borrow nails for the roof.
“That’s what I call a good neighbor!” Pa said when he told Ma about it.
“Yes,” said Ma. “But I don’t like to be beholden, not even to the best of neighbors.”
“Nor I,” Pa replied. “I’ve never been beholden to any man yet, and I never will be. But neighborliness is another matter, and I’ll pay him back every nail as soon as I can make the trip to Independence.”
Now Pa carefully took the nails one by one from his mouth, and with ringing blows of the hammer he drove them into the slab. It was much quicker than drilling holes and whittling pegs and driving them into the holes. But every now and then a nail sprang away from the tough oak when the hammer hit it, and if Pa was not holding it firmly, it went sailing through the air.
Then Mary and Laura watched it fall and they searched in the grass till they found it. Sometimes it was bent. Then Pa carefully pounded it straight again. It would never do to lose or waste a nail.
When Pa had nailed down two slabs, he got up on them. He laid and nailed more slabs, all the way up to the top of the rafters. The edge of each slab lapped over the edge of the slab below it.
Then he began again on the other side of the house, and he laid the roof all the way up from that side. A little crack was left between the highest slabs. So Pa made a little trough of two slabs, and he nailed this trough firmly, upside down over the crack.
The roof was done. The house was darker than it had been, because no light came through the slabs. There was not one single crack that would let rain come in.
“You have done a splendid job, Charles,” Ma said, “and I’m thankful to have a good roof over my head.”
“You shall have furniture, too, as fine as I can make it,” Pa replied. “I’ll make a bedstead as soon as the floor is laid.”
He began again to haul logs. Day after day he hauled logs. He did not even stop hauling logs to go hunting; he took his gun on the wagon and brought back at night whatever meat he had shot from the wagon-seat.
When he had hauled enough logs to make the floor, he began to split them. He split each log straight down the middle. Laura liked to sit on the woodpile and watch him.
First, with a mighty blow of his ax he split the butt of the log. Into the crack he slipped the thin edge of an iron wedge. Then he wrenched the ax out of the log, and he drove the wedge deeper into the
crack. The tough wood split a little farther.
All the way up the log Pa fought that tough oak. He struck with his ax into the crack. He drove blocks of wood into it, and moved the iron wedge higher. Little by little he followed the crack up the log.