to the road. The horses began to trot, rapidly taking Father and Mother away. In a little while the sound of the buggy wheels ceased. Father and Mother were gone.
Nobody said anything. Even Eliza Jane looked a little scared. The house and the barns and the fields seemed very big and empty. For a whole week Father and Mother would be ten miles away.
Suddenly Almanzo threw his hat into the air and yelled. Alice hugged herself and cried:
“What’ll we do first?”
They could do anything they liked. There was nobody to stop them.
“We’ll do the dishes and make the beds,” Eliza Jane said, bossy.
“Let’s make ice-cream!” Royal shouted.
Eliza Jane loved ice-cream. She hesitated, and said, “Well—”
Almanzo ran after Royal to the ice-house. They dug a block of ice out of the sawdust and put it in a grain sack. They laid the sack on the back porch and pounded it with hatchets till the ice was crushed. Alice came out to watch them while she whipped egg-whites on a platter. She beat them with a fork, till they were too stiff to slip when she tilted the platter.
Eliza Jane measured milk and cream, and dipped up sugar from the barrel in the pantry. It was not common maple sugar, but white sugar bought from the store. Mother used it only when company came. Eliza Jane dipped six cupfuls, then she smoothed the sugar that was left, and you would hardly have missed any.
She made a big milk-pail full of yellow custard. They set the pail in a tub and packed the snowy crushed ice around it, with salt, and they covered it all with a blanket. Every few minutes they took off the blanket and uncovered the pail, and stirred the freezing ice-cream.
When it was frozen, Alice brought saucers and spoons, and Almanzo brought out a cake and the butcher knife. He cut enormous pieces of cake, while Eliza Jane heaped the saucers. They could eat all the ice-cream and cake they wanted to; no one would stop them.
At noon they had eaten the whole cake, and almost all the ice-cream. Eliza Jane said it was time to get dinner, but the others didn’t want any dinner. Almanzo said:
“All I want is a watermelon.”
Alice jumped up. “Goody! Let’s go get one!”
“Alice!” Eliza Jane cried. “You come right back here and do the breakfast dishes!”
“I will,” Alice called out, “when I come back.”
Alice and Almanzo went into the hot melon field, where the melons lay round above their wilting flat leaves. Almanzo snapped his finger against the green rinds, and listened. When a melon sounded ripe, it was ripe, and when it sounded green, it was green. But when Almanzo said a melon sounded ripe, Alice thought it sounded green. There wasn’t really any way to know, though Almanzo was sure he knew more about melons than any girl. So in the end they picked six of the biggest melons, and they lugged them one by one to the ice-house and put them on the damp, cold sawdust.
Then Alice went to the house to do the dishes. Almanzo said he wasn’t going to do anything; maybe he’d go swimming. But as soon as Alice was out of sight, he skipped through the barns and stole into the pasture where the colts were.
The pasture was big and the sun was very hot. The air shimmered and wavered with heat, and little insects made a shrill sound. Bess and Beauty were lying down in the shade of a tree, and their little colts stood near them, waggling their small bushy tails and straddling a little on their long, gangling legs. The yearlings and the two-year-olds and the three-year-olds were grazing. All of them lifted their heads and stared at Almanzo.
He went slowly toward them, holding out his hand. There wasn’t anything in his hand, but they didn’t know that. He didn’t mean to do anything, he only wanted to get near enough to pet them. Starlight and the other little colt ran wabbling to their mothers, and Bess and Beauty lifted up their heads and looked, then laid them down again. The big colts all pricked up their ears.
One big colt stepped toward Almanzo, then another. The six big colts were all coming. Almanzo wished he had brought carrots for them. They were so beautiful and free and big, tossing their manes and showing the whites of their eyes. The sunshine glistened on their strong, arched necks and on the muscles of their chests. Suddenly one of them said:
“Whoosh!”
One of them kicked, one of them squealed, and all at once their heads went up, their tails went up, and their hoofs thundered on the ground. All their brown haunches and high black tails were turned to Almanzo. Like a thundering whirlwind those six colts went around the tree, and Almanzo heard them behind him.
He whirled around. He saw their pounding hoofs and big chests coming straight at him. They were running too fast to stop. There wasn’t time to get out of the way. Almanzo’s eyes shut; he yelled:
“Whoa!”
The air and the ground shook. His eyes opened. He saw brown knees rising up in the air, a round belly and hind legs rushed overhead. Brown sides went by him like thunder. His hat flew off. He felt stunned. One of the three-year-olds had jumped over him. The colts were thundering down across the pasture, and Almanzo saw Royal coming.
“Leave those colts be!” Royal shouted. He came up and said that for a cent he’d give Almanzo a licking he’d remember.
“You know better than to fool with those colts,” Royal said. He took Almanzo by the ear. Almanzo trotted, but his ear was pulled all the way to the barns. He said he hadn’t done anything; Royal wouldn’t listen.
“Let me catch you in that pasture again and I’ll whale the hide off you,” Royal said. “I’ll tell Father, too.”