In the Horse-Barn he stopped just a minute to look at the colts. He liked Star and Bright, but calves were clumsy and awkward compared with the slender, fine, quick colts. Their nostrils fluttered when they breathed, their ears moved as swiftly as birds. They tossed their heads with a flutter of manes, and daintily pawed with their slender legs and little hoofs, and their eyes were full of spirit.
“I’d like to help break a colt,” Almanzo ventured to say.
“It’s a man’s job, son,” Father said. “One little mistake’ll ruin a fine colt.”
Almanzo did not say any more. He went soberly into the house.
It was strange to be eating all alone with Father and Mother. They ate at the table in the kitchen, because there was no company today. The kitchen was bright with the glitter of snow outside. The floor and the tables were scrubbed bone white with lye and sand. The tin saucepans glittered silver, and the copper pots gleamed gold on the walls, the teakettle hummed, and the geraniums on the window-sill were redder than Mother’s red dress.
Almanzo was very hungry. He ate in silence, busily filling the big emptiness inside him, while Father and Mother talked. When they finished eating, Mother jumped up and began putting the dishes into the dishpan.
“You fill the wood-box, Almanzo,” she said. “And then there’s other things you can do.”
Almanzo opened the woodshed door by the stove. There, right before him, was a new handsled! He could hardly believe it was for him. The calf-yoke was his birthday present. He asked:
“Whose sled is that, Father? Is it—it isn’t for me?”
Mother laughed and Father twinkled his eyes and asked, “Do you know any other nine-year-old that wants it?”
It was a beautiful sled. Father had made it of hickory. It was long and slim and swift-looking; the hickory runners had been soaked and bent into long, clean curves that seemed ready to fly. Almanzo stroked the shiny-smooth wood. It was polished so perfectly that he could not feel even the tops of the wooden pegs that held it together. There was a bar between the runners, for his feet.
“Get along with you!” Mother said, laughing. “Take that sled outdoors where it belongs.”
The cold stood steadily at forty below zero, but the sun was shining, and all afternoon Almanzo played with his sled. Of course it would not slide in the soft, deep snow, but in the road the bobsled’s runners had made two sleek, hard tracks. At the top of the hill, Almanzo started the sled and flung himself on it, and away he went.
Only the track was curving and narrow, so sooner or later he spilled into the drifts. End over end went the flying sled, and headlong went Almanzo. But he floundered out, and climbed the hill again.
Several times he went into the house for apples and doughnuts and cookies. Downstairs was still warm and empty. Upstairs there was the thud-thud of Mother’s loom and the clickety-clack of the flying shuttle. Almanzo opened the woodshed door and heard the slithery, soft sound of a shaving-knife, and the flap of a turned shingle.
He climbed the stairs to Father’s attic workroom. His snowy mittens hung by their string around his neck; in his right hand he held a doughnut, and in his left hand two cookies. He took a bite of doughnut and then a bite of cookie.
Father sat astraddle on the end of the shaving-bench, by the window. The bench slanted upward toward him, and at the top of the slant two pegs stood up. At his right hand was a pile of rough shingles which he had split with his ax from short lengths of oak logs.
He picked up a shingle, laid its end against the pegs, and then drew the shaving-knife up its side.
One stroke smoothed it, another stroke shaved the upper end thinner than the lower end. Father flipped the shingle over. Two strokes on that side, and it was done. Father laid it on the pile of finished shingles, and set another rough one against the pegs.
His hands moved smoothly and quickly. They did not stop even when he looked up and twinkled at Almanzo.
“Be you having a good time, son?” he asked.
“Father, can I do that?” said Almanzo.
Father slid back on the bench to make room in front of him.
Almanzo straddled it, and crammed the rest of the doughnut into his mouth. He took the handles of the long knife in his hands and shaved carefully up the shingle. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. So Father put his big hands over Almanzo’s, and together they shaved the shingle smooth.
Then Almanzo turned it over, and they shaved the other side. That was all he wanted to do. He got off the bench and went in to see Mother.
Her hands were flying and her right foot was tapping on the treadle of the
loom. Back and forth the shuttle flew from her right hand to her left and back again, between the even threads of warp, and swiftly the threads of warp crisscrossed each other, catching fast the thread that the shuttle left behind it.
Thud! said the treadle. Clackety-clack! said the shuttle. Thump! said the hand-bar, and back flew the shuttle.
Mother’s workroom was large and bright, and warm from the heating-stove’s chimney. Mother’s little rocking-chair was by one window, and beside it a basket of carpet-rags, torn for sewing. In a corner stood the idle spinning-wheel. All along one wall were shelves full of hanks of red and brown and blue and yellow yarn, which Mother had dyed last summer.
But the cloth on the loom was sheep’s-gray. Mother was weaving undyed wool from a white sheep and wool from a black sheep, twisted together.