By the Shores of Silver Lake (Little House 5)

“How much do they cost, Pa?” Laura asked.

“What, Flutterbudget?” said Pa.

“Horses like those.”

“A matched team like that? Not a penny under two hundred and fifty dollars, maybe three hundred,” said Pa. “Why?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering,” Laura replied. Three hundred dollars was so much money that she could hardly imagine it. Only rich people could pay such a sum for horses. Laura thought that if ever she were rich, what she would have would be two sleek brown horses with black manes and tails. She let her bonnet fly back in the wind and thought of riding behind such fast horses.

Far to the west and south, Big Slough widened and spread. On the other side of the wagon it ran narrow and marshy to the narrow tip of Silver Lake. Quickly Pa drove across the narrow part and up to the higher ground beyond.

“There it is!” he said. The little claim shanty stood bright in its newness in the sunlight. It looked like a yellow toy on the great rolling prairie covered with rippling young grass.

Ma laughed at it when Pa helped her from the wagon. “It looks like half of a woodshed that has been split in two.”

“You are wrong, Caroline,” Pa told her. “It is a little house only half built, and that half unfinished. We’ll finish it now, and build the other half soon.”

The little house and its half a slanting roof were built of rough boards with cracks between. There were no windows and no door for the doorway, but there was a floor. And a trap door in the floor opened into a cellar.

“I couldn’t do more than dig the cellar and put up rough walls yesterday,” said Pa. “But now we’re here! Nobody can jump our claim. And I’ll soon fix things up for you, Caroline.”

“I’m glad to be home, Charles,” said Ma.

Before sunset they were all settled in the funny little house. The stove was up, the beds were made, the curtain was hung to make two tiny rooms of the one small room. Supper was cooked and eaten, the dishes washed, and darkness was falling softly on the prairie. No one wanted the lamp lighted, the spring night was so beautiful.

Ma sat gently rocking by the doorless doorway, holding Grace in her lap and Carrie close beside her. Mary and Laura sat together on the threshold. Pa sat just outside the doorway, in a chair on the grass. They did not talk. They sat looking, while stars came out one by one and frogs were croaking in the Big Slough.

A little wind was whispering. The darkness was velvety soft and quiet and safe. All over the huge sky the stars were twinkling merrily.

Then Pa said softly, “I feel like music, Laura.”

Laura brought the fiddle box from its safe place under Ma’s bed. Pa took the fiddle from its nest and tuned it lovingly. Then they sang to the night and the stars:

“Oh, drive dull care away,

For weeping is but sorrow.

If things are wrong today,

There’s another day tomorrow.

“So drive dull care away

And do the best you can.

Put your shoulder to the wheel

Is the motto for every man.”

“I am going to put up the little shepherdess just as soon as the roof is finished over our heads,” said Ma.

Pa’s fiddle answered her with little notes running like water in the sunshine and widening into a pool. The moon was rising. The creamy light crept up the sky and the stars melted in it. Cool and silvery, the moonlight lay over the wide, dark land, and softly Pa sang with the fiddle:

“When the stars are brightly beaming

And the sighing winds are still,

When the twilight shadows hover o’er the lea,