The Long Winter (Little House 6)

“I wouldn’t get caught,” Laura answered. She did not like to think about it. She would rather talk with Mary Power about other things. But Miss Garland rang the bell and the boys came trooping in, red with the cold and grinning.

That whole day long everyone was as cheerful as the sunshine. At noon Laura and Mary Power and Carrie, with the Beardsley girls, raced in the shouting crowd over the big snowdrifts home to dinner. On top of the high drift that was Main Street, some went north and some went south and Laura and Carrie slid down its east side to their own front door.

Pa was already in his place at the table, Mary was lifting Grace onto the pile of books in her chair, and Ma was setting a dish of steaming baked potatoes before Pa. “I do wish we had some butter for them,” she said.

“Salt brings out the flavor,” Pa was saying, when a loud knocking sounded on the kitchen door. Carrie ran to open it and, big and furry as a bear in his buffalo coat, Mr. Boast came in.

“Come in, Boast! Come in, come in!” Pa kept saying. They were so glad to see him. “Come in and put your feet under the table. You’re just in time!”

“Where is Mrs. Boast?” Mary inquired.

“Yes, indeed! Didn’t she come with you?” Ma said eagerly.

Mr. Boast was getting out of his wraps. “Well, no. You see, Ellie thought she must do the washing while the sun shone. I told her we’ll have more good days but she said then she’d come to town on one of them. She sent you some butter. It’s from our last churning. My cows are going dry. The weather we’ve been having, I couldn’t take care of them.”

Mr. Boast sat up to the table and they all began on the good baked potatoes, with butter, after all.

“Glad to know you came through the storm all right,” Pa said.

“Yes, we were lucky. I was watering the stock at the well when the cloud came up. I hurried them in, had them all snug in the stable and got halfway to the house before the storm struck,” Mr. Boast told them.

The baked potatoes and hot biscuits with butter were delicious, and to finish the dinner there were more biscuits with some of Ma’s rich tomato preserves. “There’s no more salt pork in town,” Pa said. “Getting all our supplies from the east, this way, we run a little short when the trains don’t get through.”

“What do you hear about the train?” Mr. Boast asked him.

“They’ve put extra gangs to work on the Tracy cut, Woodworth says,” Pa replied. “And they’re bringing out snowplows. We can look for a train before the end of the week.”

“Elbe’s counting on my getting some tea and sugar and flour,” said Mr. Boast. “The storekeepers raising prices any?”

“Not that I know of,” Pa reassured him. “Nothing’s running short but meat.”

Dinner was eaten and Mr. Boast said he must be getting along to reach home before night. He promised to bring Mrs. Boast in to see them all one day soon. Then he and Pa went up Main Street to Harthorn’s grocery and Laura and Carrie, hand in hand, went joyously climbing up the drifts and sliding down them, back to school.

All that happy afternoon they were full of the clear, cold air and as bright as the sunshine. They knew their lessons perfectly, they enjoyed reciting them. Every face in school was smiling and Cap Garland’s flashing grin included them a

ll.

It was good to see the town alive again and to know that again all the weekdays would be school days.

But in the night Laura dreamed that Pa was playing the wild storm-tune on his fiddle and when she screamed to him to stop, the tune was a blinding blizzard swirling around her and it had frozen her to solid ice.

Then she was staring at the dark, but for a long time that nightmare held her stiff and cold. It was not Pa’s fiddle she heard, but the storm wind itself and the swish! swish! of icy snow on the walls and the roof. At last she was able to move. So cold that the dream still seemed half real, she snuggled close to Mary and pulled the quilts over her head.

“What is it?” Mary murmured in her sleep.

“A blizzard,” Laura answered.

Chapter 15

No Trains

It was not worth while to get up in the morning. The daylight was dim, the windows were white and so were the nails in the roof. Another blizzard was roaring, screaming, and swishing around the house. There would be no school.

Laura lay sluggish and half awake. She would rather sleep than wake up to such a day. But Ma called, “Good morning, girls! Time to get up!”

Quickly, because of the cold, Laura put on her dress and her shoes and went downstairs.

“Why, what is the trouble, Laura?” Ma asked, looking up from the stove.