Little House On The Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder Read Free Book Online Page A

over and her black coat was streaked with sweat and foam. Pa swung off her. He was breathing hard, too.
    “What is the matter, Charles?” Ma asked him.
    Pa was looking toward the creek, so Ma and Laura looked at it, too. But they could see only the space above the bottom lands, with a few tree-tops in it, and the distant tops of the earthen bluffs under the High Prairie's grasses.
    “What is it?” Ma asked again. “Why did you ride Patty like that?”
    Pa breathed a long breath. “I was afraid the wolves would beat me here. But I see everything's all right.”
    “Wolves!” she cried. “What wolves?”
    “Everything's all right, Caroline,” said Pa.
    “Let a fellow get his breath.”
    When he had got some breath, he said, “I didn't ride Patty like that. It was all I could do to hold her at all. Fifty wolves, Caroline, the biggest wolves I ever saw. I wouldn't go through such a thing again, not for a mint of money.”
    A shadow came over the prairie just then because the sun had gone down, and Pa said “I'll tell you about it later.”
    “We'll eat supper in the house,” said Ma.
    “No need of that,” he told her. "Jack will 85 give us warning in plenty of time."
    He brought Pet and her colt from the picket-line. He didn't take them and Patty to drink from the creek, as he usually did. He gave them the water in Ma's washtub, which was standing full, ready for the washing next morning. He rubbed down Patty's sweaty sides and legs and put her in the barn with Pet and Bunny.
    Supper was ready. The camp fire made a circle of light in the dark. Laura and Mary stayed close to the fire, and kept Baby Carrie with them. They could feel the dark all around them, and they kept looking behind them at the place where the dark mixed with the edge of the firelight.
    Shadows moved there as if they were alive.
    Jack sat on his haunches beside Laura.
    The edges of his ears were lifted, listening to the dark. Now and then he walked a little way into it. He walked all around the camp fire, and came back to sit beside Laura. The hair lay flat on his thick neck and he did not growl.
    His teeth showed a little, but that was because he was a bulldog.
    Laura and Mary ate their corncakes and the prairie hen's drumsticks, and they listened to Pa while he told Ma about the wolves.
    He had found some more neighbors. Settlers were coming in and settling along both sides of the creek. Less than three miles away, in a hollow on the High Prairie, a man and his wife were building a house. Their name was Scott, and Pa said they were nice folks. Six miles beyond them, two bache-
    lors were living in one house. They had taken two farms, and built the house on the line be-
    tween them. One man's bunk was against one wall of the house, and the other man's bunk was against the other wall. So each man slept on his own farm, although they were in the same house and the house was only eight feet wide. They cooked arid ate together in the middle of the house.
    Pa had not said anything about the wolves yet. Laura wished he would. But she knew that she must not interrupt when Pa was talking.
    He said that these bachelors did not know that anyone else was in the country. They had seen nobody but Indians. So they were glad to see Pa, and he stayed there longer than he had meant to.
    Then he rode on, and from a little rise in the prairie he saw a white speck down in the creek bottoms. He thought it was a covered wagon, and it was. When he came to it, he found a man and his wife and five children.
    They had come from Iowa, and they had camped in the bottoms because one of their horses was sick. The horse was better now, but the bad night air so near the creek had given them fever 'n' ague. The man and his wife and the three oldest children were too sick to stand up. The little boy and girl,no big-88 ger than Mary and Laura, were taking care of them.
    So Pa did what he could for them, and then he rode back to tell the bachelors about them.
    One of them rode