The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder Read Free Book Online Page A

wrong,” Pa answered. “Here are your sugar and tea and a bit of salt pork. I didn't get a rabbit. Not a thing's wrong,” he repeated, “but we're moving to town as quick as we can. I've got to haul in hay, first, for the stock. I can haul one load before dark if I hustle.”
    “Goodness, Charles!” Ma gasped, but Pa was on his way to the stable. Carrie and little Grace stared at Ma and at Laura and at Ma again. Laura looked at Ma and Ma looked helplessly at her.
    “Your Pa never did such a thing before,” Ma said.
    “Nothing's wrong, Ma. Pa said so,” Laura answered. “I must run help him with the hay.”
    Ma came out to the stable, too, and Pa talked to her while he slapped the harness on the horses.
    “It's going to be a hard winter,” Pa said. “If you must have the truth, I'm afraid of it. This house is nothing but a claim shanty. It doesn't keep out the cold, and look what happened to the tar-paper in the first blizzard. Our store building in town is boarded and papered, sided on the outside and ceiled on the inside. It's good and tight and warm, and the stable there is built warm too.”
    “But what's the need to hurry so?” Ma asked.
    “I feel like hurrying,” Pa said. “I ' m like the muskrat, something tells me to get you and the girls inside thick walls. I've been feeling this way for some time, and now that Indian . . .”
    He stopped.
    “What Indian?” Ma asked him. She looked as if she were smelling the smell of an Indian whenever she said the word. Ma despised Indians. She was afraid of them, too.
    “There's some good Indians,” Pa always insisted.
    Now he added, “And they know some things that we don't. I'll tell you all about it at supper, Caroline.”
    The y could not talk while Pa pitched hay from the stack and Laura trampled it down in the rack. The hay rose higher under her fast-moving legs until the load was tall above the horses' backs.
    “I'll handle it by myself in town,” Pa said. “Town's no place for a girl to be doing a boy's work.”
    So Laura slid down from the high top of the load into what was left of the haystack, and Pa drove away.
    The Indian summer afternoon was warm and sweet-smelling and still. The low ripples of softly-colored land stretched far away and the sky was gentle over them. But under the softness and gentleness there was something waiting. Laura knew what Pa meant.
    '“Oh, that I had the wings of a bird!'” Laura thought of those words in the Bible. If she had had the wings of a bird, she, too, would have spread them and flown, fast, fast, and far away.
    She went soberly to the house to help Ma. None of them had wings; they were only moving to town for the winter. Ma and Mary did not mind, but Laura knew she would not like to live among so many people.

SETTLED IN TOWN
    Pa's store building was one of the best in town. It stood by itself on the east side of Main Street.
    Its false front was tall and square-cornered, with one upstairs window in it. Downstairs there were two windows with the front door between them.
    Pa did not stop the loaded wagon there. He turned the corner to Second Street, that was only a road, and drove in behind the store to its lean-to door. There was a good wooden stable with one haystack already beside it, and beyond them, on Second Street, Laura saw a house newly built of fresh boards. Pa's stable and store building had already weathered gray, like the other stores on Main Street.
    “Well, here we are!” said Pa. “It won't take us long to get settled in.”
    He untied Ellen, the cow, and her big calf from behind the wagon, and Laura led them to their stalls in the stable, while Pa unloaded the wagon. Then he drove it on to the stable and began to unhitch the horses.
    The lean-to's inside door opened under the stairs that went up from the back room. Thenarrow, back room would be the kitchen, of course, and it had a window, in its other end, looking out across the road that was Second Street and on across vacant lots to