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

the side of a little vacant store. Farther over the prairie to the northeast, Laura could see the two-story depot.
    Ma stood in the bare front room, looking at it and thinking where to put all their things.
    In the big, empty room stood a coal heater and a shiny boughten desk and boughten chair.
    “Why, where did that desk and chair come from?”
    Laura exclaimed.
    “They're Pa's,” said Ma. “Judge Carroll's new part-ner has a desk so Judge Carroll let Pa have his old desk and chair and the coal heater for part of the rent.”
    The desk had drawers and a top with pigeonholes under a marvelous flexible cover made of narrow slats of wood that could be pulled, curving down, or pushed up again. When it was pushed up it disappeared.
    “We'll put the rocking chairs by the other window,”
    Ma went on. " Then Mary'll have the sunshine all afternoon and I can see to read to us until sundown.
    We'll do that first thing, Mary, so you can settle down and keep Grace out of our way."
    Ma and Laura set the rocking chairs by the window.
    Then they edged the table through the doorways and put it between the coal heater and the door to the kitchen. “That will be the warm place to eat,” said Ma.
    “Can we put up the curtains now?” Laura asked.
    The two windows were like strange eyes looking in.
    Strangers went by in the street, and across the street stood the staring store buildings. Fuller's Hardware was there, with the drugstore beside it, and Power's Tailor Shop, and Loftus' Groceries, Dry Goods and General Merchandise.
    “Yes, the sooner the better,” said Ma. She un-packed the muslin curtains and she and Laura put them up. A wagon went by while they did it and suddenly five or six boys came down Second Street and after a moment as many girls.
    “School's out for the day,” said Ma. “You and Carrie'll be going to school tomorrow.” Her voice was glad.
    Laura did not say anything. No one knew how she dreaded meeting strangers. No one knew of the fluttering in her breast and the gone feeling in her stomach when she had to meet them. She didn't like town; she didn't want to go to school.
    It was so unfair that she had to go! Mary wanted to be a schoolteacher, but she couldn't be because she was blind, Laura didn't want to teach, but she must do it to please Ma. Probably all her life she must go among strange people and teach strange children; she would always be scared and she must never show it.
    No! Pa had said she must never be afraid and she would not be. She would be brave if it killed her. But even if she could get over being afraid, she could not like strange people. She knew how animals would act, she understood what animals thought, but you could never be sure about people.
    Anyway, the curtains at the windows kept strangers from looking in. Carrie had set the plain chairs around the table. The floor was bright, clean pine boards, and the large room looked very pleasant when Laura and Ma had laid a braided-rag rug before each door.
    Pa was setting up the cookstove in the kitchen.
    When he had put the stovepipe together, straight and solid, he brought in the dry-goods-box cupboard and set it against the wall on the other side of the doorway.
    “There!” he said. “The stove and the cupboard'll both be handy to the table in the other room.”
    “Yes, Charles, that's well thought out,” Ma praised him. “Now, when we get the beds upstairs, we'll soon be through.”
    Pa handed up the pieces of the bedsteads while Ma and Laura drew them through the trap-door at the top of the stairs. He crowded the fat featherbeds through, and the blankets, quilts, and pillows, and then he and Carrie went to fill the strawticks from the haystack.
    They must fill the strawticks with hay, because there was no straw in this new country where no grain had yet been raised.
    Under the attic roof, a building-paper partition made two rooms. One had a window to the west and one to the east. From the eastern window at the top of the stairs,