True Sisters by Sandra Dallas Read Free Book Online Page B

wife behind the crossbar. They did not have far to go, and Louisa was grateful Thales was there, because they would need his help in setting up the campfire. Despite the days on the trail, Louisa’s family did a poor job of it. Louisa was not such a good cook, and she could barely manage over an outdoor fire. Her mother and sister were no better.
    Pushing their way past the carts that had bogged down in the thick mud, which made every step an effort, Louisa and Thales came upon her two nephews, Dick and Jimmy, eleven and eight, the sons of Louisa’s widowed sister, Huldah Rowley. As they walked along, the two boys had played a game with sticks, pushing a rock back and forth to each other and laughing. They were young, still children, but old enough to help, and Thales let go of the crosspiece and grabbed the two by their shirt collars, propelling them along. “Where have you been? There will be no idle hands while I am in charge of this family. You are shirkers. You could stand a good hiding.”
    Dick, the older boy, stood in front of his brother, as if to protect him in case Thales made good on his threat. “It’s all right, Jimmy,” he whispered.
    Louisa thought to protest that the two were only boys, but Thales had made it clear from the beginning that she was not to question him. Besides, there would be hard work for them to do once they reached Utah. Thales had told her he was serving the boys well by insisting they do their chores now. He was a hard taskmaster, but he never asked a member of Louisa’s family or any other Saint to work harder than he did himself. She believed that it was Thales’s hard work, along with his faith and his practical bent, that had caused him to be chosen a leader of one of the hundreds.
    “We can park the Tanner cart over there,” Dick said, pointing to a vacant spot under a tree. By rights, it ought to have been called the Chetwin cart, for Louisa’s father, who was head of the family, but Hall Chetwin deferred to Thales now, and rightly so, Louisa knew. Hall had been so humiliated by the incident in New York that he had let Thales take charge. They all—the sister, the in-laws, the nephews, and Louisa most of all—considered Thales Tanner to be their leader.
    Thales ordered the boys to unload the cart, then walked off, saying he must see to his hundred. As soon as he was gone, Louisa shooed the boys away, telling them to go and play but to be careful that Brother Tanner should not see them.
    *   *   *
    Louisa and her family had arrived in America well ahead of other members of the Martin Company. They had embarked from Liverpool in December on the John Boyd with an earlier group of converts, landing in New York City in February. Thales, who had been called back to America the previous year, not to the valley but to Iowa to help with the handcarts, was to reunite with them in Iowa City for the last of the handcart treks to the valley that year.
    The trip across the ocean was a difficult one for Louisa, whose sister, Huldah, along with their mother, Margaret, spent most of their time tossing on the bunks while Louisa and her father ministered to them. Hall was not well himself, suffering from a congestion in his lungs. Only the two boys traveled well, and they taxed both sisters, who took turns leaving their sickbeds to look after them.
    Badly debilitated by the time they reached New York, the family decided to stay there until they recovered. Louisa wrote Thales to tell him they would travel overland to Iowa City in the summer, with the last of the handcart companies. She was disappointed, she wrote, for the two of them had been wed only a short time before Thales departed for America and she was anxious to join her husband. But without rest, her mother, Margaret, would never survive even the trip to Iowa, let alone the journey from Iowa to the valley.
    Once on land, Louisa’s family, all except her mother, regained their energy, and, abhorring idleness, as did all the