“Lie down, Laura, and go to sleep,” Ma said, gently.
“What’s that howling?” Laura asked.
“The wind is howling,” said Ma. “Now mind me, Laura.”
Laura lay down, but her eyes would not shut. She knew that Pa was out in the dark, where that terrible howling was. The wild men were in the bluffs along the creek bottoms, and Pa would have to cross the creek bottoms in the dark. Jack growled.
Then Ma began to sway gently in the comfortable rocking-chair. Fire-light ran up and down, up and down the barrel of Pa’s pistol in her lap. And Ma sang, softly and sweetly:
“There is a happy land,
Far, far away,
Where saints in glory stand,
Bright, bright as day.
“Oh, to hear the angels sing,
Glory to the Lord, our King—”
Laura didn’t know that she had gone to sleep. She thought the shining angels began to sing with Ma, and she lay listening to their heavenly singing until suddenly her eyes opened and she saw Pa standing by the fire.
She jumped out of bed, shouting, “Oh Pa! Pa!”
Pa’s boots were caked with frozen mud, his nose was red with cold, his hair wildly stood up on his head. He was so cold that coldness came through Laura’s nightgown when she reached him.
“Wait!” he said. He wrapped Laura in Ma’s big shawl, and then he hugged her. Everything was all right. The house was cozy with firelight, there was the warm, brown smell of coffee, Ma was smiling, and Pa was there. The shawl was so large that Mary wrapped the other end of it around her. Pa pulled off his stiff boots and warmed his stiff, cold hands. Then he sat on the bench and he took Mary on one knee and Laura on the other and he hugged them against him, all snuggled in the shawl. Their bare toes toasted in the heat from the fire.
“Ah!” Pa sighed. “I thought I never would get here.”
Ma rummaged among the stores he had brought, and spooned brown sugar into a tin cup. Pa had brought sugar from Independence. “Your coffee will be ready in a minute, Charles,” she said.
“It rained between here and Independence, going,” Pa told them. “And coming back, the mud froze between the spokes till the wheels were nearly solid. I had to get out and knock it loose, so the horses could pull the wagon. And seemed like we’d no more than started, when I had to get out and do it again. It was all I could do to keep Pet and Patty coming against that wind. They’re so worn out they can hardly stagger. I never saw such a wind; it cuts like a knife.”
The wind had begun while he was in town. People there told him he had better wait until it blew itself out, but he wanted to get home.
“It beats me,” he said, “why they call a south wind a norther, and how a wind from the south can be so tarnation cold. I never saw anything like it. Down here in this country, the north end of a south wind is the coldest wind I ever heard of.”
He drank his coffee and wiped his mustache with his handkerchief, and said: “Ah! That hits the spot, Caroline! Now I’m beginning to thaw out.”
Then his eyes twinkled at Ma and he told her to open the square package on the table. “Be careful,” he said. “Don’t drop it.”
Ma stopped unwrapping it and said: “Oh, Charles! You didn’t!”
“Open it,” Pa said.
In that square package there were eight small squares of window-glass. They would have glass windows in their house.
Not one of the squares was broken. Pa had brought them safely all the way home. Ma shook her head and said he shouldn’t have spent so much, but her whole face was smiling and Pa laughed with joy. They were all so pleased. All winter long they could look out of the windows as much as they liked, and the sunshine could come in.
Pa said he thought that Ma and Mary and Laura would like glass windows better than any other present, and he was right. They did. But the windows were not all he had brought them. There was a little paper sack full of pure white sugar. Ma opened it and Mary and Laura looked at the sparkling whiteness of that beautiful sugar, and they each had a taste of it from a spoon. Then Ma tied it carefully up. They would have white sugar when company came.
Best of all, Pa was safely home again.
Laura and Mary went back to sleep, very comfortable all over. Everything was all right when Pa was there. And now he had nails, and cornmeal, and fat pork, and salt, and everything. He would not have to go to town again for a long time.
Chapter 18