Mother stood listening and looking. It was dark under the trees, and she could not see anyone. But the dog growled savagely at the darkness.
Mother watched. She heard the clock strike midnight, and after a long time it struck one o’clock. The dog walked up and down by the picket fence, growling. At last he lay down, but he kept his head up and his ears pricked, listening. Mother went softly back to bed.
At dawn the dog was gone. They looked for him, but they could not find him anywhere. But his tracks were in the yard, and on the other side of the fence, in the woodlot, Father found the tracks of two men’s boots.
He hitched up at once, before breakfast, and tied the colts behind the buggy and drove to Malone. He put the $200 in the bank. He delivered the colts to the horse-buyer and got the other $200, and put that in the bank, too.
When he came back he told Mother:
“You were right. We came near being robbed last night.”
A farmer near Malone had sold a team the week before, and kept the money in his house. That night robbers broke into his house while he was asleep. They tied up his wife and children, and they beat him almost to death, to make him tell where the money was hidden. They took the money and got away. The sheriff was looking for them.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if that horse-buyer had a hand in it,” Father said. “Who else knew we had money in the house? But it couldn’t be proved. I made inquiry, and he was at the hotel in Malone last night.”
Mother said, she would always believe that Providence had sent the strange dog to watch over them. Almanzo thought perhaps he stayed because Alice fed him.
“Maybe he was sent to try us,” Mother said. “Maybe the Lord was merciful to us because we were merciful to him.”
They never saw the strange dog again. Perhaps he was a poor lost dog and the food that Alice gave him made him strong enough to find his way home again.
Chapter 14
Sheep-Shearing
Now the meadows and pastures were velvety with thick grass, and the weather was warm. It was time to shear sheep.
On a sunny morning Pierre and Louis went with Almanzo into the pasture and they drove the sheep down to the washing-pens. The long pen ran from the grassy pasture into the clear, deep water of Trout River. It had two gates opening into the pasture, and between the gates a short fence ran to the water’s edge.
Pierre and Louis kept the flock from running away, while Almanzo took hold of a woolly sheep and pushed it through one gate. In the pen Father and Lazy John caught hold of it. Then Almanzo pushed another one through, and Royal and French Joe caught it. The other sheep stared and bleated, and the two sheep struggled and kicked and yelled. But the men rubbed their wool full of brown soft-soap and dragged them into the deep water.
There the sheep had to swim. The men stood waist-deep in the swift water, and held on to the sheep and scrubbed them well. All the dirt came out of their wool and floated downstream with the soap suds.
When the other sheep saw this, every one of them cried, “Baa-aa-aa, baa-aa-aa!” and they all tried to run away. But Almanzo and Pierre and Louis ran yelling around the flock, and brought it back again to the gate.
As soon as a sheep was clean, the men made it swim around to the end of the dividing fence, and they boosted it up the bank into the outer side of the pen. The poor sheep came out bleating and dripping wet, but the sun soon dried it fluffy and white.
As fast as the men let go of one sheep, Almanzo pushed another into the pen, and they caught it and soaped it and dragged it into the river.
Washing sheep was fun for everybody but the sheep. The men splashed and shouted and laughed in the water, and the boys ran and shouted in the pasture. The sun was warm on their backs and the grass was cool under bare feet, and all their laughter was small in the wide, pleasant stillness of the green fields and meadows.
One sheep butted John; he sat down in the river and the water went over his head. Joe shouted:
“Now if you had soap in your wool, John, you’d be ready for shearing!”
When evening came, all the sheep were washed. Clean and fluffy-white, they scattered up the slope, nibbling the grass, and the pasture looked like a snowball bush in bloom.
Next morning John came before breakfast, and Father hurried Almanzo from the table. He took a wedge of apple pie and went out to the pasture, smelling the clover and eating the spicy apples and flaky crust in big mouthfuls. He licked his fingers, and then he rounded up the sheep and drove them across the dewy grass, into the sheepfold in the South Barn.
Father had cleaned the sheepfold and built a platform across one end of it. He and Lazy John each caught a sheep, set it up on the platform, and began cutting off its wool with long shears. The thick white mat of wool peeled back, all in one piece, and the sheep was left in bare pink skin. With the last snick of the shears the whole fleece fell on the platform, and the naked sheep jumped off it, yelling, “Baa-aa-aa!” All the other sheep yelled back at the sight, but already Father and John were shearing two more.
Royal rolled the fleece tightly and tied it with twine, and Almanzo carried it upstairs and laid it on the loft floor. He ran upstairs and down again as fast as he could, but another fleece was always ready for him.
Father and Lazy John were good sheep-shearers. Their long shears snipped through the thick wool like lightning; they cut close to the sheep, but never cut its pink skin. This was a hard thing to do, because Father’s sheep were prize Merinos. Merinos have the finest wool, but their skin lies in deep wrinkles, and it is hard to get all the wool without cutting them.
Almanzo was working fast, running upstairs with the fleeces. They were so heavy that he could carry only one at a time. He didn’t mean to idle, but when he saw the tabby barn-cat hurrying past with a mouse, he knew she was taking it to her new kittens.
He ran after her, and far up under the eaves of the Big Barn he found the little nest in the hay, with four kittens in it. The tabby cat curled herself around them, loudly purring, and the black slits in her eyes widened and narrowed and widened again. The kittens’ tiny pink mouths uttered tiny meows, their naked little paws had wee white claws, and their eyes were shut.