“Oh no! I couldn’t!” Laura said. “But I’m going to get even with her. Sh! Don’t let Mary know I said that.”
Jack was waiting lonesome at the ford. It was Saturday, and Laura had not played with him. It would be a whole week before they would have another day of playing along Plum Creek.
They told Ma all about the party, and she said, “We must not accept hospitality without making some return. I’ve been thinking about it, girls, and you must ask Nellie Oleson and the others to a party here. I think a week from Saturday.”
Chapter 23
Country Party
Will you come to my party?” Laura asked Christy and Maud and Nellie Oleson. Mary asked the big girls. They all said they would come.
That Saturday morning the new house was specially pretty. Jack could not come in on the scrubbed floors. The windows were shining and the pink-edged curtains were freshly crisp and white. Laura and Mary made new starry papers for the shelves, and Ma made vanity cakes.
She made them with beaten eggs and white flour. She dropped them into a kettl
e of sizzling fat. Each one came up bobbing, and floated till it turned itself over, lifting up its honey-brown, puffy bottom. Then it swelled underneath till it was round, and Ma lifted it out with a fork.
She put every one of those cakes in the cupboard. They were for the party.
Laura and Mary and Ma and Carrie were dressed up and waiting when the guests came walking out from town. Laura had even brushed Jack though he was always clean and handsome in his white and brown-spotted short fur.
He ran down with Laura to the ford. The girls came laughing and splashing through the sunny water, all except Nellie. She had to take off her shoes and stockings and she complained that the gravel hurt her feet. She said: “I don’t go bare-footed. I have shoes and stockings.”
She was wearing a new dress and big, new hair-ribbon bows.
“Is that Jack?” Christy asked, and they all patted him and said what a good dog he was. But when he politely wagged to Nellie, she said: “Go away! Don’t you touch my dress!”
“Jack wouldn’t touch your dress,” Laura said.
They went up the path between the blowing grasses and wild flowers, to the house where Ma was waiting. Mary told her the girls’ names one by one, and she smiled her lovely smile and spoke to them. But Nellie smoothed down her new pretty dress and said to Ma:
“Of course I didn’t wear my best dress to just a country party.”
Then Laura didn’t care what Ma had taught her; she didn’t care if Pa punished her. She was going to get even with Nellie for that. Nellie couldn’t speak that way to Ma.
Ma only smiled and said: “It’s a very pretty dress, Nellie. We’re glad you could come.” But Laura was not going to forgive Nellie.
The girls liked the pretty house. It was so clean and airy, with sweet-smelling breezes blowing through it and the grassy prairies all around. They climbed the ladder and looked at Laura’s and Mary’s very own attic; none of them had anything like that. But Nellie asked, “Where are your dolls?”
Laura was not going to show her darling rag Charlotte to Nellie Oleson. She said: “I don’t play with dolls. I play in the creek.”
Then they went outdoors with Jack. Laura showed them the little chicks by the haystacks, and they looked at the green garden rows and the thick-growing wheat-field. They ran down the knoll to the low bank of Plum Creek. There was the willow and footbridge, and the water coming out of the plum thicket’s shade, running wide and shallow over sparkling pebbles and gurgling under the bridge to the knee-deep pool.
Mary and the big girls came down slowly, bringing Carrie to play with. But Laura and Christy and Maud and Nellie held their skirts up above their knees and went wading into the cool, flowing water. Away through the shallows the minnows went swimming in crowds away from the shouts and splashing.
The big girls took Carrie wading where the water sparkled thin in the sunshine, and gathered pretty pebbles along the creek’s edge. The little girls played tag across the footbridge. They ran on the warm grass, and played in the water again. And while they were playing, Laura suddenly thought of what she could do to Nellie.
She led the girls wading near the old crab’s home. The noise and splashing had driven him under his rock. She saw his angry claws and browny-green head peeping out, and she crowded Nellie near him. Then she kicked a big splash of water onto his rock and she screamed:
“Oo, Nellie! Nellie, look out!”
The old crab rushed at Nellie’s toes, snapping his claws to nip them.
“Run! Run!” Laura screamed, pushing Christy and Maud back toward the bridge, and then she ran after Nellie. Nellie ran screaming straight into the muddy water under the plum thicket. Laura stopped on the gravel and looked back at the crab’s rock.
“Wait, Nellie,” she said. “You stay there.”
“Oh, what was it? What was it? Is he coming?” Nellie asked. She had dropped her dress, and her skirt and petticoats were in the muddy water.