They walked steadily over the house. They walked over the stable. They walked over Spot until Pa shut her in the stable. They walked into Plum Creek and drowned, and those behind kept on walking in and drowning until dead grasshoppers choked the creek and filled the water and live grasshoppers walked across on them.
All day the sun beat hot on the house. All day it was full of the crawling sound that went up the wall and over the roof and down. All day grasshoppers’ heads with bulging eyes, and grasshoppers’ legs clutching, were thick along the bottom edge of the shut windows; all day they tried to walk up the sleek glass and fell back, while thousands more pushed up and tried and fell.
Ma was pale and tight. Pa did not talk and his eyes could not twinkle. Laura could not shake the crawling sound out of her ears nor brush it off her skin.
The fourth day came and the grasshoppers went on walking. The sun shone hotter than ever, with a terribly bright light.
It was nearly noon when Pa came from the stable shouting: “Caroline! Caroline! Look outdoors! The grasshoppers are flying!”
Laura and Mary ran to the door. Everywhere grasshoppers were spreading their wings and rising from the ground. More and more of them filled the air, flying higher and higher, till the sunshine dimmed and darkened and went out as it had done when the grasshoppers came.
Laura ran outdoors. She looked straight up at the sun through a cloud that seemed almost like snowflakes. It was a dark cloud, gleaming, glittering, shimmering bright and whiter as she looked high and farther into it. And it was rising instead of falling.
The cloud passed over the sun and went on far to the west until it could be seen no longer.
There was not a grasshopper left in the air or on the ground, except here and there a crippled one that could not fly but still hobbled westward.
The stillness was like the stillness after a storm.
Ma went into the house and threw herself down in the rocking-chair. “My Lord!” she said. “My Lord!” The words were praying, but they sounded like, “Thank you!”
Laura and Mary sat on the doorstep. They could sit on the doorstep now; there were no grasshoppers.
“How still it is!” Mary said.
Pa leaned in the doorway and said, earnestly, “I would like some one to tell me how they all knew at once that it was time to go, and how they knew which way was west and their ancestral home.”
But no one could tell him.
Chapter 33
Wheels of Fire
All the days were peaceful after that July day when the grasshoppers flew away. Rain fell and grass grew again over all the land that they had eaten bare and left brown and ugly. Ragweeds grew faster, and careless weeds, and the big, spreading tumbleweeds like bushes.
Willows and cottonwoods and plum thickets put out leaves again. There would be no fruit, for blossom-time was past. There would be no wheat. But wild hay was growing coarse in low places by the creek. Potatoes lived, and there were fish in the fish-trap.
Pa hitched Sam and David to Mr. Nelson’s plow, and plowed part of the weedy wheat field. He plowed a wide fire-break west of the house, from the creek to the creek again. On the field he sowed turnip seeds.
“It’s late,” he said. “The old folks say to sow turnips the twenty-fifth of July, wet or dry. But I guess the old folks didn’t figure on grasshoppers. And likely there will be as many turnips as you and the girls can handle, Caroline. I won’t be here to do it.”
He must go away to the east again, to work where there were harvests, for the house was not yet paid for and he must buy salt and cornmeal and sugar. He could not stay to cut the hay that Sam and David and Spot must have to eat next winter. But Mr. Nelson agreed to cut and stack Pa’s wild hay for a share of it.
Then one early morning Pa went walking away. He went whistling out of sight, with his jumper-roll on his shoulder. But there was not one hole in his boots. He would not mind the walk, and some day he would come walking back again.
In the mornings after the chores and the housework were done, Laura and Mary studied their books. In the afternoons Ma heard their lessons. Then they might play or sew their seams, till time to meet the herd and bring Spot and her calf home. Then came chores again and supper and the supper dishes and bedtime.
After Mr. Nelson stacked Pa’s hay by the stable, the days were warm on the sunny side of the stacks, but their shady sides were cool. The wind blew chill and the mornings were frosty.
One morning when Laura drove Spot and her calf to meet the herd, Johnny was having trouble with the cattle. He was trying to drive them out on the prairie to the west, where the frostbitten, brown grass was tall. The cattle did not want to go. They kept turning and dodging back.
Laura and Jack helped him drive them. The sun was coming up then and the sky was clear. But before Laura got back to the house, she saw a low cloud in the west. She wrinkled her nose and sniffed long and deep, and she remembered Indian Territory.
“Ma!” she called. Ma came outdoors and looked at the cloud.
“It’s far away, Laura,” Ma said. “Likely it won’t come so far.”
All morning the wind blew out of the west. At noon it was blowing more strongly, and Ma and Mary and Laura stood in the dooryard and watched the dark cloud coming nearer.