The Long Winter (17 page)

“Well, Lady, so you can outrun an antelope! Made a fool of yourself, didn't you?” Almanzo talked to her while he worked. “It's the last time I'll let a fool ride you, anyway. Now you rest warm and quiet. I'll water and feed you after a while.”

Pa had come quietly into the kitchen and without a word he laid his shotgun on its hooks. No one said anything; there was no need to. Carrie sighed. There would be no venison, no gravy on the brown bread. Pa sat down by the stove and spread his hands to the warmth.

After a little, he said, “Foster lost his head from excitement. He jumped off his horse and fired before he was anywhere near within gunshot. None of the rest of us had a chance. The whole herd's high-tailed it north.”

Ma put a stick of hay in the stove. " The y would have been poor eating anyway, this time of year," she said.

Laura knew that antelope had to paw away the deep snow to reach the dry grass that was their food.

In a blizzard they couldn't do that, and now the snow was so deep that they must be starving. It was true that their meat would have been thin and tough. But it would have been meat. The y were all so tired of nothing but potatoes and brown bread.

“The younger Wilder boy's horse got away, too,” Pa said, and he told them how it had run with the antelope. He made a story for Carrie and Grace of the beautiful horse running free and far with the wild herd.

“And didn't it ever, ever come back, Pa?” Grace asked him, wide-eyed.

“I don't know,” said Pa. “Almanzo Wilder rode off that way and I don't know whether he's come back or not. While you're getting dinner ready, Caroline, I'll step up to the feed store and find out.”

The feed store was bare and empty, but Royal looked from the back room and said heartily, “Come on in, Mr. Ingalls! You're just in time to sample the pancakes and bacon!”

“I didn't know this was your dinnertime,” Pa said.

He looked at the platter of bacon keeping hot on the stove hearth. Three stacks of pancakes were tall on a plate, too, and Royal was frying more. There was molasses on the table and the coffeepot was boiling.

“We eat when we get hungry,” said Royal. “That's the advantage of baching it. Where there's no women-folks, there's no regular mealtimes.”

“You boys are lucky to have brought in supplies,”

Pa said.

“Well, I was bringing out a carload of feed anyway and thought I might as well bring the stuff along,”

Royal replied. “I wish I'd brought a couple of carloads, now. I guess I could sell another carload before they get the train through.”

“I guess you could,” Pa agreed. He looked around the snug room, ran his eyes along the walls hung with clothes and harness, and noticed the empty spaces on the end wall. “Your brother not got back yet?”

“He just came into the stable,” Royal answered.

Then he exclaimed, “Jiminy crickets, look there!”

The y saw Lady, dripping with lather and empty-saddled, streaking past the window to the stable.

While they were talking about the hunt and Mr.

Foster's crazy shot, Almanzo came in. He dumped the saddles in a corner to be cleaned before he hung them up and he warmed himself by the stove. Then he and Royal urged Pa to sit up to the table and eat with them.

“Royal don't make as good pancakes as I do,” Almanzo said. "But nobody can beat this bacon. It's home-cured and hickory-smoked from corn-fattened young hogs raised on clover, back on the farm in Minnesota."

"Sit right up, Mr. Ingalls, and help yourself.

There's plenty more down cellar in a teacup!" said Royal. So Pa did.

T he sun shone again next morning and the winds were still. The day seemed warmer than it was, because the sunshine was so bright.

“This is a beautiful day,” Ma said at breakfast, but Pa shook his head.

“The sun is too bright,” he said. “I'll get a load of hay as soon as I can for we'll need plenty on hand if another storm comes.” And he hurried away.

Anxiously from time to time Ma or Laura or Carrie peeped out through the frosty window to see the northwestern sky. The sun still was shining when Pa came safely back, and after the day's second meal of brown bread and potatoes he went across the street to hear the news.

In a little while he came gaily whistling through the front room and burst into the kitchen, singing out, “Guess what I got!”

Grace and Carrie ran to feel the package he carried.

“It feels like...it feels like . . .” Carrie said, but she did not quite dare to say what it felt like for fear she was mistaken.

“It's beef!” Pa said. “Four pounds of beef! To go with our bread and potatoes.” He handed the package to Ma.

“Charles! However did you get beef?” Ma asked, as if she could not believe it.

“Foster butchered his oxen,” Pa answered. “I got there just in time. Every last bit, to bones and gristle, sold twenty-five cents a pound. But I got four pounds and here it is! Now we'll live like kings!”

Ma quickly took the paper off the meat. “I'll sear it all over well and pot-roast it,” she said.

Looking at it made Laura's mouth water. She swallowed and asked, “Can you make a gravy, Ma, with water and brown flour?”

“Indeed I can,” Ma smiled. “We can make this last a week, for flavoring at least, and by that time the train will surely come, won't it?”

She looked smiling at Pa. Then she stopped smiling and quietly asked, “What is it, Charles?”

“Well,” Pa answered reluctantly, “I hate to tell you.” He cleared his throat. “The train isn't coming.”

They all stood looking at him. He went on, “The railroad has stopped running trains, till spring.”

Ma threw up her hands and dropped into a chair.

“How can it, Charles? It can't. It can't do that. Till spring? This is only the first of January.”

“The y can't get the trains through,” said Pa. "They no sooner get a train through a cut than a blizzard comes and snows it in again. They've got two trains between here and Tracy, snowed under between cuts.

Every time they cleared a cut they threw up the snow on both sides, and now all the cuts are packed full of snow to the top of the snowbanks. And at Tracy the superintendent ran out of patience."

“Patience?” Ma exclaimed. “Patience! What's his patience got to do with it I'd like to know! He knows we are out here without supplies. How does he think we are going to live till spring? It isn't his business to be patient. It's his business to run the trains.”

“Now, Caroline,” Pa said. He put his hand on her shoulder and she stopped rocking and rolling her hands in her apron. “We haven't had a train for more than a month, and we are getting along all right,” he told her.

“Yes,” Ma said.

“There's only this month, then February is a short month, and March will be spring,” Pa encouraged her.

Laura looked at the four pounds of beef. She thought of the few potatoes left and she saw the partly filled sack of wheat standing in the corner.

“Is there any more wheat, Pa?” she asked in a low voice.

“I don't know, Laura,” Pa said strangely. “But don't worry. I bought a full bushel and it's by no means gone.”

Laura could not help asking, “Pa, you couldn't shoot a rabbit?”

Pa sat down before the open oven and settled Grace on his knee. “Come here, Half-Pint,” he said, “and you, too, Carrie. I'm going to tell you a story.”

He did not answer Laura's question. She knew what the answer was. There was not a rabbit left in all that country. The y must have gone south when the birds went. Pa never took his gun with him when he was hauling hay, and he would have taken it if he had ever seen so much as one rabbit's track.

He put his arm around her as she stood close against Carrie on his knee. Grace cuddled in his other arm and laughed when his brown beard tickled her face as it used to tickle Laura's when she was little. The y were all cosy in Pa's arms, with the warmth from the oven coming out pleasantly.

“Now listen, Grace and Carrie and Laura,” said Pa.

“And you, too, Mary and Ma. This is a funny story.”

And he told them the story of the superintendent.

The superintendent was an eastern man. He sat in his offices in the east and ordered the train dispatch-ers to keep the trains running. But the engineers reported that storms and snow stopped the trains.

“Snowstorms don't stop us from running trains in the east,” the superintendent said. “Keep the trains running in the western end of the division. That's orders.”

But in the west the trains kept stopping. He had reports that the cuts were full of snow.

“Clear the cuts,” he ordered. "Put on extra men.

Keep the trains running. Hang the costs!"

The y put on extra men. The costs were enormous.

But still the trains did not run.

Then the superintendent said, “I'll go out there and clear those tracks myself. What those men need is someone to show them how we do things in the east.”

So he came out to Tracy, in his special car, and he got off there in his city clothes and his gloves and his fur-lined coat and this is what he said. “I've come out to take charge myself,” he said. “I'll show you how to keep these trains running.”

In spite of that, he was not a bad fellow when you knew him. He rode out in the work train to the big cut west of Tracy, and he piled out in the snow with the work crew and gave his orders like any good foreman.

He moved that snow up out of the cut in double-quick time and in a couple of days the track was clear.

“That shows you how to do it,” he said. “Now run the train through tomorrow and keep it running.” But that night a blizzard hit Tracy. His special train couldn't run in that blizzard, and when it stopped blowing the cut was packed full of snow to the top of the snowbanks he'd had thrown up on both sides.

He got right out there with the men again, and again they cleared the cut. It took longer that time because they had to move more snow. But he got the work train through, just in time to be snowed under by the next blizzard.

You had to admit that the superintendent had stick-to-itiveness. He tackled the cut again and got it cleared again, and then he sat in Tracy through another blizzard. This time he ordered out two fresh work crews and two locomotives with a snowplow.

He rode out to the Tracy cut on the first locomotive.

The cut rose up like a hill now. Between the snowbanks that he'd had thrown up on both sides of them, the blizzard had packed earth and snow, frozen solid, one hundred feet deep and tapering off for a quarter of a mile.

“All right, boys!” he said. “We'll clear her out with picks and shovels till we can run the snowplows through.”

He kept them at it, double-quick and double pay, for two days. There was still about twelve feet of snow on the tracks, but he had learned something. He knew he would be lucky to get three clear days between blizzards. So on the third morning, he was going to run the snowplows through.

He gave his orders to the two locomotive engineers.

The y coupled the locomotives together with the snowplow in front and ran the work train out to the cut. The two work crews piled out and in a couple of hours of fast work they had moved another couple of feet of snow. Then the superintendent stopped the work.

“Now,” he ordered the engineers, “you boys back down the track a full two miles, and come ahead from there with all the steam-pressure you've got. With two miles to get up speed you ought to hit this cut at forty miles an hour and go through her clean as a whistle.”

The engineers climbed into their locomotives.

Then the man on the front engine got down again.

The men of the work crews were standing around in the snow, stamping their feet and beating their hands to keep warm. The y crowded in to hear what the engineer was going to say, but he walked up to the superintendent and said it just the same.

“I quit,” he said. “I've been driving a locomotive for fifteen years and no man can call me a coward. But I'm not taking any orders to commit suicide. You want to send a locomotive up against ten foot of frozen snow at forty miles an hour, Mr. Superintendent; you can get some other man to drive it. I quit, right here and now.”

Pa paused, and Carrie said, “I don't blame him.”

“I do,” said Laura. “He oughtn't to quit. He ought to figure out some other way to get through, if he thinks that way won't work. I think he was scared.”

“Even if he was scared,” Mary said, “he ought to do as he was told. The superintendent must know best what to do or how would he be the superintendent?”

“He doesn't know best,” Laura contradicted. “Or he'd be keeping the train running.”

“Go on, Pa, go on!” Grace begged.

“'Please,' Grace,” Ma said.

“Please,” said Grace. “Go on, Pa! What happened next?”

“Yes, Pa, what did the superintendent do then?”

Mary asked.

“He fired him,” said Laura. “Didn't he, Pa?”

Pa went on.

" The superintendent looked at that engineer, and he looked at the men standing around listening, and he said, 'I've driven a locomotive in my time. And I don't order any man to do anything I won't do myself.

I'll take that throttle.'

"He climbed up into the locomotive, and he set her in reverse, and the two locomotives backed off down the track.

" The superintendent kept them backing for a good long two miles, till they looked smaller than your thumb, far off down the track. Then he signaled with the whistle to the engineer behind and they both put on the steam-power.

“Those locomotives came charging down that two miles of straight track with wide-open throttles, full speed ahead and coming faster every second. Black plumes of coal smoke rolling away far behind them, headlights glaring bigger in the sunshine, wheels blur-ring faster, faster, roaring up to fifty miles an hour they hit that frozen snow.”

“What . . . what happened...then, Pa?” Carrie asked, breathless.

" Then up rose a fountain of flying snow that fell in chunks for forty yards around. For a minute or two no one saw anything clear, nobody knew what had happened. But when the men came running to find out, there was the second locomotive buried halfway in the snow and the engineer crawling out of its hind end.