Then one day Pa said, “Laura and Mary, can you keep a secret?”
“Oh yes, Pa!” they said.
“Promise you won’t tell Ma?” he asked, and they promised.
He opened the lean-to door. And there stood a shiny-black cookstove. Pa had brought it from town and hidden it there, to surprise Ma.
On top, that cookstove had four round holes and four round lids fitted them. Each lid had a grooved hole in it, and there was an iron handle that fitted into the holes, to lift the lid by. In front, there was a long, low door. There were slits in this door, and a piece of iron would slide back and forth, to close these slits or open them. That was the draught. Under it, a shelf like an oblong pan stuck out. That was to catch ashes and keep them from dropping on the floor. A lid swung flat over this hollowed-out shelf. And on the lid were raised iron letters in rows.
Mary put her finger on the bottom row and spelled, out, “P A T. One seven seven ought.” She asked Pa, “What’s that spell, Pa?”
“It spells Pat,” Pa said.
Laura opened a big door on the side of the stove, and looked into a big square place with a shelf across it. “Oh Pa, what’s this for?” she asked him.
“It’s the oven,” Pa told her.
He lifted that marvelous stove and set it in the living-room, and put up the stovepipe. Piece by piece, the stovepipe went up through the ceiling and the attic and through a hole he sawed in the roof. Then Pa climbed onto the roof and he set a larger tin pipe over the stovepipe. The tin pipe had a spread-out, flat bottom that covered the hole in the roof. Not a drop of rain could run down the stovepipe into the new house.
That was a prairie chimney.
“Well, it’s done,” Pa said. “Even to a prairie chimney.”
There was nothing more that a house could possibly have. The glass windows made the inside of that house so light that you would hardly know you were in a house. It smelled clean and piny, from the yellow-new board walls and floor. The cookstove stood lordly in the corner by the lean-to door. A touch on the white-china door knob swung the boughten door on its boughten hinges, and the door knob’s little iron tongue clicked and held the door shut.
“We’ll move in, tomorrow morning,” Pa said. “This is the last night we’ll sleep in a dugout.”
Laura and Mary took his hands and they went down the knoll. The wheat-field was a silky, shimmery green rippling over a curve of the prairie. Its sides were straight and its corners square, and all around it the wild prairie grasses looked coarser and darker green. Laura looked back at the wonderful house. In the sunshine on the knoll, its sawed-lumber walls and roof were as golden as a straw-stack.
Chapter 17
Moving In
In the sunny morning Ma and Laura helped carry everything from the dugout up to the top of the bank and load it in the wagon. Laura hardly dared look at Pa; they were bursting with the secret surprise for Ma.
Ma did not suspect anything. She took the hot ashes out of the little old stove so that Pa could handle it. She asked Pa, “Did you remember to get more stovepipe?”
“Yes, Caroline,” Pa said. Laura did not laugh, but she choked.
“Goodness, Laura,” Ma said, “have you got a frog in your throat?”
D
avid and Sam hauled the wagon away, across the ford and back over the prairie, up to the new house. Ma and Mary and Laura, with armfuls of things, and Carrie toddling ahead, went over the footbridge and up the grassy path. The sawed-lumber house with its boughten-shingle roof was all golden on the knoll, and Pa jumped off the wagon and waited to be with Ma when she saw the cookstove.
She walked into the house and stopped short. Her mouth opened and shut. Then she said, weakly, “My land!”
Laura and Mary whooped and danced, and so did Carrie, though she did not know why.
“It’s yours, Ma! It’s your new cookstove!” they shouted. “It’s got an oven! And four lids, and a little handle!” Mary said. “It’s got letters on it and I can read them! PAT, Pat!”
“Oh, Charles, you shouldn’t!” Ma said.
Pa hugged her. “Don’t you worry, Caroline!” he told her.
“I never have worried, Charles,” Ma answered. “But building such a house, and glass windows, and buying a stove—it’s too much.”
“Nothing’s too much for you,” said Pa. “And don’t worry about the expense. Just look through that glass at that wheat-field!”