It's Thursday.

Chapter six: MOVING IN

Pa was saying to Ma that the walls were up in the morning. He said that they had better go in and get along as best they could without the floor or other fixings, and he must build the stable as fast as he could so Pet and Patty could be inside walls, too, and the night before last he could hear wolves howling from every direction, which had seemed like, and close too. Ma said he had his gun so she would not worry. Pa said that there was Jack but he would feel easier in his mind when Ma and the girls had good solid walls around them. Ma asked why he supposed they hadn’t seen any Indians. Pa replied carelessly that he didn’t know and he had seen their camping-places among the bluffs and they were away on a hunting-trip at that time as he guessed. Then Ma called the girls to tell them that the sun was up. Laura and Mary scrambled out of bed and into their clothes. Ma asked them to eat their breakfast quickly, putting the last of the rabbit stew on their tin plates. She told the girls that they were moving into the house that day and all the chips must be out. So they ate quickly and hurried to carry all the chips out of the house. They ran back-and-forth as fast as they could, gathering their skirts full of chips and dumping them in the pile near the fire. But there were still chips on the ground inside the house when mom began to sweep it with her willow-bough broom. Ma limped, though her sprained ankle was beginning to get well. But she soon swept the earthen floor and then Mary and the Laura began to help her carry things into the house. Pa was on top of the walls, stretching the canvas wagon-top over the skeleton roof of saplings. The canvas billowed in the wind, Pa’s beard blew wildly and his hair stood up from his head as if it were trying to pull itself out.