It's Friday.
Ma said that they must get dinner now and Pa would be here soon and they must have dinner ready for him. She asked Mary to bring her some wood and asked Laura to set the table. Ma rolled up her sleeves and washed her hands and mixed cornbread, while Mary brought the wood and Laura set the table. She set a tin plate and knife and fork and cup for Pa, and the same for Ma, with Carrie’s little tin cup beside Ma’s. And she set tin plates and knives and forks for her and Mary, but only their one cup between the plates. Ma made the cornmeal and water into two thin loaves, each shaped in a half circle. She laid the loaves with their straight sides together in the bake oven, and she pressed her hand flat on top of each loaf. Pa always said he did not ask any other sweetening, when Ma put the prints of her hands on the loaves. Laura had hardly set the table when Pa was there. He left a big rabbit and two prairie hens outside the door, and stepped in and laid his gun on its pegs. Laura and Mary ran and clutched him, both talking at once. He asked them what all this was, rumpling their hair. He asked them if they had seen Indians at last and he had noticed they had had a camp in a little valley west of here. He asked Ma if the Indians had come to the house. Ma answered that two of them had come and taken all his tobacco and eaten a lot of cornbread, and they had pointed to the cornmeal and made signs for her to cook some, and she had been afraid not to. Pa told her that she had done the right thing and they didn’t want to make enemies of any Indians. Then he said what a smell. Ma told him that they had worn fresh skunk skins and that had been all they had worn. Pa said that must had been thick while they had been here. Ma said that it had been and they had been short of cornmeal, too.
