It's Thursday.

The cowboys held the cow with their ropes while Pa tied her to the stable. Then they said goodbye to him and rode away. Ma could not believe that Pa had actually brought home a cow. But it really was their own cow. Pa said that the calf was too small to travel and the cow would be too thin to sell, so the cowboys had given them to Pa. They had given him the beef, too; a big chunk was tied to his saddle horn. Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and even Baby Carrie laughed for joy. Pa always laughed out loud and his laugh was like great bells ringing. When Ma was pleased she smiled a gentle smile that made Laura feel warm all over. But now she was laughing because they had a cow. Pa asked Ma to give him a bucket. He was going to milk the cow, right away. He took the bucket, he pushed back his hat, and he squatted by the cow to milk her. And that cow hunched herself and kicked Pa flat on his back. Pa jumped up. His face was blazing red and his eyes snapped blue sparks. He said that he would milk her by the Great Horn Spoon. He got his ax and he sharpened two stout slabs of oak. He pushed the cow against the stable, and he drove those slabs deep into the ground beside her. The cow bawled and little calf squalled. Pa tied poles firmly to the posts and stuck their ends into the cracks of the stable, to make a fence. Now the cow could not move forward or backward or sidewise. But the little calf could nudge its way between its mother and the stable. So the baby calf felt safe and stopped bawling. It stood on that side of the cow and drank its supper, and Pa put his hand through the fence and milked from the other side. He got a tin cup almost full of milk. He said that he would try again in the morning and the poor thing was as wild as a deer, but he would gentle her.