It's Saturday.
They drank from the spring, and Laura and Mary ran around in the grass, picking wild flowers, while Ma tidied the foodbox and Pa hitched up Pet and Patty again. Then for a long time they went on, across the prairie. There was nothing to be seen but the blowing grass, the sky, and the endless wagon track. Now and then a rabbit bounded away. Sometimes a prairie hen with her brood of prairie chicks scuttled out of sight in the grass. Baby Carrie slept, and Mary and Laura were almost asleep when they heard Pa say that something was wrong there. Laura jumped up, and far ahead on the prairie she saw a small, light-colored bump. She couldn't see anything else unusual. She asked Pa where. Pa said there, nodding toward that bump. He told her that it wasn't moving. Laura didn't say any more. She kept on looking, and she saw that that bump was a covered wagon. Slowly it grew bigger. She saw that no horses were hitched to it. Nothing moved, anywhere around it. Then she saw something dark in front of it. The dark thing was two people sitting on the wagon tongue. They were a man and a woman. They sat looking down at their feet, and they moved only their heads to look up when Pet and Patty stopped in front of them. Pa asked what was wrong and where their horses were. The man said that he didn't know, and he had tied them to the wagon last night, and this morning they had been gone, and somebody had cut the ropes and taken them away in the night. Pa asked what about his dog. The man.said that he hadn't got a dog. Jack stayed under the wagon. He didn't growl but he didn't come out. He was a sensible dog, and knew what to do when he met strangers. Pa told the man that their horses were gone, and they would never see them again, and hanging was too good for horse-thieves. The man said yes. Pa looked at Ma, and Ma barely nodded. Then Pa asked them to come ride with us to Independence. The man said no and that all they had got was in this wagon, and they wouldn't leave it. Pa exclaimed why, and what they would do, and there might be nobody along here for days, weeks, and they couldn't stay here. The man said that he didn't know and the woman they would stay with their wagon. She was looking down at her hands clasped in her lap, and Laura couldn't see her face; she could see only the side of the sunbonnet. Pa told them that they jad better go, and they could come back for their wagon. The woman said no, and they wouldn't leave the wagon; everything they had owned in the world had been in it. So at last Pa drove on, leaving them sitting on the wagon tongue, all alone on the prairie.
