Little House On The Prairie Read Online Free PDF Page B

log was sliding. Pa was trying to hold up his end of it, to keep it from falling on Ma. He couldn't. It crashed down. Ma huddled on the ground.
    She got to Ma almost as quickly as Pa did. Pa knelt down and called Ma in a dreadful voice, and Ma gasped, “I'm all right.”
    The log was on her foot. Pa lifted the log and Ma pulled her foot from under it. Pa felt her to see if any bones were broken.
    “Move your arms,” he said. “Is your back hurt? Can you turn your head?” Ma moved her arms and turned her head.
    “Thank God,” Pa said. He helped Ma to sit up. She said again, “I'm all right, Charles. It's just my foot.”
    Quickly Pa took off her shoe and stocking.
    He felt her foot all over, moving the ankle and the instep and every toe. "Does it hurt much?" he asked.
    Ma's face was gray and her mouth was a tight line. “Not much,” she said.
    “No bones broken,” said Pa. “It's only a bad sprain.”
    Ma said, cheerfully: "Well, a sprain's soon mended. Don't be so upset, Charles."
    “I blame myself,” said Pa. “I should have used skids.”
    He helped Ma to the tent. He built up the fire and heated water. When the water was as hot as Ma could bear, she put her swollen foot into it.
    It was Providential that the foot was not crushed. Only a little hollow in the ground had saved it.
    Pa kept pouring more hot water into the tub in which Ma's foot was soaking. Her foot was red from the heat and the puffed ankle began to turn purple. Ma took her foot out of the water and bound strips of rag tightly around and around the ankle. “I can manage,” she said.
    She could not get her shoe on. But she tied more rags around her foot, and she hobbled on it. She got supper as usual, only a little more slowly. But Pa said she could not help to build the house until her ankle was well.
    He hewed out skids. These were long, flat slabs. One end rested on the ground, and the other end rested on the log wall. He was not going to lift any more logs; he and Ma would 61 roll them up these skids.
    But Ma's ankle was not well yet. When she unwrapped it in the evenings, to soak it in hot water, it was all purple and black and green and yellow. The house must wait.
    Then one afternoon Pa came merrily whistling up the creek road. They had not expected him home from hunting so soon. As soon as he saw them he shouted, “Good news!”
    They had a neighbor, only two miles away on the other side of the creek. Pa had met him in the woods. They were going to trade work and that would make it easier for everyone.
    “He's a bachelor,” said Pa, “and he says he can get along without a house better than you and the girls can. So he's going to help me first. Then as soon as he gets his logs ready, I'll go over and help him.”
    They need not wait any longer for the house, and Ma need not do any more work on it.
    “How do you like that, Caroline?” Pa asked, joyfully; and Ma said, "That's good, Charles.
    I'm glad."
    Early next morning Mr. Edwards came. He was lean and tall and brown. He bowed to Ma and called her “Ma'am,” politely. But he told Laura that he was a wildcat from Tennessee.
    He wore tall boots and a ragged jumper, and a coonskin cap, and he could spit tobacco juice farther than Laura had ever imagined that anyone could spit tobacco juice. He could hit anything he spit at, too. Laura tried and tried, but she could never spit so far or so well as Mr.
    Edwards could.
    He was a fast worker. In one day he and Pa built those walls as high as Pa wanted them.
    They joked and sang while they worked, and their axes made the chips fly.
    On top of the walls they set up a skeleton roof of slender poles. Then in the south wall they cut a tall hole for a door, and in the west wall and the east wall they cut square holes for windows.
    Laura couldn't wait to see the inside of the house. As soon as the tall hole was cut, she ran inside. Everything was striped there. Stripes of sunshine came through the cracks in the west wall, and stripes of