Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) Read Online Free PDF

said, but I didn’t like to sit when she didn’t, or see her go barehanded for my sake, so I stayed standing.
    I picked up her mittens, which were fur on the backs but plain leather on the palms. “Did you wear it off or did they start this way?” I asked. When she didn’t answer, I came to notice that I was pressing them to my face. She watched me, and I felt I had to explain. “They feel good,” I said. “Like a kitten,” which was only partly true – they were bearskin and very coarse, but they did feel good. “Here, put them back on.”
    “They started this way,” she said, slipping them over her red hands. “You can’t grip an ax with fur.”
    That gave me what I chose to consider a natural opportunity to say what I’d come for. “Is that your ax?” I asked. “Your own ax?”
    “Why, I don’t know. It’s one of our axes. I guess it’s mine. It’s the one I use.”
    “But could you take it pioneering with you?”
    “I should think Pa’d give me that much,” she said, uncertain already.
    I should have been glad that my task was easy, but I was unexpectedly sad. I would have felt better for both our sakes if I could have hugged her in the commonplace way of women together, but something about her made me unable even to hold her hand to comfort us. She didn’t do woman things. I kept my distance.
    “Sarah Dowling, dear,” I said. “Dear Sarah Dowling. How reasonable are you being? How many details have you thought out?”
    “I won’t tell you.” Her tone reminded me that she was six years younger than I. “You’d just say I couldn’t.”
    “I feel you must say it, dear.”
    “I thought you was my friend,” she said. So young.
    “I am your friend. That’s why I feel I have to. You might not heed anyone else.”
    She scowled at me. “I won’t heed you, neither.” Her uncertainty departed. She strode furiously around her little clearing of trampled snow and chips. “I’m going. I’m going. I’m strong. I can do it.”
    “I wish you wouldn’t.”
    “You’re not my friend when you want me to stay here. Where even my ax ain’t mine. Look!” She seized the ax and with two strokes broke a big chip from the beech. “It’s mine because I can do that with it. That makes it mine.” She was breathing hard. “You want me to get married.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    As though I hadn’t spoken, she said, “Well, I won’t. I don’t have to. I won’t. I’m going.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “I won’t tell you.”
    “Do you have any money?”
    “I’ll buy my land like Pa’s buying his. Land buys itself, with wood and ashes and oats and corn.”
    “Do you think – dear – that anyone would let a woman alone, with no money, take an indenture on this land?”
    “They don’t have to know I’m a woman.”
    I bowed my head to take that in. When I looked again she had her back to me. “Well, what’d you think?” she asked without turning. “That I was going to drag out there in a skirt? What’d you think?”
    If only she’d been like other girls so I could have gone up to her and put my arms around her!
    I said, “I doubt anyone would let a man alone do it, either. One alone’s not enough. You haven’t thought.”
    “I have thought,” she said, still not turning, but tipping her head back, looking up into the treetops. “I’ll tell you what I’ve thought. I’ve thought I’d rather die than not go.” She turned around then and let me see her face. “I have to try,” she said.
    And I knew that Columbus looked like that and said that.
    “Then take me with you,” I said.
    As soon as I said it, I knew it was what I’d intended, unknown to myself, all along. My words stayed in the air and I listened to them again. They sounded even more reasonable and natural.
    But Sarah said, “You better think it over.”
    “I’ve been thinking. I just didn’t know it. I’ve thought of all the things we’ll need, that I can bring. I’ve got two cows. Don’t you