The Ballad of Lucy Whipple Read Online Free PDF Page B

was my first real friend in California. He had a sweet smile and appreciated a slice or two of pie whenever he picked up letters. I didn't even know we were friends until his third or fourth visit, when he brought me an eagle feather, for he didn't talk much. I don't know if he got used to silence because of being alone in the mountains or if he took to the mountains because they were silent. And he never said.
     
Dear Gram and Grampop,
Mama said that we are all fine and healthy and if I cannot write nicer things than I usually do, I cannot write at all Expect to hear only good things from now on, whether they are true or not. You'll begin to think Lucky Diggins is as calm as a toad in the sunshine.
     
    Snowshoe's best friend was an Indian called Hennit, which meant Beaver, for his thick brown hair. Jimmy Whiskers told me Snowshoe and Hennit would sit in the big Indian sweathouse for hours, cleaning themselves of all human smell, and then go hunting for the deer Snowshoe used for making his shoes, his feet being too big for ready-mades. After hunting, Jimmy said, Snowshoe and Hennit would thank the spirit of the deer for sharing his hide and his meat with them. I thought it was a good idea and for a while thanked the prairie chickens and rabbits and squirrels I shot, but it never seemed quite enough.
     
Dear Gram and Grampop,
I dreamed last night of clam chowder and Gram's apple pandowdy with sweet yellow cream. Woke to a bean-and-biscuit breakfast again. We eat lots of beans and biscuits. Except for what I shoot, our meat is mostly the weevils in the flour or some moldy salt pork that traveled halfway around the world to find us and did not have an easy trip. I think such a diet cannot be as healthy for little children as wholesome Massachusetts food, but when I try to talk to Mama of this, she looks like she's going to spit.
If you see my former teacher, Miss Charlotte Homer of Reedsville, kindly inquire if she might send me a book. I am sick to death of
Ivanhoe
and Mr. Scatter's Bible, and there is not another book in these mountains.
     
    Once when Snowshoe seemed more talkative than usual, I asked him why he took to the mountains and the mails. Snowshoe shrugged and said, "Know many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe."
    "Don't you have family?" I asked.
    Snowshoe said he didn't recollect.
     
Dear Gram and Grampop,
You would not know me. I am so tall and almost fat. I think it is all the biscuits and gravy. I do the biscuits but Mama makes fine gravy. It is one reason her boarding house is full, that and the fact the miners like to look at her, her being the only woman in the camp except for Milly, who has come to work at the saloon, and Mr. Scatter's grown daughter, Belle, who has cross-eyes and bad skin and is as mean as a meat axe. Maybe she should marry Mr. Coogan and they can go into the meanness business: two bits a frown, a dollar a scowl, and a twenty-dollar gold piece would buy you flat-out savagerous rage.
Mr. Scatter has hired Snoose McGrath to build an honest-to-gosh wooden boarding house behind the general store, so we are hoping to be out of this tent by winter. Mama works hard but sees only the mountains and big trees and clear blue sky and doesn't seem to see the dirt. I myself am knee deep in dirt.
I am getting more used to boarders and even open my mouth now and then, but it seems just as I'm getting friendly, they leave, going home or to the city for the winter, except for Mr. Coogan, who gives every indication of becoming a permanent member of the Whipple family.
We look never to get out of here. My heart is so sore with missing you and Pa and Golden and home, sometimes I think I'll sigh myself to death.
     
    I asked Jimmy why Snowshoe kept so quiet and alone all the time.
    "He ain't much for other people," Jimmy said. "Doesn't he have any kin?"
    "Well," said Jimmy, scratching his beard with his fork, "there's Hennit, though I don't suppose you'd exactly call him kin. And there was the