“A magic time of year,” Caddie called it to herself. She loved both spring and fall. At the turning of the year things seemed to stir in her that were lost sight of in the commonplace stretches of winter and summer.
One April afternoon she went by herself to gather flowers in the woods. The mourning doves had come back and they were making a little sad refrain through the singing of the pines. The buckets hung empty on the sugar maple trees, for the syrup season was ended. There were some new pine slashings that filled the air with perfume. Like the birch smoke and the smell of clover, the pine smell was a Wisconsin smell, and because she loved them so, they were a part of Caddie Woodlawn.
There was a flash of red in the branches above her head, and Caddie caught her breath in sharply. The cardinals were back! Almost every year a pair of them nested in the woods, and Father always expressed his surprise at seeing them so far north.
“They’ve come from the South,” said Caddie to herself. “Maybe they saw Nero.”
With her hands full of flowers, she skirted around the farm through the woods until she came to the hill north of the house. There she could look down and see house and barnyard spread out beneath her, and Robert Ireton spading the garden and never guessing that someone watched him from the hill. Here in the edge of the woods on the north hill was little Mary’s grave. Father had made a little white picket fence around it, to show that this was no longer woods but belonged to little Mary. It was hard to remember little Mary now. She had come with them from Boston, but she had died so soon and gone to rest on the north hill. No one missed her now, and it was hard to imagine that she would have been near Hetty’s age, if she had lived. But sometimes it was nice to come here and sit beside her, because it was so peaceful on this hill and one could see so far and think far thoughts. Caddie braided the stems of her flowers together into a garland and hung it across the little white fence for Mary. Then she leaned back on last year’s autumn leaves and this year’s flowers, and fell into a sort of happy daydream.
Presently she heard someone coming up the hill and she sat up to see who it was. Hetty’s energetic, small legs were bringing her up the hill, her red pigtails bobbing and shining.
“Oh, bother!” said Caddie, “she’s got something to tell.”
But today Hetty had nothing to tell. She came up quietly and sat down beside Caddie, her round face flushed with the climb. “I saw you up here, and I thought I’d come too,” she said.
“It’s nice up here,” said Caddie.
“Yes, it is nice,” said Hetty. After a while she added: “It’s kind of nice to be just us two alone, too, isn’t it? Without the boys. But I guess it’s more fun for you with the boys.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Caddie. “Sometimes I get kind of tired of being with the boys all the time. I came off by myself today.”
“Maybe you’d ruther I hadn’t come,” said Hetty. There was something unexpectedly wistful in her bright eyes.
“Why, no,” said Caddie. “I think it’s nicer since you came, Hetty. I really do.”
A pleased smile brightened Hetty’s face. They sat on in silence for a while. But Caddie’s mood of vacant daydreaming had passed. Something in Hetty’s face had started a whole train of unaccustomed thoughts. She stole occasional glances at the serious, round face, turned now across the farm toward the road which wound away in the distance. It was almost as if Caddie had never seen that little face before. Suddenly she understood for the first time that Hetty was all by herself. Minnie was too young, and Tom, Caddie, and Warren had no room in their adventures for a tagging and tattling little sister. Was her eagerness to be the first to tell only her way of trying to make herself important in the eyes of all the selfish older people? If little Mary had lived—
“Caddie! Look!” cried Hetty, suddenly jumping to her feet and pointing. “It’s the circuit rider! He’s coming along the road.” Caddie’s thoughts scattered like frightened birds. She, too, sprang to her feet and focused her eyes on the distant road.
“Sure enough!” she cried. “It’s Mr. Tanner! How long he was gone this time! Let’s run down and meet him. I want to tell him that I was the one who mended his clock. Come on!”
Away they ran, down the hill, across the newly plowed field, through the barnyard, and into the barn to tell Father.
“Father, the circuit rider’s coming!”
“Father, Mr. Tanner’s on the road! He’ll be here in a minute.”
“Bless my soul, I’ll be glad to see him,” said Father. “It’s been a long time, and he’s been so far back in the woods. I wonder if he’s heard of Lee’s surrender?”
Mr. Tanner rode slowly up the lane to the barn. His horse looked tired and muddy. But there was something so strange and sad about Mr. Tanner himself that the children stopped halfway in running to meet him. It was as if he carried bad news for them.
“Hey, Mr. Tanner!” cried Father. “Welcome home again! But you look as if you had not heard the good news. Is it possible that no one has told you the war is ended?”
Mr. Tanner got down slowly, and stood a moment with his hand on his horse’s neck, his head bowed. When he spoke, his voice was deep and husky.
“God help us, Mr. Woodlawn!” he said at last. “I have later news than yours. Abraham Lincoln has been shot.”
19. Two Unexpected Heroes
Spring slipped away and it was summer again. The children helped Father and Robert cut and store the wild hay. Then the three adventurers took their buckets and went out into the woods to harvest the summer berries for their mother. There were blueberries for pies and puddings and pin cherries for quivering red jelly. There were Juneberries and wild strawberries, and later there were raspberries and blackberries and thorn apples.
“I guess the Woodlawn family wouldn’t have much to eat if it wasn’t for us,” boasted Warren.
“Oh, yes,” said Caddie with a twinkle in her eye, “Mother’d give us turkey.”
One day they crossed the river and went as far as Chimney Bluffs, a high, rocky place overlooking the river.
“It’s better to go to Chimney Bluffs in the spring or the fall,” said Tom. “There’s rattlers here in the summer, and we’d better look sharp and keep our ears open or we’ll get bit.”
The blueberries were thick on Chimney Bluffs and in the excitement of picking them it was hard to remember that one must be on the lookout for rattlesnakes. But, although the children were brave, they were not foolhardy, and life in a wild country had taught them to be cautious. Tom went ahead with a forked stick and the other two followed him, Indian file. They had almost filled their buckets, when Tom found something that filled his heart with joy.
“Gollee-Christmas!” he shouted. “This is as good as the scalp belt!”
The others crowded around him and saw, bleaching in the short grass, the skeleton of a huge snake.
“What a whopper!” yelled Warren.
“I’ll bet it’s four feet long!” said Tom breathlessly. “Here, you take my berries.” With reckless haste he heaped his berries into their buckets and began gathering the vertebrae of the hapless snake into his pail. “Oh, say, I’ll string him together and we’ll have another show. Oh, gollee! What a beauty! I wonder what Katie’ll think!”
“Look at the size of his rattle!” marveled Warren as the last pieces went into Tom’s bucket.
He shook it to hear the little dry, buzzing rattle. Then he dropped it in the bucket, but the little, dry, buzzing rattle continued.
“Tom! Look!” said Caddie, in a strange, urgent voice. The boys’ eyes followed her pointing finger. Only a few feet away was coiled a brown and yellow snake. Its wicked little eyes glinted at them, and its tail rattled a warning. With berries flying out of buckets, they fled down the hill. Over rocks and bushes, helter-skelter, shouting, they ran. If there were other snakes on Chimney Bluffs that day, they, too, must have fled away in terror. Tom, Caddie, and Warren did not stop running until they reached the river. There they paused a m
oment to draw breath, and then they plunged in, clothes and all, with only their buckets balanced on their heads.
“Well,” said Tom, when they were safely at home. “That’s the last time we go to Chimney Bluffs in the summer. But, oh! crickety! didn’t I get a bully skeleton!”
“You shouldn’t have wandered so far away from home, children,” said Mrs. Woodlawn. “Perhaps it’s for lack of work to do here on the farm. I’ll see what I can do to remedy that.”
The three adventurers exchanged unhappy glances. Berrying was much more to their taste than churning. But churning it was! During the summer when cream was plentiful, Mrs. Woodlawn churned great quantities of butter, packed it and sealed it in brown stone jars, and set the jars away in rows in the cool box which Father had dug and built around the spring at the north of the house. There, with the cold spring water trickling around it, the butter kept fresh until cold weather came, and so they were sure of having butter all the year around. There had been one dreadful summer, which Caddie always remembered as she helped to fill the brown stone jars. Caddie knew that Mother remembered it, too, although she never spoke of it. The butter had been all put up for the summer, and the family had gone to town in the wagon to meet the Little Steamer. That year one of their neighbors had been letting his hogs run loose in the woods. When they returned, they found that these hogs had broken through the fence, knocked the platform off the top of the spring box, upset and broken the butter jars and rolled them in the mud, spoiling what butter they had not eaten. The Woodlawns had stood silent and aghast, looking at the ruin of their winter’s butter. Often their bread was without butter that year, but that was not why the children remembered the calamity so vividly. They remembered it because on that day Mother had cried—the only time that they had ever seen her cry. After that Father had built stronger fences, and the neighbor had been persuaded to shut his hogs in a pen.
Now, when summer woods and fields were at their pleasantest, Miss Parker came back from Durand and opened and swept the schoolhouse. Oh, how tedious it was to go to school in summer! Even churning on a cool back porch, with a deep glass of buttermilk to drink afterward, was heavenly compared to school.
Through the open windows of the schoolhouse came the sound of birds and droning bees, and the heavy odors of clover and milkweed in blossom. The eyes of the children kept wandering from their books to the window squares of green and gold where grasshoppers sang and heat shimmered in little wavy lines. Silas Bunn used to slip to the window when Teacher wasn’t looking and hang out so far that only his heels and the seat of his trousers were visible to those inside the room. He had done it so often, with no remarks from Teacher, that he no longer took the trouble to be stealthy about it. One day, when he was hanging out, absorbed in watching a spider snare a fly, Miss Parker came up behind him. She stood and looked at him a moment while the children held their breaths, wondering what she would do. Presently she took a firm hold on the seat of Silas’s pants and lifted him on out the window. Miss Parker was not very big, but then neither was Silas. She set a surprised and frightened Silas neatly on the ground beneath the window.
“There, Silas,” said Miss Parker, “you get up and look all around, and when you have seen all there is to see, come back to school.” It did not take Silas long to see all that there was to see. After that he was a wistful looker with the other children, but not a hanger-out. The children’s voices droned sleepily through the heat, like the voices of the bees and katydids.
After Tom had sorted and wired together the many little bones of his rattlesnake skeleton, Teacher let him bring it to school and hang it over the map of North America. That made a little break in the monotony, and then there was another break—a more exciting one. A letter came from Boston for Mother from Cousin Annabelle Grey.
I shall be charmed to visit you, dear Aunty Harriet[the letter said]. Mamma and papa think that my education will not be complete without a view of the majestic open spaces of my native land. Although I have recently been finished at the Misses Blodgett’s Seminary for Young Ladies, I, myself, feel that I may yet be able to acquire some useful information in the vicissitudes of travel.
“Wow!” said Tom, when Mother read the letter. “Does she always talk like that?”
“I imagine not,” said Mrs. Woodlawn. “But it’s a very pretty letter, isn’t it? And what a delicate penmanship!”
Often over her slate or her reader Caddie’s thoughts wandered to Cousin Annabelle. The pleasure of her anticipation was sometimes marred by a pang of fear. What would a girl be like who could write such a letter? It sounded like a story from The Mothers Assistant or The Young Ladies’ Friend—those tiresome stories which were so much less interesting than Hans Andersen’s or Tom’s. Caddie tried to imagine herself writing that letter to an aunt in Boston. No, Caddie Woodlawn would never write a letter like that. Couldn’t she or wouldn’t she? She honestly did not know, but it made her a little ashamed and apprehensive to think about it.
The summer grew hotter and drier. The Indians did not come back, and Father said it was because they could read the weather signs and knew that hunting and fishing would be better in the north. On hot evenings Tom and Caddie used to go down to the lake and take the canoe out to set lines for fish. Using empty, corked jugs as floats, they anchored them in several places on the lake with baited lines attached to them. In the morning early, before school, they would go down and pull in the lines, and usually there would be a nice pike or two for Mrs. Conroy to bake or make into chowder. John’s dog went with them to the lake, his tongue hanging out and his eyes alert for any small fish which they might throw him. Just now John’s dog was in disfavor at the farmhouse. He had bitten the head off one of Clara’s pet kittens, and Caddie was the only one who continued to love and defend him. Like Mary’s lamb, he used to follow her to school, and sit mournfully outside the little building, waiting until she came out at recess and at noon.
“What a horrid, ugly, ol’ Indian dog!” said all the girls.
But Caddie replied: “He’s mine!” and she said it so fiercely that that seemed reason enough why everyone should like him.
One afternoon John’s dog set up a mournful howl outside the schoolhouse. It was a stifling hot afternoon and everything was as dry as a tinder box. The sun had been overcast since early afternoon and the hope of rain was in everybody’s mind. But there was no hint of rain’s freshness in the hot west wind—only a queer, hot smell. In the middle of the afternoon John’s dog came and scratched at the schoolhouse door and gave three or four short, troubled barks. When no one paid him any attention, he came around to the window. By standing on his hind legs and putting his front paws on the side of the schoolhouse, he could just manage to look in the window. He looked around, trying to see Caddie among the other children, then he put up his mouth and uttered a long, unhappy howl, followed by several short barks!
The children began to titter and Miss Parker rapped sharply on her desk. “Caroline Woodlawn,” she said, “will you please look to your dog?”
Caddie rose obediently and went to the window to send her dog away. But what she had intended saying to the dog never came out. Instead she turned back to the schoolroom, her hands flung in the air, her eyes wide.
“Teacher! It’s a fire! It’s a prairie fire. It’s coming here!”
“Fire?” cried the children. They sprang out of their seats, throwing the quiet schoolroom into a hubbub.
Miss Parker rapped again on her desk. Her face was suddenly pale, but she cried out in a strong voice: “Get back into your seats, every one of you! Don’t you dare to move until I tell you that you may!” No danger was greater than Teacher’s voice, when she spoke like that. Every child but one sank back into his seat. That one was Obediah, who had gone out of the door like a shot at the first word of fire.
Miss Parker took a hasty look out of the window. “Now,” she said, “gather your things together and get ready to pass out in the usual way. No running or pushing—just as usual.
One—two—three—march!” When they were outside, they broke ranks and scattered before the little licking red tongues of flame that were running through the dry grass toward the schoolhouse.
“Run to Dunnville for help,” cried Teacher. “We must save the schoolhouse if we can.” Caddie caught the command and raced for Dunnville, with John’s dog racing beside her. Miss Parker took up the bucket of water that stood by the schoolroom door. However, one bucket of water does not go very far in a prairie fire, and the spring was some distance down the road.
But a fire fighter was already at work. Obediah, his head down, the smoke swirling all about him, had caught up a flat board and was beating out the fire as fast as he could. When his brother Ashur saw what he
was doing, he caught up a board, too, and ran to join him. The other boys, forgetting their panic in a common purpose, began to imitate the two Jones boys.
“Hey, you,” shouted Obediah to Tom, “get a shovel or sumpin’ to dig with.” In the schoolhouse Tom found the shovel they used to make a path through the snow in winter. He knew what Obediah wanted, and he began to dig and scrape the dry grass away in a trench between the oncoming fire and the schoolhouse. The ground was baked almost as hard as rock and the shovel was not sharp. It was slow work and the sweat stood out all over Tom’s round face after a few moments of digging.
“Here!” said Obediah, and he grasped the shovel and thrust his board into Tom’s hands. The board was already charred and smoking, but Tom seized it and fell to beating back the fire, while Obediah threw his strength into clearing a trench around the schoolhouse before the fire reached it. Obediah’s great, hulking frame, which fitted so badly into the school benches and desks, seemed splendid at last. No grown man could have done braver or harder work than Obediah did that day to save his schoolhouse.