2018.09.03

It's Monday.

One day his head nodded down to the table and he slept there. Ma and Mary and Laura were still to let him sleep. He was so tired. But in a minute he woke up with a jump and said, sharply, to Ma, to ask her not let him do that again. Ma said gently that Jack had been on guard. That night was worst of all. The drums were faster and the yells were louder and fiercer. All up and down the creek war-cries answered war-cries and the bluffs echoed. There was no rest. Laura ached all over and there was a terrible ache in her very middle. At the window Pa told Ma that they were quarreling among themselves, and maybe they would fight each other. Ma said that if they only would. All night there was not a minute's rest. Just before dawn a last war-cry ended and Laura slept against Ma's knee. She woke up in bed. Mary was sleeping beside her. The door was open, and by the sunshine on the floor Laura knew it was almost noon. Ma was cooking dinner. Pa sat on the doorstep. He said to Ma that there was another big party, going off to the south. Laura went to the door in her nightgown, and she saw a long line of Indians far away. The line came up out of the black prairie and it went farther away southward. The Indians on their ponies were so small in the distance that they looked not much bigger than ants. Pa said that two big parties of Indians had gone west that morning. Now this one was going south. It meant that the Indians had quarreled among themselves. They were going away from their camps in the creek bottoms. They would not go all together to their big buffalo hunt. That night the darkness came quietly. There was no sound except the rushing of the wind. Pa said that night they would sleep, and they did. All night long they did not even dream.