“Oh, I don’t care,” Will gave in readily enough. “I just liked it. It sounds solid and substantial as though he might amount to something.”

Abbie pulled the little soft sleeping form into the hollow of her arm. “I know he’ll amount to something.”

After that she could not get the thought of the “John” out of her mind. “John Deal,” she said it over several times. “Will’s right. It just fits him. Some day people will say, ‘Go and ask John Deal. He’s a smart man. He can advise you.’ ” She lay and smiled at the vision. If the faith of all the mothers could blossom to its full fruition, there would be no unsuccessful men in the land.

Mack was nearly six now and Margaret four, so that when Abbie was up again, and strong enough, she began to teach them their letters. Will painted a board with black paint and brought some soft chalk-like deposit from the Platte with which they could print. The oldest Reinmueller and Lutz children had started to school at Sodom College, but Abbie would not let Mack go so far. So to her other labors she now added teaching.

All winter during the deep snows when they were shut in, she gave the children lessons to do, hearing them recite in their queer little ways, while she was mending or mixing bread or ironing. It was tiresome, shut in the small soddie, and spring was a welcome guest. On Easter morning, accompanied by the faithful dog, who would kill a snake whenever he found one, Abbie took Mack and Margaret and little John down to the creek bank for flowers. Will had made a wagon in which to pull John, the wheels of round disks cut from a young cottonwood, and now at seven months, the baby lay in it and blinked solemn eyes at the April sky. It was an advanced spring and they found blue and yellow violets, Dutchmen’s breeches, ferns, and the tiny red buds of the hawthorn.

“Smell!” said Abbie, “smell the springtime on the prairie.” And Mack and Margaret stood and sniffed miniature olfactory organs.

“What makes it smell sweet?” they wanted to know.

“Because everything,—every little wild plum-blossom, every little tiny crocus and anemone and violet and every tree-bud and grass-blade is working to help make the prairie nice,” Abbie told them. [And who is there to say this was not a beginners’ class in philosophy?]

The day was hot, with a strong wind from the south, so that they did not stay long at the creek bed. On the way back to the house it clouded, and by the time they had reached it, the drops were falling. In the night the rain changed to snow and when the family awoke in the early morning, the storm was shrieking around the soddie with cyclonic fury. Great wet clumps of snow were being hurled against the small half-windows and snow had been driven through the cracks of the door. The wind and the snow, whirling together in their wild Bacchanalia, seemed laughing drunkenly at the tiny pigmy inmates of the tiny prairie house.