She got out the precious paints Mrs. Whitman had given her and worked on a picture for Will when he was away. It was a scene of the prairie with a clump of cottonwoods in the foreground. She tried to get the afterglow of the sunset but even though she worked faithfully, she could not get it. “If I only had some one to help a little,” she would say. “Some day I want to take some painting lessons again. If I could just make a picture as I want to,—it would satisfy something in me.”

From the barn she got clean husks and made a family of dolls for Margaret. She made the bodies, heads and limbs from the husks and braided the corn-silk for hair. A man, a lady and a baby, she made, and dressed them in corn-husk clothes. Will built a small bedstead for them. Out of one of the coats in the barrel she made Mack a new suit and concocted a bonnet for Margaret out of the old one Regina had sent, trimming it with a little wisp of the pink tips. With her paints, she marked off a checkerboard for Mack, and Will whittled checkers from the circumference of some small cottonwood branches. She cut a pattern and made a calico dog for little John, stuffing it with corn-husks, and covering it with knotted ends of carpet rags to give it a woolly appearance. She ironed out brown wrapping paper, tied the pieces with yarn and drew waggish-looking cows and horses on it for him, too.

Margaret laboriously hemmed a handkerchief for her father and Mack made him a box for his newspapers. There was a State Journal now, and as scarce as money was, Will had subscribed. “We can’t drop out of touch with other parts of the country,” he had said. “And we must know what the rest of the settlers are doing.”

The children could talk of nothing but the approach of the wonderful day. The word “he” had only one meaning in their vocabulary,—a portly gentleman with a white beard and a sack on his back.

“Are you sure he’ll come this year, Mother? Heinie Reinmueller said he wouldn’t. He said his mother said so.”

“Of course he’ll come,” Abbie assured the three. “Because Father and I are making things, too, to help him when he comes.”

With Scotch-Irish cleverness, she could think of a dozen things to do with her meager supplies to add to the festivities. She ran tallow in tiny molds for the candles. She made a little batch of molasses candy and baked cookies in star and diamond shapes. She boiled eggs and painted faces on them and made little calico bonnets for them.

Christine was contemptuous toward the unnecessary festivities.

“For dot . . . no time I haf. You learn ’em vork . . . cows milk ’n’ pigs svill . . . ’n’ dey for foolishness no time haf.”

“Oh, don’t let us ever get like Reinmuellers,” Abbie said. “We’re poor. If we were any poorer we might as well lie down and give up. But we can fight to keep civilized . . . can fight to keep something before us besides the work.”