“What are we going to do for a stove?” asked the wife, as soon as he was out of sight.
“That’ll be forthcoming,” said the minister.
Tom, having made his appearance, was requested by Mr. Payson to take the team and go to town, and say to Mr. Palmer that they had decided to move into the cabin, and would like to get settled before night; which message brought 135 Mr. Palmer back with Tom, accompanied by a wagon-load, containing a large cooking-stove, a bag of flour, some chairs, a little crockery, and a supply of various eatables. And by nightfall the missionary family were domiciled in the frontier cabin; and the next morning you would have thought the missionary’s wife already quite ‘westernized,’ with her neat calico and tidy apron, busy in her preparations for the house-raising.
“I don’t mean to stay in a borrowed house a great while,” she said. “Husband, how soon do you calculate that we can be housekeeping in our own cabin?”
“It will take some weeks, do our best,” he answered.
“Well,” she rejoined, “I’ll set the time four weeks from to-day; and if it isn’t ready then, I shall go into it if I have to leave you behind.”
But how slowly everything dragged, except the raising! The settlers went into that with right good will; men and teams were busy drawing the logs, while experienced hands placed them properly upon each other, till the ridge-pole crowned the whole. Then they sat down on the grass to partake of the tempting eatables that Tom and Mr. Payson had brought on the ground. There were the light biscuits and the golden butter, nice venison steaks for which they were indebted to the rifle of Mr. Jones, dried apple 136 turnovers, and the sheets of crisp gingerbread, loaf cake, and fragrant coffee.
“We don’t get any whiskey at this raising!” said Mr. Palmer, nudging his next neighbor.
“No,” he replied; “and it’s an example that I hope will be often followed.”
Then there was the door to be made and hung, and the windows to be put in, and the crevices between the logs to be mortared, and the floors laid–long and tedious operations, where everybody was over-busy, and labor could be hired neither “for love nor money.” Mr. Payson found that much of the work had to be done by himself, with the occasional help of Tom. He was city-bred, and his bodily strength feeble; but necessity obliged him to perform prodigies of teaming, lifting, and joinering, and even of quarrying stone for the well that was being dug. A few weeks had wrought a wonderful change in the man of books; his study was wherever he chanced to be; his white hands had become horny and browned, his pale face tanned. His retiring habits had given place to a broad sociality, his diffidence to a generous self-reliance, and it seemed to him that he could do and dare almost anything. From early morning till late at night he worked to get his log home ready, while his wife and little ones remained in the solitary cabin by the riverside. It was a long walk for him, however after 137 toiling all day; and when the sky was overcast at nightfall, he was in danger of getting lost. This gave his wife much uneasiness; then she feared that he might meet some prowling wolf, or other beast, in the darkness; and when he was very late, she would be sure to think he was lost, and would ring her house-bell, which consisted of a tin pan, on which she would drum vigorously with the stove-lifter. She said he would recognize that sound, she thought, at a great distance.