“I’m tough as a pine knot,” she said, merrily; “but if I were really going to die I should like to have the children say, ‘She always tried to help us have good times, and the very last night she was here she made us some candy.’”
There was a foolish little moisture in Dolly’s eyes as she dropped into the low-cushioned chair, the same old creaky chair in which her mother had rocked her when she was a baby, and in which she herself had rocked Bess and Johnny scores of times. She was very tired, now that she came to sit down and think about it, and her little speech wakened a sort of pathetic pity for herself. She even began to fancy what they would all do without her, but just at that point the molasses made a sudden rush for the top of the skillet, and put an end to her musing.
Mrs. Marshall roused up a little also.
“It seems so strange to have Thanksgiving come without a flake of snow! Joel says it is as dry as midsummer, too. I never feel easy about the stacks until there’s a good fall of snow.”
“Joel is very careful,” suggested Dolly, “and father plowed a good strip around the stacks before he went away.”
“Yes, I know. But what good would a few furrows do against a prairie fire such a time as this?”
“Then we’ll hope the Lord’ll not let a fire start in such a time as this,” and Dolly seized her boiling syrup at the precise moment of crispiness, poured it over the plump white kernels spread thickly in the shallow pans, and set the whole to cool in the back kitchen.
When everything was tidy, and Dolly was ready to help her mother to bed, the old clock ventured to remark, in the same soft purr as before, that it only lacked two hours to midnight; to which Dolly smilingly answered that Thanksgiving only came once a year.
“How the colts stamp,” said Dolly. “I wonder if Joel could have forgotten to water them before he went home.”
“Joel ought not to have gone home,” said her mother. “It isn’t right for two lone women to be left with no neighbors within a mile. Are you sure the fire is all right, Dolly? seems to me there’s a smoky smell in here.”