The Prairie Thief by Melissa Wiley

Author:Melissa Wiley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A Very Good Question

THEY CREPT CAUTIOUSLY THROUGH THE CORNFIELD toward the barn, keeping a wary eye out for signs of Mr. Smirch. Close to the barn’s back wall, the brownie cocked his eye and held up a hand in warning. He seemed to be listening. Louisa held her breath, trying to hear what he was hearing.

“By the kelpie’s mane!” the brownie burst out. “He’s taken the cow, blast him.”

“Evangeline?” Louisa hurried around the corner of the barn behind the little man.

“Evangeline,” snorted the brownie, coming to a halt in the wide doorway. “Is that what ye call her?”

The barn doors had been left open, and the cow was gone. At first Louisa thought, with considerable alarm, that Mr. Smirch must have been careless enough to leave the doors open after he milked the evening before, allowing Evangeline to wander off—or worse, wolves to wander in. But the deserted stall showed no signs of unpleasantness, and a hasty conversation between the brownie and a meadowlark revealed that Mr. Smirch had returned to the farm in the dark the night before and gone all over the house with a lantern, hollering and clomping, making it altogether impossible for the lark to settle down for the night. After seventeen choruses of this unmelodic song (so the meadowlark explained), the man had clomped back to the barn and led the cow away.

“He must have been looking for me,” said Louisa, feeling a bit guilty that Mr. Smirch had had to hike the two miles over here and back twice in one evening, for he had scarcely returned from milking Evangeline an hour before his wife had insisted Louisa read to the family after supper. “I suppose he didn’t want to have to come back first thing this morning for another milking. He must have taken her to his own barn.”

“Impertinence!” said the brownie. “First the milk, and now the cow. I don’t suppose he asked her if she wanted to go traipsin’ off into the dark. And her so terrible afraid o’ the moon.”

“She is?” asked Louisa, but he had gone off, muttering in disgust, to tend to the chickens.

The brownie did not seem to want her help, so she went to the well and filled a pail with water for a wash. She longed to change her clothes, but her other work dress was at the Smirches’, and she wanted to keep her Sunday frock clean for when she got to town.

Town. It was thirteen miles away—farther than she had ever walked in her life. Her toes wiggled inside her tight boots. Pa had said he’d buy her a new pair of shoes after the wheat was sold. She added a pair of stockings to the small pile she was assembling for her pack: a sunbonnet, a wedge of cheese, a jug of water, some wrinkled ropes of venison jerky she and Pa had made the previous winter. She tied the pile up in a bedsheet. It was clumsy, but it would have to do.

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