Lost on the Prairie Read online

  I think about my last day with Joe. We had a fine time. We wrestled with Wi and Hanwi. We played catch. We lay on the grass for a long while and I told Joe the story of Captains Courageous. He said it was a wondrous tale. Joe’s mother made a supper of venison stew. At nightfall we sat on a big rock near the house staring at the stars a spell before Joe and I shook hands real solemn and silent-like and headed off to bed.

  Mr. Little Thunder and I pull up to the Sisseton train station about noon. I jump down from the wagon to follow Mr. Little Thunder inside. There’s a passel of people lined up at the ticket window and they all turn to stare as we walk in. Mr. Little Thunder waits till everyone has attended to their business before he approaches the window motioning for me to follow.

  “This is Peter Schmidt,” he says, introducing me to the ticket agent, who scratches his grey moustache and pushes his wire glasses up to the top of his balding head.

  “He was travelling to Canada. Found his train car five miles or so from Enemy Swim Lake.”

  “Have you heard about me?” I say, interrupting. Mr. Little Thunder speaks so slow and careful-like, and I’m in a hurry to know if this man has any news.

  The ticket agent drums his fingers on the counter in front of him and ignores my question. He looks at Mr. Little Thunder. “What’s the boy doing with you? He don’t look like a Dakota to me.”

  “I found him near Enemy Swim Lake. Took him to my place.”

  “And when was this?”

  “A week ago.”

  “Well, it just so happens I did get a message on the telegraph about that missing car. Head office in Minneapolis is sending an engine to retrieve it this coming Monday. They’ll pull in here first thing in the morning and then head out to the line near the lake.”

  “That’s great news!” I shout. “Did the message say anything about a missing boy?”

  “No.”

  “Could you send word telling them a passenger from that lost train car will be waiting here at the station to be picked up?”

  “Guess I could. What’s your name again, boy?”

  “Peter Schmidt,” I say.

  The ticket agent writes my name on a piece of paper with a pencil and says, “We’ve got some Schmidts here in town. Henry, the mister, runs the mill and his wife Euphemia has a nice little sewing business.”

  “We know,” says Mr. Little Thunder.

  “Could be this young lad could stay with them over the weekend. It’d save you making the trip back. Euphemia and Henry are good folks and though their house isn’t big, they could probably spare a place for this fellow in their barn.”

  We find the sewing shop and millinery no problem. A tiny silver bell rings as Mr. Little Thunder opens the door and a woman sails out from behind the store counter to greet us. She’s tall, with hair piled high on her head.

  “How can I help you?” she asks. She’s got a little pucker between her eyebrows that are lifted high. Guess she’s wondering what two fellows are doing in a ladies’ shop.

  Mr. Little Thunder introduces both of us, and I explain what has happened to me.

  “Mr. Little Thunder thought you might know something about my family since we share the same last name,” I say as I finish my tale.

  “Can’t say for sure, but it seems to me my husband, Henry, did have some cousins down Kansas way,” says Mrs. Schmidt as she smooths her long black skirt with her right hand and then straightens a frill on her white blouse with the left.

  “Obliged if he could stay with you,” Mr. Little Thunder says politely.

  Mrs. Schmidt is frowning slightly and I try to reassure her. “It is just till Monday when the railroad fellows are coming from Minneapolis to pick up my train car.”

  Mr. Little Thunder adds, “He’s got two horses. I can board them at the livery.”

  Mrs. Schmidt gives just a hint of a smile. “No need. I suspect we can do our Christian duty by this boy and his horses.”

  “Girls,” Mrs. Schmidt calls in a voice that almost screeches. Three girls trot immediately into the shop from a door behind the counter, where they must have been listening to every word we said. The oldest looks to be about my age. The girls have matching blue checked dresses with wide white collars like a sailor would wear. Big white bows bounce in their hair. They line up in front of me from shortest to tallest.

  Mrs. Schmidt introduces her daughters. “This is Ettie, Ellie, and Eudora.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Mr. Little Thunder and I say almost in unison.

  “Girls, this is Peter Schmidt. He just may be a relative of your pa’s. I want you take Peter and his horses up to the house. Show him the barn and have him put his things in the hayloft. He can sleep there tonight.”

  “Thank you,” says Mr. Little Thunder.

  We step out onto the street, and Ettie, Ellie, and Eudora follow. Mr. Little Thunder puts a hand on my shoulder.

  “Goodbye and good fortune, Peter.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Little Thunder. I sure do appreciate all you’ve done for me.”

  Mr. Little Thunder jumps up into the wagon. I hold tight to Prince and Gypsy’s reins as he pulls away. I feel like crying, but there’s no way I’m going to do that with those three girls staring as if I’m the main act in a vaudeville show.

  As he turns the corner by the train station Mr. Little Thunder stops and gives me a nod and a tiny bit of a smile. I wave back. Swallowing hard I turn to the three girls.

  “I’m ready.”

  Chapter 10

  LAND SAKES, CAN THOSE SCHMIDT girls ever talk! A waterfall of words gushes from their mouths as we walk into the red barn behind their house.

  “My Grandpa built this barn, you know,” Ettie says sweeping her arms upward to trace the arc of the high rafters. The sun is streaming in through the open door and little bits of hay dust and chicken feathers and horsehair float in its light. “Grandpa died three years ago from the consumption, buried over in the church graveyard there beside Grandma. They’ve got ever such nice gravestones. Papa paid for them himself since his brother Ben couldn’t help out.”

  Eudora picks up the story as we climb up to the loft. She’s pulled a thick grey blanket from a wooden cupboard near the stalls where we’ve settled Prince and Gypsy, and she helps me spread it on a mound of hay that will be my bed later.

  “Ma don’t like Pa’s brother Ben very much and won’t invite his family for supper anymore, no siree. Says they are ne’er-do-wells, always asking Pa for money. Money we can’t spare.”

  After we get a place all squared away for me to spend the night, Eudora helps me shovel some grain from the feed room into the troughs in Prince and Gypsy’s stalls. Ellie plays with a couple of the barn kittens. She’s the youngest sister, I figure around my little brother Alvin’s age. After I close the door to the feed room and latch it tight, I turn around and notice Ellie is staring at me like a barn owl with her huge eyes. “Why are you wearing those strange looking clothes?” she asks.

  “My friend’s mother made them for me while I was living with him.”

  “Was your friend Dakota? There's lots of Dakota people around here.” Ellie’s eyes get even bigger and rounder so that it’s hard to look at anything but their blue watery centres. “What was it like to live with them? Did you smoke a peyote pipe or eat dog meat or sleep in a tipi? Did you understand their language?”

  “They were Sisseton-Wahpeton, but they spoke the Dakota language. They also spoke English as good as you and I do. And they didn’t live in a tipi; they lived in a house like yours over there.” I jerk my head towards the black-and-white Schmidt house perched at the top of a rise on the prairie.

  “I didn’t eat dog, but I ate porcupine and bear and squirrel, and it was awful good. And I never smoked a pipe although my friend Joe’s great-grandpa did. But his pipe had regular tobacco in it, I reckon, at least from the smell of it.”

  As we march up to the house four abreast, Ettie says, “Some of my friends at school say the Dakota aren’t very clean.”
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  “I was the dirty one when I arrived,” I say. “I’d had an accident and the Little Thunder family doctored me back to health in a nice clean bed.”

  “Honest?” says Eudora with surprise in her voice.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”

  “You know that rhyme in Kansas too?” Ellie asks. “We girls skip to it at school.”

  “Yeah, I know it, although Mama doesn’t like me to say it at home. My brother Herman died a while back, so people talking about wanting to die gets her mighty upset.”

  “Your brother died?”

  “How come?”

  “How old was he?”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “Where’s he buried?”

  “Do you have other brothers and sisters?”

  The questions tumble out of Ettie, Eudora, and Ellie’s mouths quicker than a smattering of bullets. I tell them about Herman and Sylvester and Levi and Alvin. The Schmidt sisters heard the story about me getting left behind by the train when I explained it to their mother in the store. Now they’ve got a million questions about what’s happened to me since Mr. Little Thunder found me, and I try to answer them as best I can.

  I’m ready to have a little peace and quiet by the time we cross the porch into their house, but a tiny woman opens the front door and says in a voice much bigger than she is, “You just come straight into the kitchen, young man, and have a ham sandwich and a cold glass of buttermilk. Mrs. Schmidt sent word from the store you’d be arriving and I was to feed you and the girls.”

  “This is Violet,” Eudora does the introduction. “She’s our housekeeper and she looks after us sometimes when Ma and Pa are at work. Violet’s the best cook in five counties, and if you treat her real polite she might give you a piece of her quince pie later, which is so good, you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven.”

  “Eudora!” Ettie gives her a frosty glare.

  “Oh, sorry,” says Eudora putting her hand up to her mouth. “That maybe wasn’t too polite seeing as your brother’s just gone and died and all.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “He actually passed a while back.” I realize as I say it that it’s been near to eight months since Herman died. So much has happened to me in the last while, I scarce can believe I am the same boy who helped to dig my brother’s grave in the cold and snow.

  After my stomach is round and full of quince pie and buttermilk, Ettie, Eudora, and Ellie say they’ll take me over to the mill to meet their pa.

  Mr. Schmidt’s red face wrinkles into a smile when the girls tell him who I am and how I’ve come to be in Sisseton. Mr. Schmidt pulls the heavy glove off his right hand to shake mine. “Of course I know your folks,” he says. “Your grandma Marie was my mother’s cousin once removed.”

  “I never knew Grandma Marie,” I say, “but my grandpa is still living in Newton.”

  “Always meant to make a trip someday to visit those kinfolk in Kansas, but with the mill and the millinery and all, we’ve never made it. Ettie and Eudora, you’d better get back to the store to help your Ma, and Ellie, you go back to the house and help Violet fix supper. Peter can stay here and give me a hand.”

  I spend the next few hours in the mill. Mr. Schmidt shows me the giant millstones his grandfather had made in Germany and brought to South Dakota by ship and train.

  “There have been millwrights in my family for more than a hundred years,” Mr. Schmidt says proudly. “My grandfather started building this mill almost as soon as he arrived in America. My father taught my brother Ben and me all about milling but decided before he died I should be the one to run it. Ben wasn’t too happy about that.”

  Five customers come to the mill to pick up wheat they’ve had ground into flour, and I help Mr. Schmidt carry the full sacks out to their wagons. He shows me how to throw the sack onto my back. “In the old days fellows who worked in flour mills were called sack and back boys,” he tells me.

  While he’s readying the grindstones for a wagonload of wheat brought in by another customer, he asks me to empty the rat and mousetraps in the mill.

  “Should be forty or so traps, Peter, here and there. Be right careful when you take out the dead varmints. Don’t let a near dead one bite your finger or let the trap snap back on your hand.”

  I spend the next hour releasing dead creatures from the thirty-five traps I manage to find and dropping them into a pail Mr. Schmidt has given me. He’s told me to throw the bodies into the cornfield behind the mill. I almost choke looking down at that heaping pile of dead rodents, some of them still warm, before I toss them between the corn stalks.

  When I turn back for a minute, I see a flock of crows circling down ready to eat the bodies I’ve left. I can’t help thinking about my gopher family. Where are they? Are they safe and getting fat and furry for winter, or did someone trap them or shoot them? Did the little ones become a crow’s dinner?

  Before we head home, Mr. Schmidt takes me next door to see his blacksmith shop. “Milling keeps me busy during summer and fall,” he says, “but in winter and spring, I fix wagon wheels and shoe horses and sharpen knives and plows.” Mr. Schmidt sure is a hard worker. He reminds me of my Papa who, besides farming our land, does carpentry work for other people and a little horse doctoring.

  Violet outdoes herself at supper with fried chicken and sweet potatoes with gravy, cooked carrots, and a peach cobbler for dessert.

  After supper Mrs. Schmidt lights the kerosene lamps and we stay sitting around the table while Mr. Schmidt reads from the Bible. The story is about Joseph and his brothers. Joseph had plenty of troubles—just like I’ve been having—but he stayed hopeful and believed things would get better. The people in Joseph’s family got separated for a long spell, but in the end they were all together. Maybe next week I will be together with my family too.

  After closing his Bible, Mr. Schmidt prays a real long time about everything from Mrs. Schmidt’s gout to President Roosevelt’s spot of trouble with the Japanese, and then we say good night. Mrs. Schmidt gives me one of the kerosene lamps to carry out to the barn and warns me to make sure I blow it out before I go to sleep.

  I look up on my way across the yard and notice the autumn moon is not quite as full as it was the night Joe and I had our adventure in Sica Hollow. Only two more moonlit nights and I might just be on a train to Minneapolis, and from there, back to my family.

  I climb up to the hayloft, settle in under my blankets, blow out the lamp, and close my eyes.

  Chapter 11

  A FRIGHTENING CHOIR OF ANIMAL sounds wakes me. Prince and Gypsy are snorting, cows bellow, the rooster croaks, chickens squawk, and the pigs are barking. I jerk upright and throw off my blanket. The hayloft is hotter than Hades. I take a breath, burning my lungs and throat. I cough and sniff the smoky air.

  Luckily I’ve slept in my clothes, so after I find my moccasins and feel for Herman’s watch in my pocket, I start inching my way over to where I remember the hayloft ladder was. Something tells me it wouldn’t be a good idea to light the kerosene lamp, but moonlight streaming in through tiny cracks in the barn roof and walls makes it just possible for me to see where I am going in the haze all around. I climb down the ladder as fast as I can.

  The animal noises are getting so loud I might go deaf. The cats have joined in too and are yowling and snarling and hissing. I jump down from the last rung and turn around.

  Lord have mercy! The barn’s on fire! There’s a crackling sound coming from the feed room that gets louder as I walk towards it. Smoke is billowing out from under the door, and when I touch the latch it burns my hand. I jump back. I need to get the animals out of the barn.

  I make my way over to the big front door, and although it’s dark, I figure out how to open it because it works just the same as the doors on my train car did. I lift the heavy hook out of the iron loop and push with all my might. The door slides open and the kittens and chickens and rooster scurry outside.

  I hook my fing
ers into the corners of my mouth and whistle loud as ever I can. Prince and Gypsy and the Schmidts’ four horses back out of their stalls and gallop out the door. They stop near the wagon that Mr. Schmidt left out of the barn so it would be ready to hitch up for church in the morning.

  I wonder why the pigs and cows aren’t coming, but then I remember there is a latched gate on the pigpen and the cows are tied up in their stalls. I crook my arm around my nose and head back into the barn. I know there are three cows because this morning the Schmidt sisters each introduced one to me: Clarabelle, Annabelle, and Lulubelle. Their stalls are side by side. The poor girls are in a horrible state, bawling and stomping, and they each land a few good kicks on my legs and shins as I slide past them to get to the ropes that hold them in place. Luckily the knots are easy to undo, especially with all my practising of Grandpa’s puzzles, and it isn’t long before the three belles are headed out of the barn.

  I manage to open the pigpen gate, and in their rush to get outside the squealers knock me down face first. My head hits the barn floor hard and for a minute, I lay there winded. Then I feel something nudging me in the back. I look up. Gypsy has come back into the barn and she is pushing her nose real hard into my buckskin jacket and nickering loudly. Gypsy kneels down so I can crawl on her back. She carries me outside and canters towards the Schmidt house.

  Just then, there is a loud whooshing sound that nearly jolts me off Gypsy’s back. I jump down and turn around. The whole barn is engulfed in flames. Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt, Violet, and the three girls come stumbling out onto the porch of the house in their nightgowns. Mr. Schmidt is carrying the kerosene lamp. “Peter!” he shouts in a panicked voice, lifting the lamp high. “Peter, are you there?”

  “Over here, sir,” I say.

  “Thanks be!” Mrs. Schmidt shouts. “Henry, we need to dig a trough around the barn so the fire can’t spread to the house. The plow would come in handy, but it’s in the barn. Eudora, run and get the hoes and spades from the back shed near the garden. Ellie, you bring out every pail and pot you can find in the house and start filling them with water from the slough. Ettie and Violet, find all the blankets and sheets and such, wet them at the pump, and start spreading them on the porch and around the house.”