so we had to kill
our chickens to save their lives. We et 'em. They would have starved
anyway."

Then we tried for some vegetables. "Well," she said, "they ain't much
to look at; maybe you'll not want 'em. Our garden ain't much this
year. Pa has had to work out all the time. The kids and me put in some
seed--all we had--with a hoe. We ain't got no horse; our team died
last winter. We didn't have much feed and it was shore a hard winter.
We hated to see old Nick and Fanny die. They were just like ones of
the family. We drove 'em clean from Missouri, too. But they died, and
what hurt me most was, pa 'lowed it would be a turrible waste not to
skin 'em. I begged him not to. Land knows the pore old things was
entitled to their hides, they got so little else; but pa said it
didn't make no difference to them whether they had any hide or not,
and that the skins would sell for enough to get the kids some shoes.
And they did. A Jew junk man came through and give pa three dollars
for the two hides, and that paid for a pair each for Johnny and Eller.

"Pa hated as bad as we did to lose our faithful old friends, and all
the winter long we grieved, the kids and me. Every time the coyotes
yelped we knew they were gathering to gnaw poor old Nick and Fan's
bones. And pa, to keep from crying himself when the kids and me would
be sobbin', would scold us. 'My goodness,' he would say, 'the horses
are dead and they don't know nothin' about cold and hunger. They don't
know nothin' about sore shoulders and hard pulls now, so why don't you
shut up and let them and me rest in peace?' But that was only pa's way
of hidin' the tears.

"When spring came the kids and me gathered all the bones and hair we
could find of our good old team, and buried 'em where you see that
green spot. That's grass. We scooped all the trash out of the mangers,
and spread it over the grave, and the timothy and the redtop seed in
the trash came up and growed. I'd liked to have put some flowers
there, but we had no seed."

She wiped her face on her apron, and gathered an armful of cabbage;
it had not headed but was the best she had. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy seemed
possessed; she bought stuff she knew she would have to throw away, but
she didn't offer one word of sympathy. I felt plumb out of patience
with her, for usually she can say the most comforting things.

"Why don't you leave this place? Why not go away somewhere else, where
it will not be so hard to start?" I asked