“Hear him running away?  Cowardly varmint!” Tom sat down again.  “No wolf will hurt us if we keep our fire going.”

It was a busy winter.  Abe worked side by side with his father.  How that boy can chop! thought Nancy, as she heard the sound of his ax biting into wood.  Tree after tree had to be cut down before crops could be planted.  With the coming of spring, he helped his father to plow the stumpy ground.  He learned to plow a straight furrow.  He planted seeds in the furrows.

In the meantime, some of the neighbors helped Tom build a cabin.  It had one room, with a tiny loft above.  The floor was packed-down dirt.  There were no windows.  The only door was a long, up-and-down hole cut in one wall and covered by a bearskin.  But Tom had made a table and several three-legged stools, and there was a pole bed in one corner.  Nancy was glad to be living in a real house again, and she kept it neat and clean.

She was no longer lonely.  Aunt Betsy and her husband, Uncle Thomas, brought Dennis with them from Kentucky to live in the shelter near the Lincoln cabin.  Several other new settlers arrived, settlers with children.  A schoolmaster, Andrew Crawford, decided to start a school.

“Maybe you’ll have a chance to go, Abe,” Nancy told him.  “You know what the schoolmaster down in Kentucky said.  He said you were a learner.”

Abe looked up at her and smiled.  He was going to like living in Indiana!

3

[Illustration]

But sad days were coming to Pigeon Creek.  There was a terrible sickness.  Aunt Betsy and Uncle Thomas died, and Dennis came to live with the Lincolns.  Then Nancy was taken ill.  After she died, her family felt that nothing would ever be the same again.

Sally tried to keep house, but she was only twelve.  The one little room and the loft above looked dirtier and more and more gloomy as the weeks went by.  Sally found that cooking for four people was not easy.  The smoke from the fireplace got into her eyes.  Some days Tom brought home a rabbit or a squirrel for her to fry.  On other days, it was too cold to go hunting.  Then there was only cornbread to eat and Sally’s cornbread wasn’t very good.

It was hard to know who missed Nancy more—­Tom or the children.  He sat around the cabin looking cross and glum.  The ground was frozen, so very little work could be done on the farm.  He decided, when Andrew Crawford started his school, that Abe and Sally might as well go.  There was nothing else for them to do, and Nancy would have wanted it.

For the first time since his mother’s death Abe seemed to cheer up.  Every morning, except when there were chores to do at home, he and Sally took a path through the woods to the log schoolhouse.  Master Crawford kept a “blab” school.  The “scholars,” as he called his pupils, studied their lessons out loud.  The louder they shouted, the better he liked it.  If a scholar didn’t know his lesson, he had to stand in the corner with a long pointed cap on his head.  This was called a dunce cap.