Summary
In a frost-bitten corner of New England, Katie Standish—calloused palms, spine of ash—hauls the weight of a household that never thanks her. Her sister Priscilla’s ailments are as finely embroidered as lace doilies, each sigh a new excuse for Katie to shoulder the churn, the washtub, the milk-pail, the cradle. Into this salt-sprayed drudgery lumbers Oliver Putnam, a broad-shouldered hymn to soil and sunlight, whose courtship is sabotaged by a parental choreography of slammed doors and whispered ultimatums. Exiled, Oliver follows Uncle Ben southward to a Mexican sierra where silver sleeps under volcanic skin. Priscilla, meanwhile, marries the boy-next-farm and multiplies—seven squalling testaments to her fragility—until a locomotive’s iron shriek orphans them all in a single crimson instant. Katie, now governess, nurse, and penitent ghost to her sister’s legacy, dispatches a letter across the border; the reply is a telegrammed covenant: come, bring the brood, the hacienda’s doors yawn wide. She does, stepping onto a dust-veiled platform with a parade of small hands clutching her skirts. Oliver, expecting the solitary girl he once loved, confronts a marching battalion of childhood; his face folds like a crumpled letter. One impulsive spank, one overheard tirade against children, and the fragile rekindling collapses. Yet the desert is not done with them: bandits circle, rifles glint, and the children—taught by an eccentric uncle to pull a collective trigger—turn the adobe house into a pint-sized fortress. Mines bloom beneath hooves, bullets stitch starlight, and in the crucible of gunsmoke Katie and Oliver remember the alphabet of forgiveness. When the smoke clears, silver ingots gleam under the floorboards, seven scruffy survivors cheer, and the couple head north, not as lovers fleeing circumstance but as parents adopting an entire horizon.
Synopsis
Katie Standish is the family drudge on a New England farm. Her elder sister "enjoys" poor health and her mother sees to it that Katie not only does her own work but that of the weak or lazy Priscilla. Oliver Putnam, a husky young farmer lad, comes courting Katie, but her parents interfere so much that he is discouraged. Oliver finally goes to Mexico with Ben Standish, uncle of Katie and Priscilla, who owns a valuable mine there. Priscilla marries Caleb Adams, a young man who bought a farm adjoining that of Standish. Father and Mother Standish die and Katie goes to live with her sister. Soon she is doing all the housework, and as Priscilla rapidly becomes the mother of seven, each and every one of them is turned over to Katie's care. Then Priscilla and her husband are killed by an express train while driving to the city. Then Katie must teach school to help keep the wolf from the door. She writes to her uncle, telling of her sister's death and how the care of the children had fallen to her. The uncle invites her to bring the motherless brood with her and they can all make their home with him in Mexico. Oliver Putnam is expecting Katie, but the information about the children has been withheld from him. He is overjoyed when he sees Katie step off the train, but is flabbergasted when he sees the many children--only the first time the children get between Oliver and Katie, and Oliver comes to resent them. He sees two of them fussing and spanks one of them; Katie catches this and gives him a scathing rebuke. Then she happens to hear him tell Dan that he hates children; this lands him squarely in her bad graces. Uncle Ben likes the youngsters. He shows them how a series of guns in their little home could be discharged at once by pulling a lever and how a mine around the house could be discharged in a similar manner. He is careful to lock the room where the weapons of destruction are placed, but one of the children finds out where he has hidden the key. While Katie and Oliver are away on an errand of mercy, Mexicans attack the little house. The children are all there but one. The missing one happens to be outside and escapes to the road, where he is saved by a cowboy who goes after help. Meanwhile the children defend themselves by discharging the guns and firing the mines as their uncle had shown them. Katie and Oliver have a desperate fight when they are attacked by another band of Mexicans, but hold them off in a deserted cabin, till the cowboys rescue them. Oliver can't help admiring the brave way in which the children have defended the house, and is grateful also for the fact that the silver under the floor has been saved from the Mexicans. So Oliver and Katie forget their differences and make a home for the children in a mansion in the United States.
