he could find. The Bergson wagon lurched
along over the rough hummocks and grass banks, followed the bottom
of winding draws, or skirted the margin of wide lagoons, where the
golden coreopsis grew up out of the clear water and the wild ducks
rose with a whirr of wings.

Lou looked after them helplessly. "I wish I'd brought my gun,
anyway, Alexandra," he said fretfully. "I could have hidden it
under the straw in the bottom of the wagon."

"Then we'd have had to lie to Ivar. Besides, they say he can smell
dead birds. And if he knew, we wouldn't get anything out of him,
not even a hammock. I want to talk to him, and he won't talk sense
if he's angry. It makes him foolish."

Lou sniffed. "Whoever heard of him talking sense, anyhow! I'd
rather have ducks for supper than Crazy Ivar's tongue."

Emil was alarmed. "Oh, but, Lou, you don't want to make him mad!
He might howl!"

They all laughed again, and Oscar urged the horses up the crumbling
side of a clay bank. They had left the lagoons and the red grass
behind them. In Crazy Ivar's country the grass was short and gray,
the draws deeper than they were in the Bergsons' neighborhood,
and the land was all broken up into hillocks and clay ridges. The
wild flowers disappeared, and only in the bottom of the draws and
gullies grew a few of the very toughest and hardiest: shoestring,
and ironweed, and snow-on-the-mountain.

"Look, look, Emil, there's Ivar's big pond!" Alexandra pointed to
a shining sheet of water that lay at the bottom of a shallow draw.
At one end of the pond was an earthen dam, planted with green willow
bushes, and above it a door and a single window were set into the
hillside. You would not have seen them at all but for the reflection
of the sunlight upon the four panes of window-glass. And that was
all you saw. Not a shed, not a corral, not a well, not even a path
broken in the curly grass. But for the piece of rusty stovepipe
sticking up through the sod, you could have walked over the roof
of Ivar's dwelling without dreaming that you were near a human
habitation. Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank,
without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that
had lived there before him had done.

When the Bergsons drove over the hill, Ivar was sitting in the
doorway of his house, reading the Norwegian Bible. He was a queerly
shaped old man, with a thick, powerful body set on short bow-legs.
His shaggy white hair, falling in a thick man