of constant exposure to the sun, kept a miraculous
whiteness which somehow made her seem more undressed than other girls
who went scantily clad. The first time I stopped to talk to her, I was
astonished at her soft voice and easy, gentle ways. The girls out there
usually got rough and mannish after they went to herding. But Lena asked
Jake and me to get off our horses and stay awhile, and behaved exactly
as if she were in a house and were accustomed to having visitors. She
was not embarrassed by her ragged clothes, and treated us as if we were
old acquaintances. Even then I noticed the unusual colour of her eyes--a
shade of deep violet--and their soft, confiding expression.

Chris Lingard was not a very successful farmer, and he had a large
family. Lena was always knitting stockings for little brothers and
sisters, and even the Norwegian women, who disapproved of her, admitted
that she was a good daughter to her mother. As Tony said, she had been
talked about. She was accused of making Ole Benson lose the little sense
he had--and that at an age when she should still have been in pinafores.

Ole lived in a leaky dugout somewhere at the edge of the settlement. He
was fat and lazy and discouraged, and bad luck had become a habit with
him. After he had had every other kind of misfortune, his wife, 'Crazy
Mary,' tried to set a neighbour's barn on fire, and was sent to the
asylum at Lincoln. She was kept there for a few months, then escaped and
walked all the way home, nearly two hundred miles, travelling by night
and hiding in barns and haystacks by day. When she got back to the
Norwegian settlement, her poor feet were as hard as hoofs. She promised
to be good, and was allowed to stay at home--though everyone realized
she was as crazy as ever, and she still ran about barefooted through the
snow, telling her domestic troubles to her neighbours.

Not long after Mary came back from the asylum, I heard a young Dane, who
was helping us to thresh, tell Jake and Otto that Chris Lingard's oldest
girl had put Ole Benson out of his head, until he had no more sense than
his crazy wife. When Ole was cultivating his corn that summer, he used
to get discouraged in the field, tie up his team, and wander off to
wherever Lena Lingard was herding. There he would sit down on the
drawside and help her watch her cattle. All the settlement was talking
about it. The Norwegian preacher's wife went to Lena and told her she
ought not to allow this;