re's no sort of luck in
anything."

Sometimes they taunted him with want of courage, and called him
a "night-cap" and a "hen-pecked coon," all of which made Nils
uncomfortable. He made two or three attempts to persuade his wife to
change her mind in regard to little Hans, but the last time she got so
frightened that she ran out of the house and hid in the cow stable with
the boy, crouching in an empty stall, and crying as if her heart would
break, when little Hans escaped and betrayed her hiding-place. The boy,
in fact, sympathized with his father, and found his confinement at home
irksome. The companionship of the cat had no more charm for him; and
even the brindled calf, which had caused such an excitement when he
first arrived, had become an old story. Little Halls fretted, was
mischievous for want of better employment, and gave his mother no end
of trouble. He longed for the gay and animated life at the river, and he
would have run away if he had not been watched. He could not imagine how
the lumbermen could be getting on without him. It seemed to him that all
work must come to a stop when he was no longer sitting on the top of the
log piles, or standing on the bank throwing chips into the water.

Now, as a matter of fact, they were not getting on very well at the
river without little Hans. The luck had deserted them, the lumbermen
said; and whatever mishaps they had, they attributed to the absence of
little Hans. They came to look with ill-suppressed hostility at Nils,
whom they regarded as responsible for their misfortunes. For they could
scarcely believe that he was quite in earnest in his desire for the
boy's return, otherwise they could not comprehend how his wife could
dare to oppose him. The weather was stormy, and the mountain brook which
ran along the slide concluded to waste no more labor in carving out a
bed for itself in the rock, when it might as well be using the slide
which it found ready made. And one fine day it broke into the slide and
half filled it, so that the logs, when they were started down the steep
incline, sent the water flying, turned somersaults, stood on end, and
played no end of dangerous tricks which no one could foresee. Several
men were badly hurt by beams shooting like rockets through the air, and
old Mads Furubakken was knocked senseless and carried home for dead.
Then the lumbermen held a council, and made up their minds to get little
Hans by fair means or foul. They thought fir