from me, Hans," she answered,
panting.

"Those were not bad men, mamma," the boy ejaculated. "That was Stubby
Mons and Stuttering Peter and Lars Skin-breeches. They don't, want to
hurt me."

He expected that his mamma would be much relieved at receiving this
valuable information, and return home without delay. But she still
pressed on, flushed and panting, and cast the same anxious glances
behind her.

In the meanwhile Nils and his guests had entirely lost their patience.
Finding his persuasions of no avail, the former began to thump at the
door with the handle of his axe, and receiving no response, he climbed
up to the window and looked in. To his amazement there was no one in the
room. Thinking that Inga might have gone to the cow-stable, he ran to
the rear of the cottage, and called her name. Still no answer.

"Hans," he cried, "where are you?"

But Hans, too, was as if spirited away. It scarcely occurred to Nils,
until he had searched the cow-stable and the house in vain, that his
wife had fled from the harmless lumbermen. Then the thought shot through
his brain that possibly she was not quite right in her head; that this
fixed idea that everybody wanted to take her child away from her had
unsettled her reason. Nils grew hot and cold in the same moment as this
dreadful apprehension took lodgement in his mind. Might she not, in
her confused effort to save little Hans, do him harm? In the blind and
feverish terror which possessed her might she not rush into the water,
or leap over a precipice? Visions of little Hans drowning, or whirled
into the abyss in his mother's arms, crowded his fancy as he walked
back to the lumbermen, and told them that neither his wife nor child was
anywhere to be found.

"I would ask ye this, lads," he said, finally: "if you would help me
search for them. For Inga--I reckon she is a little touched in the upper
story--she has gone off with the boy, and I can't get on without little
Hans any more than you can."

The men understood the situation at a glance, and promised their aid.
They had all looked upon Inga as "high-strung" and "queer," and it did
not surprise them to hear that she had been frightened out of her wits
at their request for the loan of little Hans. Forming a line, with a
space of twenty feet between each man, they began to beat the bush,
climbing the steep slope toward the mountains. Inga, pausing for an
instant, and peering out between the tree trunks, saw the alder