eople ought to
get fun for some of their money. Even father liked old Joe."

"Your father," Mrs. Ericson said grimly, "liked everybody."

As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own place, Mrs.
Ericson observed, "There's Olaf's buggy. He's stopped on his way from
town." Nils shook himself and prepared to greet his brother, who was
waiting on the porch.

Olaf was a big, heavy Norwegian, slow of speech and movement. His head
was large and square, like a block of wood. When Nils, at a distance,
tried to remember what his brother looked like, he could recall only his
heavy head, high forehead, large nostrils, and pale blue eyes, set far
apart. Olaf's features were rudimentary: the thing one noticed was the
face itself, wide and flat and pale; devoid of any expression, betraying
his fifty years as little as it betrayed anything else, and powerful by
reason of its very stolidness. When Olaf shook hands with Nils he looked
at him from under his light eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could
ever say what that pale look might mean. The one thing he had always
felt in Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding stickiness of
wet loam against the plow. He had always found Olaf the most difficult
of his brothers.

"How do you do, Nils? Expect to stay with us long?"

"Oh, I may stay forever," Nils answered gaily. "I like this country
better than I used to."

"There's been some work put into it since you left," Olaf remarked.

"Exactly. I think it's about ready to live in now--and I'm about ready
to settle down." Nils saw his brother lower his big head ("Exactly like
a bull," he thought.) "Mother's been persuading me to slow down now, and
go in for farming," he went on lightly.

Olaf made a deep sound in his throat. "Farming ain't learned in a day,"
he brought out, still looking at the ground.

"Oh, I know! But I pick things up quickly." Nils had not meant to
antagonize his brother, and he did not know now why he was doing it. "Of
course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to make a big success, as you
fellows have done. But then, I'm not ambitious. I won't want much. A
little land, and some cattle, maybe."

Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down. He wanted to ask Nils
what he had been doing all these years, that he didn't have a business
somewhere he couldn't afford to leave; why he hadn't more pride than to
come back with only a little sole-leather trunk to show for himself, and
to present hims