elf as the only failure in the family. He did not ask one
of these questions, but he made them all felt distinctly.

"Humph!" Nils thought. "No wonder the man never talks, when he can butt
his ideas into you like that without ever saying a word. I suppose he
uses that kind of smokeless powder on his wife all the time. But I guess
she has her innings." He chuckled, and Olaf looked up. "Never mind
me, Olaf. I laugh without knowing why, like little Eric. He's another
cheerful dog."

"Eric," said Olaf slowly, "is a spoiled kid. He's just let his mother's
best cow go dry because he don't milk her right. I was hoping you'd take
him away somewhere and put him into business. If he don't do any good
among strangers, he never will." This was a long speech for Olaf, and as
he finished it he climbed into his buggy.

Nils shrugged his shoulders. "Same old tricks," he thought. "Hits from
behind you every time. What a whale of a man!" He turned and went round
to the kitchen, where his mother was scolding little Eric for letting
the gasoline get low.

IV

Joe Vavrika's saloon was not in the county seat, where Olaf and Mrs.
Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place, a little Bohemian
settlement which lay at the other end of the county, ten level miles
north of Olaf's farm. Clara rode up to see her father almost every day.
Vavrika's house was, so to speak, in the back yard of his saloon. The
garden between the two buildings was inclosed by a high board fence
as tight as a partition, and in summer Joe kept beer tables and wooden
benches among the gooseberry bushes under his little cherry tree. At
one of these tables Nils Ericson was seated in the late afternoon, three
days after his return home. Joe had gone in to serve a customer, and
Nils was lounging on his elbows, looking rather mournfully into his
half-emptied pitcher, when he heard a laugh across the little garden.
Clara, in her riding habit, was standing at the back door of the house,
under the grapevine trellis that old Joe had grown there long ago. Nils
rose.

"Come out and keep your father and me company. We've been gossiping all
afternoon. Nobody to bother us but the flies."

She shook her head. "No, I never come out here any more. Olaf doesn't
like it. I must live up to my position, you know."

"You mean to tell me you never come out and chat with the boys, as you
used to? He _has_ tamed you! Who keeps up these flower-beds?"