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?"

"I come out on Sundays, when father is alone, and read the Bohemian
papers to him. But I am never here when the bar is open. What have
you two been doing?"

"Talking, as I told you. I've been telling him about my travels. I
find I can't talk much at home, not even to Eric."

Clara reached up and poked with her riding-whip at a white moth that
was fluttering in the sunlight among the vine leaves. "I suppose you
will never tell me about all those things."

"Where can I tell them? Not in Olaf's house, certainly. What's the
matter with our talking here?" He pointed persuasively with his hat
to the bushes and the gr