ed and burned. Ormgard being remote had at first escaped the
sickness.

Thorolf turned away from the church door and began to climb the
mountain. At the lane leading to his home he did not stop, but kept on
into the woods. It was not so lonely there.

Up and up he climbed, the thrilling scent of fir-balsam in his nostrils,
the small friendly noises of the forest all about him. Only a few months
ago he had come down this very road with his father, driving the cattle
and goats home from the summer pasture. All the other farmers were doing
the same, and the clear notes of the lure, the long curving horn, used
for calling the cattle and signaling across valleys, soared from slope
to slope. There was laughter and shouting and joking all the way down.
Now the only persons abroad seemed to be thieving ruffians whose greed
for plunder was more than their fear of the plague.

A thought came to the boy. How could he leave his father's cattle unfed
and uncared for? What if he were to drive the cows himself to the saeter
and tend them through the summer? He faced about, resolutely, and began
to descend the hill.

Within sight of the familiar roofs he heard some one coming from the
village, on horseback. It proved to be Nils the son of Magnus the son of
Nils who was called the Bear-Slayer, with a sack of grain and a pair of
saddlebags on a sedate brown pony. Nils was lame of one foot and no
taller than a boy of nine, although he was thirteen this month and his
head was nearly as large as a man's. He had been an orphan from
baby-hood, and for the last three years had lived in the priest's house
learning to be a clerk.

"Hoh!" called Nils, "where are you going?"

"To the farm to get our cattle and take them to the saeter. There is no
one left to do it but me."

"Cattle?" queried the other interestedly, "She will be glad of that."

"She!" said Thorolf, "who?"

"The Wind-wife[2]--Mother Elle, who used to sell wind to the
sailors--the Finnish woman from Stavanger. She has gathered up a lot of
children who have no one to look after them and is leading them into the
mountains. She has Nikolina Sven's daughter Larsson, and Olof and Anders
Amundson, and half a score of younger ones from different villages. She
says that if it is God's will for the plague to come to the saeter it
will come, but it is not there now, and it is in the valleys and the
towns. She has gone on with the small ones who cannot walk fast, and
left Olof and An