ay in my bed, and beside her was a little bundle wrapped in a blanket
made of one of my flannel sheets. The women were making free of my
property as a matter of course.

"What are you goin' to do with me, Jake?" she asked again, looking up at
me pleadingly.

"I'm goin' to keep you here till you're able to do for yourself," I
said. "Time enough to think of that after a while."

She took my hand and pressed it, and turned her face to the pillow.
Pretty soon she turned the blanket back, and there lay the baby, red and
ugly and wrinkled.

"Ain't he purty?" said she, her face glowing with love. "Oh, Jake, I
thank God I didn't find the pond before you found me. I didn't know very
well what I was doin'. I'll have something to love an' work fur, now. I
wonder if they'll let me be a good womern. I will be, in spite of hell
an' high water--f'r his sake, Jake."

4

As I lay in Magnus's bed that night, I could see no way out for her. She
could get work, I knew, for there was always work for a woman in our
pioneer houses. The hired girl who went from place to place could find
employment most of the time; but the baby would be an incumbrance. It
would be a thing that the eye of censure could not ignore, like the
scarlet "A" on the breast of the girl in Nathaniel Hawthorne's story. I
could not foresee how the thing would work out, and lay awake pondering
on it until after midnight, and I had hardly fallen asleep, it seemed to
me, when the door was opened, and in came Magnus. He had finished his
job and come back.

"You hare, Yake?" he said, in his quiet and unmoved way. "I'm glad. Your
house bane burn up in fire?"

I told him the startling news, and as the story of poor Rowena slowly
made its way into his mind, I was startled and astonished at its effect
on him; for he has always been to me a man who would be calm in a
tornado, and who would meet shipwreck or earthquake without a tremor. I
have seen him standing in his place in the ranks with his comrades
falling all about loading and firing his musket, with no more change in
his expression than a cold light of battle in his mild buttermilk eyes.
I have seen him wipe from his face the blood of a fellow-soldier
spattered on him by a fragment of shell, as if it had been a splash of
water from a puddle. But now, he trembled. He turned pale. He raged up
and down the little room with his hands doubled into fists and beating
the air. He bit down upon his Norwegian words with c