lenched teeth. I was
afraid to talk to him at last. Finally, he turned to me and said:

"Ay know de man! So it vas in de ol' country! Rich fallar bane t'inking
poor girl notting but like fresh fruit for him to eat; a cup of vine for
him to drink; an' he drink it! He eat de fruit. But dis bane different
country. Ay keel dis damned Gowdy! You hare, Yake? Ay keel him!"

Of course I told him that this would never do, and talked the way we all
do when it is our duty to keep a friend from ruining himself. He sat
down while I was talking, and as far as I could see heard never a word
of what I said. Finally I talked myself out, and still he sat there as
silent as a statue.

"Ay--tank--Ay--take--a--valk," he said at last, in the jerky way of the
Norwegian; and he went out into the night.

I lay back expecting that he would come in pretty soon, when I had more
of which I had thought to talk to him about; but I went to sleep, and
having been a good deal broken of my rest, I slept late. He was still
absent when I woke up. When I got to my place, the widow told me that he
had been there and had a long talk with Rowena, and had hitched up his
team and driven away.

Rowena was asleep when I looked in, and I went out to plow. If Magnus
had gone to kill Buck Gowdy, there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
As a matter of fact, I approved of his impulse. I had felt it myself,
though not with any such wrathful bitterness. I had known for a long
time that Magnus had a tenderness toward Rowena; but he was such a
gentle fellow, and seemed to be so slow in approaching her, with his
fooling with Surajah's inventions and the like, that I set down his
feeling as a sort of sheepish drawing toward her which never would
amount to anything. But now I saw that his rage against Gowdy was of the
kind that overpowered him, stolid as he had always seemed. It rose above
mine in proportion to the passion he must have felt for her, when she
was a girl that a man could take for a wife. I pitied him; and I did not
envy Buck Gowdy, if it chanced that they should come together while
Magnus's white-hot anger was burning; but I rather hoped they would
meet. I did not believe that in any just court Magnus would be punished
if he supplied the lack in the law.

When I turned out at noon, I saw Magnus's team, and a horse hitched to a
buggy tied to my corn-crib; and when I went into the house, I half
expected to find Jim Boyd, the sheriff, there to arrest Magn