"I don't know how I'd ever
have got home this night but for you." And he does not forget Oline:
"And you, Oline, that was the first to find me. I've to thank you both
for it all."

That was how Axel was saved....

* * * * *

The next few days Oline would talk of nothing but the great event;
Axel was hard put to it to keep her within bounds. Oline can point out
the very spot where she was standing in the room when an angel of the
Lord called her out to the door to hear a cry for help--Axel goes
back to his work in the woods, and when he has felled enough, begins
carting it up to the sawmill at Sellanraa.

Good, regular winter work, as long as it lasts; carting up rough
timber and bringing back sawn planks. The great thing is to hurry and
get through with it before the new year, when the frost sets in
in earnest, and the saw cannot work. Things are going on nicely,
everything as well as could be wished. If Sivert happens to come up
from the village with an empty sledge, he stops and takes a stick of
timber on the way, to help his neighbour. And the pair of them talk
over things together, and each is glad of a talk with the other.

"What's the news down village?" asks Axel.

"Why, nothing much," says Sivert. "There's a new man coming to take up
land, so they say."

A new man--nothing in that; 'twas only Sivert's way of putting it. New
men came now every year or so, to take up land; there were five new
holdings now below Breidablik. Higher up, things went more slowly,
for all that the soil was richer that way. The one who had ventured
farthest was Isak, when he settled down at Sellanraa; he was the
boldest and the wisest of them all. Later, Axel Stroem had come--and
now there was a new man besides. The new man was to have a big patch
of arable land and forest down below Maaneland--there was land enough.

"Heard what sort of a man it is?" asked Axel.

"Nay," said Sivert. "But he's bringing up houses all ready made, to
fix up in no time."

"Ho! A rich man, then?"

"Ay, seems like. And a wife and three children with him; and horse and
cattle."

"Why, then, 'twill be a rich man enough. Any more about him?"

"No. He's three-and-thirty."

"And what's his name?"

"Aron, they say. Calls his place Storborg."

"Storborg? H'm. 'Tis no little place, then." [Footnote: "_Stor_" =
great]

"He's come up from the coast. Had a fishery there, so they say."

"H'm--fishery. Wonder if he kn