back so long, for I always thought he meant to do something by you.'
Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe. 'I'd have missed a lot if I had come back then. But I'm sorry I didn't get back to see father.'
'Well, I suppose we have to miss things at one end or the other. Perhaps you are as well satisfied with your own doings, now, as you'd have been with a farm,' said Mrs. Ericson reassuringly.
'Land's a good thing to have,' Nils commented, as he lit another match and sheltered it with his hand.
His mother looked sharply at his face until the match burned out. 'Only when you stay on it!' she hastened to say.
Eric came round the house by the path just then, and Nils rose, with a yawn. 'Mother, if you don't mind, Eric and I will take a little tramp before bedtime. It will make me sleep.'
'Very well; only don't stay long. I'll sit up and wait for you. I like to lock up myself.'
Nils put his hand on Eric's shoulder, and the two tramped down the hill and across the sand creek into the dusty highroad beyond. Neither spoke. They swung along at an even gait, Nils puffing at his pipe. There was no moon, and the white road and the wide fields lay faint in the starlight. Over everything was darkness and thick silence, and the smell of dust and sunflowers. The brothers followed the road for a mile or more without finding a place to sit down. Finally, Nils perched on a stile over the wire fence, and Eric sat on the lower step.
'I began to think you never would come back, Nils,' said the boy softly.
'Didn't I promise you I would?'
'Yes; but people don't bother about promises they make to babies. Did you really know you were going away for good when you went to Chicago with the cattle that time?'
'I thought it very likely, if I could make my way.'
'I don't see how you did it, Nils. Not many fellows could.' Eric rubbed his shoulder against his brother's knee.
'The hard thing was leaving home you and father. It was easy enough, once I got beyond Chicago. Of course I got awful homesick; used to cry myself to sleep. But I'd burned my bridges.'
'You had always wanted to go, hadn't you?'
'Always. Do you still sleep in our little room? Is that cottonwood still by the window?'
Eric nodded eagerly and smiled up at his brother in the grey darkness.
'You remember how we always said the leaves were whispering when they rustled at night? Well, they always whispered to me about the sea. Sometimes they said names out of the geography books. In a high wind they had a desperate sound, like someone trying to tear loose.'
'How funny, Nils,' said Eric dreamily, resting his chin on his hand. 'That tree still talks like that, and 'most always it talks to me about you.'
They sat a while longer, watching the stars. At last Eric whispered anxiously: 'Hadn't we better go back now? Mother will get tired waiting for us.' They rose and took a short cut home, through the pasture.
II
The next morning Nils woke with the first flood of light that came with dawn. The white-plastered walls of his room reflected the glare that shone through the thin window shades, and he found it impossible to sleep. He dressed hurriedly and slipped down the hall and up the back stairs to the half-story room which be used to share with his little brother.
Eric, in a skimpy nightshirt, was sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes, his pale yellow hair standing up in tufts all over his head. When he saw Nils, he murmured something confusedly and hustled his long legs into his trousers. 'I didn't expect you'd be up so early, Nils,' he said, as his head emerged from his blue shirt.
'Oh, you thought I was a dude, did you?' Nils gave him a playful tap which bent the tall boy up like a clasp knife. 'See here: I must teach you to box.' Nils thrust his hands into his pockets and walked about. 'You haven't changed things much up here. Got most of my old traps, haven't you?'
He took down a bent, withered piece of sapling that hung over the dresser. 'If this isn't the stick Lou Sandberg killed himself with!'
The boy looked up from his shoe-lacing.
'Yes; you never used to let me play with that. Just how did he do it, Nils? You were with father when he found Lou, weren't you?'
'Yes. Father was going off to preach somewhere, and, as we drove along, Lou's place looked sort of forlorn, and we thought we'd stop and cheer him up. When we found him father said he'd been dead a couple days. He'd tied a piece of binding twine round his neck, made a noose in each end, fixed the nooses over the ends of a bent stick, and let the stick spring straight; strangled himself.'
'What made him kill himself such a silly way?'
The simplicity of the boy's question set Nils laughing. He clapped little Eric on the shoulder. 'What made him such a silly as to kill himself at all, I should say!'
'Oh, well! But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and died on him, didn't they?'
'Sure they did; but he didn't have cholera; and there were plenty of bogs left in the world, weren't there?'
'Well, but, if they weren't his, how could they do him any good?' Eric asked, in astonishment.
'Oh, scat! He could have had lots of fun with other people's hogs. He was a chump, Lou Sandberg. To kill yourself for a pig-- think of that, now!' Nils laughed all the way downstairs, and quite embarrassed little Eric, who fell to scrubbing his face and hands at the tin basin. While he was parting his wet hair at the kitchen looking glass, a heavy tread sounded on the stairs. The boy dropped his comb. 'Gracious, there's Mother. We must have talked too long.' He hurried out to the shed, slipped on his overalls, and disappeared with the milking pails.
Mrs. Ericson came in, wearing a clean white apron, her black hair shining from the application of a wet brush.
