They shouted the old man’s name and shook him; but he never stirred.
“Run back for the sled, Katrina,” said Jan, “so we can draw him home. I’ll stay here and rub him with snow till he wakes up.”
“Just so you don’t freeze to death yourself!”
“My dear Katrina,” laughed Jan, “I haven’t felt as warm as I feel now in many a day. I’m so happy about the little girl! Wasn’t it dear of her to send us out here to save the life of him who has gone around spreading so many lies about her?”
A week or two later, as Jan was returning from his work one evening, he met Agrippa Prästberg.
“I’m right and fit again,” Agrippa told him. “But I know well enough that if you and Katrina had not come to the rescue there wouldn’t have been much left of Johan Utter Agrippa Prästberg by now. So I’ve wondered what I could do for you in return.”
“Oh, don’t give that a thought my good Agrippa Prästberg!” said Jan, with that upward imperial sweep of the hand.
“Hush now, while I tell you!” spoke Prästberg. “When I said I’d thought of doing you a return service, it wasn’t just empty chatter. I meant it. And now it has already been done. The other day I ran across the travelling salesman who gave that lass of yours the red dress.”
“Who?” cried Jan, so excited he could hardly get his breath.
“That blackguard who gave the girl the red dress and who afterward sent her to the devil in Stockholm. First I gave him, on your account, all the thrashing he could take, and then I told him that the next time he showed his face around here he’d get just as big a dose of the same kind of medicine.”
Jan would not believe he had heard aright. “But what did he say?” he questioned eagerly. “Didn’t you ask him about Glory Goldie? Had he no greetings from her?”
“What could he say? He took his punishment and held his tongue. Now I’ve done you a decent turn, Jan Anderson, and we’re even. Johan Utter Agrippa Prästberg wants no unpaid scores.”
With that he strode on, leaving Jan in the middle of the road, lamenting loudly. The little girl had wanted to send him a message! That merchant had come with greetings from her, but not a thing had he learned because the man had been driven away.
Jan stood wringing his hands. He did not weep, but he ached all over worse than if he were ill. He felt certain in his own mind that Glory Goldie had wanted Prästberg to take a message from her brought by the merchant and convey it to her father. But it was with Prästberg as with the trolls—whether they wanted to help or hinder they only wrought mischief.
The Sunday After Midsummer
The first Sunday after Midsummer Day there was a grand party at the seine-maker’s to which everyone in the Ashdales had been invited. The old man and his daughter-in-law were in the habit of entertaining the whole countryside on this day of each year.
Folks wondered, of course, how two people who were so pitiably poor could afford to give a big feast, but to all who knew the whys and wherefores it seemed perfectly natural.
As a matter of fact, when the seine-maker was a rich man he gave his two sons a farmstead each. The elder son wasted his substance in much the same way as Ol’ Bengtsa himself had done, and died poor. The younger son, who was the more steady and reliable, kept his portion and even increased it, so that now he was quite well-to-do. But what he owned at the present time was as nothing to what he might have had if his father had not recklessly made away with both money and lands, to no purpose whatever. If such wealth had only come into the hands of the son in his younger days, there is no telling to what he might have attained. He could have been owner of all the woodlands in the Lovsjö district, had a shop at Broby, and a steamer plying Lake Löven; he might even have been master of the ironworks at Ekeby. Naturally he found it difficult to excuse the father’s careless business methods, but he kept his thoughts to himself.
When the crash came for Ol’ Bengtsa, a good many persons, Bengtsa among them, expected the son to come to his aid by the sacrifice of his own property. But what good would that have done? It would only have gone to the creditors. It was with the idea in mind that the father should have something to fall back upon when all his possessions were gone, that the son had held on to his own.
It was not the fault of the younger son that Ol’ Bengtsa had taken up his abode with the widow of the elder son, for he had begged the father more than a hundred times to come and live with him. The father’s refusal to accept this offer seemed almost like an act of injustice; for because of it the son got the name of being mean and hard-hearted among those who knew the old man was badly off. Still, there was no ill-feeling between the two.
The son, accompanied by his wife and children, always drove down to the Ashdales over the steep and perilous mountain road once every summer, just to spend a day with his father.
If people had only known how badly he and his wife felt every time they saw the wretched hovel, the ramshackle outhouse, the stony potato patch, and the sister-in-law’s ragged children, they would have understood how his heart went out to his father. The worst of all was that the father persisted in giving a big party in their honour. Every time they bade the old man goodbye they begged him not
