up and looked around. Nothing stirred--not the painted figures on the
wooden walls, nor the boy who now stood in the doorway. This boy was
gray-eyed and flaxen-haired, and might have been eleven or twelve years
old. He was looking for the good old priest, Father Ansgar, and the wild
shy animal eyeing him from the foot of the altar made it only too clear
that the church, like the village, was deserted.

Father Ansgar was dead of the strange swift pestilence that was called
in 1348 the Black Death. So also were the sexton, the cooper, the
shoemaker, and almost all the people of the valley. A ship had come into
Bergen with the plague on board, and it spread through Norway like a
grass-fire. Only last week Thorolf Erlandsson[1] had had a father and
mother, a grandmother, two younger sisters and a brother. Now he was
alone. In the night the dairy woman and the plowmen at Ormgard farm had
run away. Other farms and houses were already closed and silent, or
plundered and burned. Ormgard being remote had at first escaped the
sickness.

Thorolf turned away from the church door and began to climb the
mountain. At the lane leading to his home he did not stop, but kept on
into the woods. It was not so lonely there.

Up and up he climbed, the thrilling scent of fir-balsam in his nostrils,
the small friendly noises of the forest all about him. Only a few months
ago he had come down this very road with his father, driving the cattle
and goats home from the summer pasture. All the other farmers were doing
the same, and the clear notes of the lure, the long curving horn, used
for calling the cattle and signaling across valleys, soared from slope
to slope. There was laughter and shouting and joking all the way down.
Now the only persons abroad seemed to be thieving ruffians whose greed