Olaf looked up. "Never mind me, Olaf. I laugh without knowing
why, like little Eric. He's another cheerful dog."

"Eric," said Olaf slowly, "is a spoiled kid. He's just let
his mother's best cow go dry because he don't milk her right. I
was hoping you'd take him away somewhere and put him into business.

If he don't do any good among strangers, he never will." This was
a long speech for Olaf, and as he finished it he climbed into his
buggy.

Nils shrugged his shoulders. "Same old tricks," he
thought. "Hits from behind you every time. What a whale of a
man!" He turned and went round to the kitchen, where his mother
was scolding little Eric for letting the gasoline get low.


IV

Joe Vavrika's saloon was not in the county seat, where Olaf
and Mrs. Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place, a
little Bohemian settlement which lay at the other end of the
county, ten level miles north of Olaf's farm. Clara rode up to see
her father almost every day. Vavrika's house was, so to speak, in
the back yard of his saloon. The garden between the two buildings
was inclosed by a high board fence as tight as a partition, and in
summer Joe kept beer tables and wooden benches among the gooseberry
bushes under his little cherry tree. At one of these tables Nils
Ericson was seated in the late afternoon, three days after his
return home. Joe had gone in to serve a customer, and Nils was