"Oh, I'm just marking myself," he replied, laughing gloomily. "When this
scratch grows out--"

He stopped.

"What then?"

"Oh, I'll be away from here then," he said.

But I had the impression that he meant to say something different, so I
probed further.

"Let me look. Well, it's not a deep scratch; you won't be here long then,
will you?"

"Nails grow slowly," he muttered.

Then he strolled away whistling, and I set about chopping wood.

A little later Solem returned across the farmyard with a cackling hen
under his arm. He went to the kitchen window and called:

"This the kind of hen you want me to kill?"

"Yes," was the reply.

Solem came back to the woodshed and asked me for the ax, as he wanted to
behead a few hens. It was easy to see that he did everything on the farm;
he was, hand and brain, indispensable.