The Settlers

XII. THE MARCH OF THE HUNDRED THOUSAND

If it be romance, if it be contrast,

if it be heroism that we require,

what was Troy town to this?

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Across the Plains

About the middle of the nineteenth century, an immense river of human beings pushed its way across North America, from the east toward the west. It was formed in the springtime, from smaller streams and rivulets, at the frontier outposts in Missouri and Kansas and from there streamed over wild and unknown country, across great deserts and salt marshes, over the prairies’ grass and the Rocky Mountains’ snow, over flat land and high mesas, uphill, downhill. Its path — two thousand miles long — was called the California Trail — but the name was all that existed; it had been given to a trail that was yet to be defined and mapped.

Over a path that was everywhere and nowhere, the March of the Hundred Thousand pushed on, from spring to autumn. Its goal was the furthermost western country, washed by an ocean greater than the one crossed by the millions of immigrants.

This train was made up of the strangest conglomeration of people that had ever traveled two thousand unknown, uncleared miles together. It was a caravan never before seen, and never to be seen again.

Men and women, married and unmarried; babes in cradles strung inside the covered ox wagons; old people with trembling limbs. There were proud, honorable women in homespun wadmal, harlots in silk and frills. There were religious people, and atheists. Pious and upright men and women, noble and high-minded people, murderers and robbers, degraded criminals of both sexes. Puritans and libertines, celibates and rapists, the young girl with her virginity intact and the whore who opened her arms to a thousand men. There were thieves and card sharks, counterfeiters and practitioners of every vice known to the world. There were farm hands and maids who had fled from service, soldiers from their regiments, prisoners from their jails, seamen from their ships, mental patients from their asylums, men who had run away from their wives and wives from their husbands, children from their parents, and officials from their posts and positions. There were truthful people and liars, bright people and simpletons, people with normal minds and people a little off. The healthy people and the sick, giants and dwarfs, well-shaped and deformed; one-legged, one-armed, one-eyed, limping ones, seeing and half-blind; all these God-created creatures could be found in this train, in the train of the hundred thousand.

They came from every land on earth, and spoke all the dialects and languages of the earth. This caravan was humanity’s parade in white, black, brown, and yellow; whites and Negroes, Hindus and Chinese, fullbloods, half-bloods, quadroons, the bluest noble blood and the rawest plebeian dregs.

Workers in all trades took off and joined this strange caravan: the carpenter threw away his plane, the timberman his ax, the smith his sledge hammer, the cobbler his last, the baker his spatula, the cook his spoon, the scrivener his pen. They streamed in from all nations: there rode in his ox wagon the English merchant, the Irish lawyer, there rode on his mule the American preacher and surgeon; the Jewish peddler kept whipping his ox. In the train were the Spanish captain, the Italian monk, the Norwegian forester, the German craftsman, and the Swedish farm hand.

In the caravan traveled, side by side the nobleman and the servant, the high officer and the low soldier, the editor and the actor, the singer and the player, the magician and the circus-performer, the ventriloquist and the snake charmer, the fire eater and the tight-rope dancer, the master marksman with the revolver and the man who had never touched a firearm. In their rucksacks, in their wagons or saddlebags, they hid what they held dearest in this world, objects they least wished to part with: the most diversified objects a human heart can cling to: Bibles and decks of cards, holy pictures and dirty pictures, canary birds in cages, whelps in baskets, gifts from parents and dear ones, knives, sewing baskets, crochet hooks, swingletrees, psalmbooks, songbooks, musical instruments, belts, clocks, rings, and amulets.

And an immense animal caravan accompanied the train intended as sacrifice for the people: in the train of the hundred thousand were 60,000 oxen, pulling 15,000 wagons, 25,000 horses and 10,000 mules who carried people on their backs. Four-legged creatures in the train supplied the two-legged with food and drink: 10,000 cows gave them milk twice a day, and a herd of 5,000 sheep gave them mutton and chops which sizzled with delicious odor over the evening campfires.

The train over the plains and deserts was accompanied by song and music — the musical instruments for religious services as well as those for idle play were brought along. Solemn tunes were heard from mouthorgans and psalmodikons, and dance tunes vibrated from fiddles and banjos. Hallowed psalms were sung to the guitar, and lewd songs to the harmonica, strings were strummed for prayer and reverence, while sin was lauded and debauchery acclaimed. Ministers and blasphemers held their services, and their voices and words rose to the same heaven, that lofty, indifferent heaven above the California Trail.

But these hundred thousand people of all nationalities and colors, speaking all languages, confessing all faiths, practicing all means of livelihood, indulging in all vices, consisting of all types, with all character traits, had one thing in common: the Goal. It was the goal that united the members in this folkwandering, the strangest migration ever to take place on the earth. It had forced them to leave their homes in widely separated countries and continents and had brought them together in civilization’s outposts in North America from where the caravan started. It drove them across prairies and deserts, over mountains and plains, over rivers and marshes, and made them endure the desert-heat and the mountain-cold. Any one unable to move forward on this road was also unable to turn back; there remained only to stay in the place and await the final end. The cowards, the cringers, had remained at home, and the weakest had been weeded out before horses’ or mules’ hoofs had taken a single step toward the west.

So the train pushed on, along the unblazed trail that was only a name, enduring the heat of the fiery sun, resting under the vaulted, starry night sky, through the days and months, from spring to fall. Only a dream could unite this human horde, and before the train of the hundred thousand there moved as guidance, day and night, a mirage, a pillar of fire: gold! It was their common goal: GOLD! It was the end of the road that united them: The Land of Gold!

And broad was the land and unmeasured, long was the road, and without end, greatminded and daring the participants, and immeasurable their dreams.

The Gold Caravan traveled every year, from spring to fall, over the California Trail, but it happened that two out of three who followed its pillar of fire never reached their goal.

XIII. A YOUTH WHO IS NOT YOUNG

— 1—

One June evening as Karl Oskar Nilsson made his way through his field, hoeing his corn, he saw a stranger approaching along the lakeshore. A tall, stooped man with a rucksack on his back came toward him, jerking along and swinging his arms as he climbed the road up to the old log cabin. He veered off toward the maple grove, walking as if he had no command over his tall, loose body. Then he stopped and looked at the new main house under the great sugar maples.

Karl Oskar rested against the hoe, staring at the man. During their first years on the claim they had barely had one visitor a month, now someone came almost every day. But this man was not one of their neighbors. And the stranger looked from one building to the other as if he had lost his way. When he saw Karl Oskar in the cornfield, he turned and walked in that direction.

He was a gaunt young man, and judging from his clothing he must be a fur trapper. He wore a broad hat, a long black-and-white-checked coat, and a hunting shirt of flaming red flannel. His pants were made of deerskin, held up by a broad yellow leather belt; his snug leggings fit into high boots. He was a skinny man; his clothes seemed too big for him, hanging on his body as they did.

To Karl Oskar the strangers walk reminded him of his brother Robert. But he was taller than Robert, and as he came closer Karl Oskar could not discern any likeness to his brother.

It must be someone who had lost his way and wanted to inquire about directions.

“Hello, Karl Oskar!”

The farmer stood openmouthed with the hoe in his hand: a stranger, in strange clothing, with a strange face, in a hoarse voice he had never heard before, called him by name.

“Don’t you recognize your brother, Karl Oskar?”

Could it be possible that someone was trying to pretend to be the brother who had left for California four years before?

“I’m back from the California Trail!”

The evening was still light; Karl Oskar peered more closely at the newcomer, looked him in the eye, and began to recognize him, feeling rather than seeing who it was. His younger brother, Robert, was standing in front of him.

Slowly, almost hesitantly, Karl Oskar put down his hoe and offered his hand: “Back at last! Welcome, Robert!”

“Thanks, Karl Oskar. Didn’t you recognize. .?”

“Well, you’ve grown taller. And changed!”

It was the height that had confused him; Robert had grown several inches — that was only natural, he had been gone four years. But the clothes; he had left in his old Swedish wadmal, and now he returned dressed like an American trapper. The greatest change, however, was in his face. When Karl Oskar had last seen his brother’s face it had been round and full with only the first down of a beard and still with a childish softness in its contours. Now his cheeks were cavernous, bones protruding under the scabby, pale-yellow skin which looked as if worms had gnawed it. Deep, dark gray furrows underlined his eyes. It was a ravished youth-face he now saw. And when Robert smiled, black holes from missing front teeth appeared.

Robert had been eighteen when he set out. Now he was twenty-two. He was still young but he looked old.

“We thought you were dead. .”

“But I wrote — many times. .”

“Only two letters have come.”

“Well, some were lost, I guess. They often rob the mail out west.”

Karl Oskar took hold of Robert by the shoulder, holding him as if wishing to convince himself that this was really his brother: Robert’s body was wasted to bones and sinews.

“Nice clothes you have!”

“Did you think I would return looking like a ragbag, Karl Oskar?”

And Robert again smiled his black, toothless smile.

“I came up the river with the steamboat — to St. Paul. Then I got a ride with an ox team. The last part I walked. You have roads through the forest now. .”

He interrupted himself with a racking, hollow cough, accompanied by a growling noise from inside his chest. “I caught a cold on the steamboat.”

He turned and looked up at the new main house. “You’ve raised some house, Karl Oskar!”

“It isn’t as big as I planned but it’ll do.”

“Two stories!”

Karl Oskar replied that he had not yet had time to finish the inside of the upper story, but downstairs they had one large room for daily use, a bedroom for the children, and a good-sized kitchen. He had built sturdy fireplaces so they would be warm in winter.

Robert had only praise for the new house, so pleasant on the slope under the maples, which gave shade in summer and protection in winter. And the maples were full and handsome. When he compared the new house with the old log cabin, he realized that things had improved for his brother while he had been away.

“Let’s go home!” said Karl Oskar, and picked up the hoe from among the furrows.

“I see you’ve started to plant Indian corn.”

“This is the second year — it’s well worth it. And I’ve sown wheat for three years now. Wheat and corn go best in Minnesota.”

Yes, Robert knew that wheat was king of the grains in America, and Indian corn the queen. And he thought that much had indeed changed since he left.

In a burst of brotherly affection Karl Oskar put his arm on Robert’s shoulder as they walked up to the house. He had been almost sure that his brother was dead. Now joy at his return and bafflement at the changes in him mingled within Karl Oskar: Robert’s emaciated body, his jaundiced, unhealthy complexion, the hollowness of his voice, his stiff motions — something of life itself was missing in Robert. He stooped as he walked — the halting gait of an old man. Perhaps he had grown too tall to carry his body erect, perhaps he was forced to stoop a little. His brother was ten years younger than he, yet he didn’t seem young any more. What was the matter with him? Was he sick?

“I don’t think Kristina will recognize you either, Robert.”

They entered the new house through the kitchen door at the back. Kristina stood at the hearth tending the pot containing the pea soup for their supper.

After a momentary look of surprise and hesitation she gave a cry of recognition: “Robert! Robert! Are you back. .?”

Her voice was filled with joy; she threw her arms around her brother-in-law. Her throat choked with tears, so moved was she. It was with difficulty that she found words to express her feeling.

“You recognized me sooner than Karl Oskar!”

“I’ve missed you terribly!” she said. “But I’ve always been sure you would come back!”

Robert unshouldered his rucksack and dropped it on the floor.

“You come dressed like an American gentleman,” continued Kristina. “And you have gown terribly tall — but so skinny. .?”

The children came running into the kitchen but they were shy with the newcomer when he approached them. Robert had been away so long they had had time to forget him. Only Johan remembered: “You are the uncle who lived with us in the old house!”

“You’ve grown a lot, Johan. How old are you now?”

“Nine!”

Robert picked up Dan and lifted him high in the air: “You lay in swaddling clothes when I left!”

“We have one more little one now,” said Kristina. “A girl we call Ulrika — she’s thirteen months.”

Robert picked up the girl too and lifted her into the air; but her uncle’s intimacy did not please Ulrika — she began to yell at the top of her voice and he had to put her down. Then Robert felt in his pocket and pulled out a bag of sweets which he divided among the five children. After this they were no longer shy of the stranger but jostled about him.

Karl Oskar sniffed the aroma from the pot on the fire; pea soup with boiled pork was to him a delicious dish and he knew his brother liked it. What luck Kristina had such fine fare today; Robert looked as if he needed nourishing food.

“You’ve walked a long way — you must be hungry.”

“I am thirsty, rather,” said Robert. “Would you have some drinking water, Kristina?”

She handed him a quart measure which she had filled from the wooden bucket on the floor against the chimney wall. He drank it down, with noticeable enjoyment. “Wonderful water! Did you find a spring?”

Karl Oskar told him that he had dug a well in the slope during the first year but it gave brown water with a brackish taste to it and in a long drought the well went dry. Then last summer he had found a spring in the oak stand behind the old cabin. It gave this clear, fresh water — the best drinking water one could wish. It was about a ten-minute walk to the spring but the water was well worth it.

Robert said, “Good water is worth any walk!”

“Where’s Arvid?” asked Kristina. “Did he come back with you?”

“No, Arvid didn’t come back with me.”

“But you were together. .?”

“Yes, we were together. But then we parted.”

“Where is Arvid now?”

“He is out there. He stayed.”

“Stayed. .?”

“You mean Arvid remained in the goldfields?” interrupted Karl Oskar in surprise.

“Yes, he remained. He is still there.”

“Oh?” said Kristina and looked questioningly at her brother-in-law.

“Yes, Arvid stayed behind.”

Robert’s replies to their questions were short and indifferent, as if they did not concern him.

Karl Oskar tried again. “I guess neither you nor Arvid had much luck? Or do you carry your gold with you in that sack?”

He pointed to his brother’s rucksack — it was made of thick, excellent skin and looked new.

“Do you think I could carry the gold with me? I can tell you’ve never been on the Trail!”

Robert smiled his broad, toothless smile; so Karl Oskar thought a gold digger could carry his gold with him? That he would come with a sack of gold on his back when he returned? Gold was heavy, almost the heaviest thing that existed. No one was able to carry gold very far. And one could easily be attacked and robbed along the way. Oh no! One put the gold in safekeeping as soon as one found it. One didn’t carry it in one’s pocket, not a single nugget could one risk. Every grain was of value and was well taken care of. He had learned how to handle and keep gold: one put it in a bank for safekeeping.

Karl Oskar eyed Kristina as he listened to his brother. He winked knowingly. She was irresolute as to how to interpret it.

“Isn’t supper ready?” wondered Karl Oskar.

The peas had not yet boiled enough, replied Kristina. But she could see that Robert was worn out from his journey; he could go into the gable room and lie down while she got supper ready. Anyway he would have to stay in there with the children, she thought. Only she and Karl Oskar and the baby slept in the big room, the living room, as they called it.

Karl Oskar showed his brother to the bedroom. He would have time to inspect their house later, he told him — not that there was much to show; as yet they had only a few pieces of furniture but he kept making more whenever time permitted. Wouldn’t Robert lie down? He looked as if his legs were a little shaky after the long walk.

Karl Oskar went back to the kitchen. “My brother isn’t like himself,” he said to Kristina. “His face is yellow. .”

“He has had a hard time, you can see that.”

“I believe something is wrong with him.”

“He might have some ailment, his hands feel hot.”

“He said he caught a cold on the steamboat.”

Kristina was taking plates from the open shelf, setting the table. “But he sounds as though he had luck in the goldfields. Wasn’t that what he said?”

“Yes, I heard it.”

“He talked as if he had put his gold in the bank. He may be rich, perhaps.”

“It sounds that way.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“Not a single word of it!”

“He makes it all up, you think?”

“I know Robert by now! You remember his lies on the ship? Remember the dead Indian in the treetop?”

Karl Oskar had a good memory. When they had landed in New York, Robert had spread a rumor that their captain was a slave trader and intended to sell them to the infidel Turk. It had caused great trouble. And during their first winter here it had been the incident at the Indian cliff. Robert had found a dead Indian, hanging from a treetop, and he had sworn that the Indian had shot arrows at him!

“He has lied before, that’s true,” admitted Kristina. “It’s a failing with him.”

“He is not going to fool me any more!” declared Karl Oskar with finality.

Kristina caught the sharp determination in his words. “Why would Robert come and lie to us again?” she asked.

“Perhaps he is ashamed to return empty-handed.”

“But he has bought new clothes and a new rucksack.”

“He must have worked for someone and earned a little.”

But Kristina felt that Karl Oskar was too eager to suspect the brother who had barely crossed their threshold. Why couldn’t they believe he had found gold? In California even a child might happen on the right place. And Robert had been gone four years — plenty of time to roam far and wide.

Karl Oskar said that he did not intend to ask Robert if he had found any gold; not even here in America did such miracles happen. To him it was enough that his brother had returned alive. A merciful Providence must have looked after him. One couldn’t also ask of Providence that Robert return with riches.

“I feel sorry for Robert,” he added. “He must be ailing. But until he shows me his gold I won’t believe a word of it! This time he won’t make a fool of me!”

Roberts unexpected return caused great excitement in the settler home; Kristina fell behind with her chores and supper was delayed. But at last the family gathered around the table in the kitchen, Robert between his brother and his sister-in-law. The children gaped at him and little Ulrika clung to his knee begging for more sweets.

Kristina looked closely at Robert. “You must have had a hard time of it?”

“Hunting gold is hard on one’s health.”

“Have you ailed in any particular way?”

“Everyone on the Trail suffers from the gold-sickness.”

But Robert did not further describe it. He looked around the new kitchen with its painted walls. In four years a person changed, and on the Trail one changed very fast. If he were to tell them all he had experienced they would have to sit at table here from now till Christmas, and still he wouldn’t get through more than half.

“We won’t ask you anything tonight,” said Kristina. “You must be tired.”

She filled his plate brimful with pea soup: he must eat and then get some sleep. She would put Harald’s and Johan’s bed in order for him; the two big boys could sleep on the floor for the time being.

“You are very kind, Kristina. You remember the food you prepared when I left — it lasted a long way on the journey. You’ve been kind to me in many ways.”

“You’re using a lot of English in your talk, Robert.”

Yes, he said, during these years he had really learned to speak English and it was a great help in traveling through this country. But with his own people he would of course always use his mother tongue, except when he forgot himself.

Before Robert had time to empty his soup plate, Kristina refilled it. “Put on some weight now! You’re only skin and bones!”

But two plates was all Robert could manage. When they left the table he picked up the quart measure from the hearth shelf, filled it with spring water from the bucket, and drank. “Good water is wonderful! Better than anything else!”

After supper Kristina sat down to give the breast to Ulrika. Then she put the girl in the cradle. Karl Oskar had recently put rockers under it and was mighty proud of his handiwork. Robert looked it over carefully. If only he had had such a cradle with him in the goldfields, he said. Gold had to be treated exactly like babies — put in cradles and rocked until all sand and refuse and dirt was winnowed away and at last it lay pure — clean and glittering in the bottom.

Kristina forgot what she had just promised and asked, “Where do they find gold?”

“All over. In the most unusual places.”

Gold could be found not only in the earth and the river sand and the rocks, explained Robert, but sometimes. . well, as an example he would like to tell them about something that happened the first year he was in California. Among his gang washing gold in a stream was a Negro. One evening when the gang had finished for the day and were on their way home, the Negro suddenly became very ill. He got such an intense stomachache that all he could do was to lie on the ground and yell to high heaven. Nobody could understand what was the matter with him and there was nothing to do for the sick man. He was unable to walk to the tent, so they left the yelling and whining Negro where he lay. Next morning when they started out for the stream the Negro still lay on his stomach where they had left him. But now he was quiet and yelled no more — he was dead.

Then one of the men guessed what had caused the man’s peculiar stomachache. He took his knife and cut open the cadaver. When he opened the stomach the glitter of gold was revealed; the insides of the Negro were gilded, filled with nuggets and gold sand.

The Negro had been a gold thief. He had stolen the gold from the others, a pinch now and then, and had hidden the gold in a safe place. He had put it in his mouth and swallowed it. He had of course expected the gold to come out intact when he went to the privy. But that was where be figured wrong; the nuggets caused a stoppage that killed the poor fool.

Now the thief’s comrades took back the gold he had stolen from them, cleaned out and washed each of his intestines. When they exchanged it for cash to divide it among themselves, it turned out to be worth four thousand dollars.

“There were eight men in the gang, and each one got five hundred dollars,” concluded Robert. Well, that was how one could find gold: he himself had been one of those digging for gold in a man’s stomach.

Kristina listened in horror to her brother-in-law. “How could they! That was terrible!”

Because of the heat the kitchen door stood open, and Karl Oskar sat on the threshold where he could still see in the lingering dusk, filing his wood saw.

“You have had horrible experiences, Robert!” said Kristina, looking at him with ever-widening eyes. He turned his head as she spoke to him, so that his right ear was turned toward her; his hearing must still be bad in his left.

“Did you hear that, Karl Oskar?”

Karl Oskar had heard every word but he acted as if he hadn’t been listening. He filed away at his saw, filed and kept silent. Once his eyes sought Kristina’s, as much as to say: you understand, don’t you?

Kristina was so stirred by Robert’s story that she could not hold back any longer — she must know. “Robert. . is it true. . have you really found gold in California?”

“I am satisfied.”

“Is it true? I mean. .”

She did not wish to hurt his feelings by sounding incredulous, she was searching for suitable words.

“You know why I left, Kristina,” he replied. “And I wrote in my letters I would not come back until I was a rich man.”

“And now you are rich?”

“I have done my last days work and had my last master. I have plenty. There’ll be enough for all three of us!”

Robert was standing close to the cradle, as if addressing himself to the child. He had said, almost casually, that he was so rich he had enough for himself, his brother, and his brother’s wife!

Kristina’s foot, rocking the cradle, came to a standstill when she heard that she was to share in his riches.

“I have plenty, Kristina! Of that you can be sure!”

But she sat in speechless confusion. Should she answer him: I don’t believe you! You are not rich! It’s a lie! But he spoke so calmly, so irrefutably. His words were as confident as if he were reading from Holy Writ.

From the doorway only the rasping of the file against the saw teeth could be heard. Karl Oskar must have heard his brother: I am rich. I have enough for all three of us! But he was unmoved. He remained silent and continued to file.

Karl Oskar had heard Robert, but he only felt that his brother had not learned anything from the times he had been found out and proven to be a liar. At his return he seemed more impudent and cheeky with his lies than ever before.

Was it right to pretend to believe him? Was it good for Robert himself? Wouldn’t it be kinder to speak out now and end his tall stories? Once and for all put an end to his lying?

The rasping and grating from the saw stopped; file in hand, Karl Oskar walked over to his younger brother. “Please, Robert, brother of mine. Stop lying to us! I can’t bear it any longer — it annoys me!”

Robert slowly turned his right ear toward him in order to hear better.

“I can’t stand a brother lying like that! Stop it!”

“You don’t believe me, Karl Oskar?” Robert asked in a dry tone.

Kristina looked in apprehension from one brother to the other.

“You know you’ve brought no gold with you. But no one holds it against you. We are glad you’re back, glad you are alive!”

“You think I haven’t anything. .? You think I lie. .?” Robert sounded deeply hurt. “All right! All right!”

He turned quickly on his heel and walked through the door into the bedroom.

“You will only drive him away!” said Kristina, reproaching Karl Oskar. “You could have waited, at least this first evening.”

“I can’t bear this nonsense! And I had to talk honestly with my only brother.”

But Robert returned in a moment with his new rucksack in his hand. His brother and sister-in-law looked puzzled as he put it down on the kitchen floor and unlatched the thick leather thongs that secured it. From the sack he pulled out a small leather bag which looked as if it had been badly worn. He opened it and pulled out a paper bundle. Without a word he handed it to Karl Oskar. Again he stuck his hand into the bag and pulled out a second bundle of rustling paper which he laid on Kristina’s knees.

“These notes are for you. I don’t have any gold in my sack. But these have the same value as gold.”

Karl Oskar stared at the bundle of bills in his hand. Kristina looked down at her apron; on it lay a bundle of paper money.

“I drew out a little cash for pocket money.”

Robert put the leather bag back into the rucksack and leaned over the cradle holding the fretful baby; the little girl was restless and wouldn’t go to sleep.

Robert smiled at the child as he spoke casually to her parents: “It’s your money. Take it and enjoy it.”

He had taken out some of the contents of his leather bag and given to his brother and sister-in-law. After this they became silent, dumbfounded. Now it was only Robert who talked, to the little girl in the cradle, pretending she answered.

Then he turned to Karl Oskar, as if he too had been a little child in need of instruction and advice. In order to make use of gold it had to be turned into money. A bank in Bloomfield, Indiana, had changed the gold into notes. The bank had taken one seventh of the gold value for its trouble; American banks were awfully greedy. But at least he had his possessions in safekeeping and he could draw money whenever he needed cash.

“These few bucks are for you, Karl Oskar and Kristina.”

Karl Oskar looked embarrassed, as if his brother had tricked him in some shameful way, as if his brother had cheated him with this gift.

The evening darkness was beginning to fill the kitchen; Karl Oskar lit a taper in the wooden candlestick on the mantel; then he took a note from his bundle and inspected it in the light. He turned it: it was green on one side and black on the other, the colors he had always seen on American notes. And on both sides, in all four corners, was imprinted: 100. In eight places it was clearly indicated the note was worth one hundred dollars.

And in the center of the green side Karl Oskar could read in big black letters: INDIANA STATE BANK, BLOOMFIELD, INDIANA.

At last he spoke again, mumbling as if dazed. “If someone hasn’t hexed my eyes this must be a hundred-dollar bill.”

And he began to look through the bundle which Robert had tossed to him like waste paper: all the bills were identical. They were wrinkled and spotty, soiled by dirty fingers, but the value of each was the same — one hundred dollars.

Karl Oskar counted them slowly; there were twenty in the bundle. He counted them again, he wet his fingers and counted them a third time; they still amounted to twenty.

“You gave me five dollars when I left,” said Robert. “I am paying you back with interest.”

Kristina had not yet touched the bundle in her lap; she only sat and stared at it as if it were a bird that suddenly had flown into the kitchen and perched on her knee. Now she handed the bills to Karl Oskar.

He counted his wife’s money also; the bills were exactly like the ones in his own bundle, and there were also twenty of them.

“Four thousand dollars in cash. .” He spoke as in a deep trance. “Four thousand in cash. .!”

And Robert called this pocket money.

“I promised to share with you when I came back from California.”

Karl Oskar Nilsson looked askance at his younger brother. He was deeply embarrassed, feeling that he had been wrong, but he could not force himself to admit it.

His sight must be failing; he must try to see aright again. He held a couple of the bills against the candle flame, turned them, rubbed them between his thumb and forefinger, let the light shine on them again, thumbed them again: were they real money? Wasn’t the whole thing some swindle?

Robert smiled. “You can see the money comes from the Indiana State Bank. If you think I lie. .”

He added that he had delivered four sacks full of nuggets to the bank in Bloomfield. He had asked for smaller bills — fifty and twenty dollars — but the bank didn’t have enough on hand to let him have all he wanted; they were printing new notes as fast as they could. A great many gold diggers had returned from California and turned in their sacks at the same bank. It would probably take a couple of months before all he owned could be exchanged for ready cash.

“You mean you have more. .?” Karl Oskar’s voice was thick.

“Of course! Much more!”

Robert had given his brother and sister-in-law four thousand dollars in cash. And as yet they had not said one word of thanks. Karl Oskar and Kristina could not thank him, they could say nothing at all, because they were overwhelmed by such a gift.

This was something they must think through, it took time, they must get their bearings.

“Now go out and buy what you need, Kristina!”

She grabbed Robert’s hand with both her own, tears gushing. “You told the truth. . You have had luck. . You give us all this. . God bless you, Robert. .!”

“Now don’t let’s talk of gold any more.” He yawned and grinned broadly, seeming thoroughly tired of the subject. “I can’t tell you how sick of it I am — I’ve got too much of the damn stuff!”

Kristina leaped up. “I must make your bed! You must be dead tired. .”

She had noticed him moving his hand to his left ear time and again; he had had an ache in that ear ever since his master, Aron of Nybacken, had boxed it so hard that something sensitive inside it had broken.

“Does your ear still bother you?” she asked compassionately.

“Yes, it carries on something awful in there.”

And in a lower voice, as if wishing to share a confidence with Kristina, he said something strange she was to remember afterward: “My ear can talk! Do you understand. .? You should only hear what it tells me during the nights!”

— 2—

Robert went to bed, but Karl Oskar and Kristina sat up late on this strange, confusing evening.

Karl Oskar spread the forty hundred-dollar bills before him — they covered most of the table. He sat and stared at this new tablecloth of green and black.

Four thousand American dollars were worth the same as fifteen thousand Swedish riksdaler. Before he emigrated he had sold his farm, Korpamoen, for fifteen hundred riksdaler. Ten times that sum was now spread before him. On the table in his kitchen this evening lay the value often farms. A fortune!

The money spread under his eyes could change their whole life.

If only there wasn’t something wrong with his sight. If these green-black papers on the table were what they were supposed to be. For he couldn’t entirely believe. . he wasn’t quite convinced. . It had happened too suddenly. Would this evening, with the turn of a hand, bring to an end his five years’ struggle for cash?

“I felt right away that Robert wasn’t lying this time,” said Kristina.

“We mustn’t lose our heads,” insisted Karl Oskar. “We can’t be sure.”

“Do you still doubt him?”

“The bills might be worthless.”

“Do you think your brother is a counterfeiter?”

No, he didn’t mean his brother had printed the bills himself. But there was so much confusion about money in America. Some states were flooded with bills entirely without value, printed by banks that had opened only to swindle people. Robert’s bills were well printed and consequently suspicious. They must be cautious.

Kristina felt a hundred-dollar bill. “They’re creased and crumpled — they look like good ones.”

When she found time she would iron out the big bills and remove the grease spots and dirt. Such big bills ought to be clean and smooth. Then she was sure they would pass for their full value.

“I had better go to the bank in Stillwater and ask them,” said Karl Oskar. “But I can’t get away before Saturday. Then we’ll know what Robert’s money is worth.”

Today was Monday; he had promised to go with Algot Svensson to the land office in Stillwater on Saturday to witness his neighbor’s right to his claim. He would take the bills with him to the bank and ask their value and if the bank was willing to accept them. Before the end of the week he would know. And before that time they must not mention to a single soul the four thousand dollars which had found its way into his home so unexpectedly.

Kristina said that this was riches. First of all they must now find a good place for safekeeping. Everything else they would think about by and by. . Forty bills, each one worth a hundred dollars! If they had had a single one of these bills when they had arrived five years ago then it would have saved them many troubles and privations. And if they had had this sum in Sweden they would never have needed to emigrate. . It was strange to think of that.

“Dare we keep the money in the house?”

Karl Oskar thought there would be no danger; no one would search for riches here. Robbers and thieves knew that whatever else they might find in a settler’s house, it would not be cash.

With loving hands Kristina gathered the bills together into one big bundle, wrapped them in her silken kerchief, and put them down in the bottom of her Swedish chest. It was the safest place she could think of. And yet it would be difficult for her to sleep tonight — what a worry to have fifteen thousand riksdaler in cash in the house! They must be careful with the fire tonight.

Karl Oskar went out to the stable to look after a sick calf; he should have done it earlier but this evening he had forgotten both people and animals. He gave the calf some milk in a bucket and looked to see that his livestock was all right; one never knew: some animal might get tangled up in its chain and choke itself to death. Never would he go to bed of an evening without first checking that all was well with the animals in his stable.

When he returned Kristina had already gone to bed. In this new house they each had a bed on opposite walls of the big room. He started to undress although it would be a long time before he could go to sleep tonight. His head buzzed with questions: What about this money? Was it real or not? And how had Robert got his hands on it? He couldn’t have earned that much through work; had he actually found gold? Kristina had said that a little child could have such luck. . Well, that could be true. And in California one might dig gold in the earth as easily as potatoes here in Minnesota. If one had luck. Luck! While he had slaved here on his claim every working day for four years and not been able to save a cent of cash, Robert had dug up a few lumps of gold which in one turn had made him rich — so rich that he never need do another days work in his whole life. At least that was what he said. Could it be the truth? It didn’t seem right, if it had happened that way. He had never believed in success except through honest work; luck and good fortune could aid for a while, but the only permanent reward came from honest work. If Robert had told the truth, then he — Karl Oskar — had been wrong in his thinking.

He always tried to keep a clear head. And he must do the same this time. He must not be fooled. In America one heard so many tales of swindles. During the last year so many good-for-nothings had arrived in the Territory; they didn’t want to break the land, only speculate in it. They wanted to be rich without working, just like Robert. They were parasites, vermin, trying to live off the settlers, like bloodsucking lice lived on the human body. It always irritated him to hear of these lazy speculators who had descended on them and who wouldn’t leave. As yet there was no real order in the Territory; the land was too vast, the farmers too few, and the speculators and the swindlers too many.

He said goodnight to his wife, who still lay awake in her bed. He had barely put his head against the pillow before a thought came to him which made him quickly sit up again. The paper! Hemlandet! He could find out right now!

Why hadn’t he thought of that at once? Every week the Swedish paper had a column — Bank Swindles — which enumerated the banks that printed and issued valueless or below-par money. Recently he had counted twelve banks in the column. Wasn’t one of them an Indiana bank? Wasn’t the Indiana State Bank of Bloomfield listed in the paper?

He could find out this very moment about Robert’s riches in hundred-dollar bills. He had saved every copy of Hemlandet. He had put them away on a shelf in the cupboard within arm’s reach of his bed.

He almost called out to Kristina: We needn’t wait till I go to Stillwater on Saturday! We can find out right away if we have become rich tonight! Or — if we are as poor as before.

But from his wife’s even breathing he could hear she had already gone to sleep. He mustn’t disturb her. If she were to learn the truth, the truth as he suspected it to be, she would take the disappointment so hard that she wouldn’t go to sleep again. Let her rest, let her be rich for one night. Tomorrow would be soon enough for her to learn, if it were so. But he himself must know the truth this evening.

Cautiously, silently, Karl Oskar rose from his bed. He lit a candle and stood in his nightshirt before the cupboard. From the shelf he took the accumulated copies of Hemlandet, every one of them, put them on the table, pulled up a chair, and began to read.

The latest paper had come on Friday. He found the headline: Bank Swindles. In that column the Indiana State Bank was not listed. But in the adjoining column his eyes fell on a notice about counterfeit twenty dollar gold pieces that the public was warned about: they were easy to recognize, the world gold above the head of the figure representing Liberty was present on the false coin. But this did not concern him; it was not a question of stamped coins, it was bills. .

Danjel Andreasson had once last year been cheated with a five dollar coin that a hog buyer from St. Paul had fooled him with. This coin had even been stamped IN GOD WE TRUST and that was why he had accepted it. Afterwards Danjel had been greatly disturbed that counterfeiters announced on their coins that they had faith in God. He had never thought that in America — the Lord’s Promised Land — such dishonest people existed who would invoke God’s name in their own counterfeiting.

Karl Oskar picked up the next copy. He went through issue after issue of the paper and read all the lists of banks which cheated people with valueless bills. He found the names of only two banks in Indiana. But the one which had printed Robert’s bills — the Indiana State Bank of Bloomfield — he did not see. That bank was not listed.

With a deep sigh he blew out the candle: the bills must be real then. Robert had probably told the truth.

When he crept into his bed for the second time this evening and pulled the blanket over him, Kristina awoke.

“Karl Oskar — are you asleep?”

She had been dreaming that she was washing and ironing hundred-dollar bills. She had moved the ironing board out into the barn and there she had pressed the long green bills, so large they had hung over the sides of the board! Karl Oskar too had been in her dream: he had the big shovel and shoveled so fast that the bills flew all over the place and up against the roof of the barn. She dreamed that they had harvested a whole crop of hundred-dollar bills and now were about to thresh them — she ironed and ironed while perspiration ran off her body.

“I was so glad when I awoke. For after all, I had dreamed the truth!”

For it was still this Monday evening when the gold seeker had returned; when he stepped across their threshold and had brought riches into their house.

XIV. BUT THE RETURNED GOLD SEEKER DOES NOT SLEEP

What does Robert’s injured ear tell him during the night?

His left ear buzzes and rings and keeps him awake. As soon as he puts his head on the pillow in the evening the ear begins to roar and thunder, it sings and rings and tinkles, songs are heard, bells toll, shots are fired. The buzz and the roar can be of such intensity that it sounds like a storm at sea in there. In bed at night his heart moves up and throbs in his ear. Each beat feels like a wasp’s sting, like a knife point. It is difficult to sleep when one feels the heart-sting in one’s ear with each beat.

It cracks and crackles, it peeps and weeps and wails. It is too crowded with a heart in there — it swells and pushes, it boils and seethes and aches. He has one heart inside his chest and another in his ear, and the ear-heart stings him many times a minute as he counts its beats.

The gold seeker lies awake and counts the beats. They are his own sounds, those he keeps hidden in there. No one can hear them except he himself; they belong to him only; what his left ear tells him at night is his secret.

It has been aching since that day when he lay on his back under the open sky, whistling and singing, although he had been told to dig a ditch. His master had come upon him and lifted the biggest hand he had ever seen on a human being. The enormous, heavy fist had hit him smack on his left ear.

He had emigrated to get away from masters, but his ear accompanied him with its buzzing and turmoil. He had run away from service, he had crossed the ocean, but the sound in his ear remained with him. He had fled the Old World for the New, but the aching ear accompanied him. It followed him on the road to California, and now it had come back with him. He had traveled over lakes and rivers, he had walked across plains and deserts, he had journeyed thousands of miles over land and water, but the ear still pursued him. He had not been able to escape from it — wherever he fled it followed him, clung to him. The echo of a box on the ear in the Old World still reverberated; his persecution by his left ear was the punishment he must suffer because be did not want to dig ditches.

And now he has come back to his brother’s house, and the ear is with him in the bed where he rests. And his heart moves into his ear again, where it pushes and roars and fills his head. He feels the sensation of stinging pain in sensitive tissue each time his heart beats. He turns his head on the pillow to the left, he turns it to the right, he raises it, puts it down, but the ear is the same. He rests on his right cheek, he changes over and lies on his left cheek, he rests on his forehead, but the knife-cuts remain inside the Ear.

He had fled from his service, he had fled from his homeland, he had fled from his masters, but wherever in the world he flees, he has a guardian he cannot escape, a pursuer he cannot get rid of, a master he cannot flee from: the ear.

And so he has been forced to get along with his eternal companion, who keeps him awake during the night hours. He lies still and does not try to escape any more, for he knows he can’t succeed. The pursuer forces his company on him; the ear forces him to listen to all its sounds. It tells him, relates to him in detail, all it has recorded: human voices and animal cries, laughter and weeping, sounds of joy and of pain and of sorrow, his own words and those of others, the voice of his friend Arvid, shouts, the swearing of men whose names are foreign to him. He hears the creaking wagon wheels in the desert sand, neighing horses, bellowing oxen, lowing cows, braying mules. The whipping, wind-driven sand, the pelting rain, the noisy great rivers, the sweeping storm over the prairie buffalo grass. It is the echo of shots and barking dogs, of muleteers hollering, fighting voices, drunken men’s slobberings, voices in delirium, calls, danger warnings, nature’s forces at play — every audible sound and noise.

The ear remembers much he himself has forgotten, or has tried to forget — the ear digs up the forgotten past and makes it vivid and present. So did it happen! Exactly so! And he lies awake and listens as it brings back to him every one of the four years of days and nights on the California Trail.

What does the injured ear say to Robert during the nights?

XV. THE FIRST NIGHT — ROBERT’S EAR SPEAKS

(There you lie — and here I am! You’ll never be rid of me! We share our secrets. But don’t worry: no one except you can hear me! My voice belongs to you only. All I say remains between us! It stays right here, with. If another ear tried to listen in — how silly! It wouldn’t hear the slightest little buzz, not the smallest whisper! So don’t worry! Not a peep from me!

Listen closely to me now! How was it? Do you remember how it happened — that first summer — that time when Arvid wanted to — well, you remember what he had in mind. .?)

— 1—

It was April when they started on their journey.

On the paddle steamer from Stillwater they got jobs as dishwashers in exchange for free transportation to St. Louis. Together they had twenty-five dollars, well hidden in a skin pouch.

The last time they had traveled on the Mississippi they had gone upstream on the Red Wing; now they traveled downstream on the New Orleans.

On his first journey up the Mississippi — the world’s greatest moving water — Robert had heard a song about liberty and freedom: I will be free, as the wind of the earth and the waves on the sea. . Ever after he had been lured by that song and had trusted its promise. But then he had been a passenger; now he was a dishwasher below deck. He and Arvid sat in a dark, narrow, dirty galley and peeled potatoes for the cook. Whole barrelfuls of potatoes were rolled up to them, and as soon as they saw the bottom of one, another appeared. During the whole long, light spring day, as the New Orleans glided by the verdant river shores, Robert and Arvid sat in the galley, the peelings wriggling like snakes about their feet. By afternoon the heap of peelings reached their knees, by evening it was up against their thighs.

“A helluva lot of potaters they grow in America,” said Arvid.

“America is the homeland of the potato,” said Robert. “The Indians invented this root.”

“Then the heathens must be quite brainy,” said Arvid, who liked potatoes.

Late in the evening, when the piles of peelings had reached all the way to their groins, the youths were liberated and could go onto a lower deck. They were forbidden, however, to go onto the upper deck, where the paying passengers promenaded and viewed the wonders of the shores along the world’s broadest river.

As they steamed south, the days grew warmer and it became oppressive in the narrow galley. Any grown person can with equanimity peel potatoes for a few hours, perhaps a whole day, and a patient individual can perhaps peel for a few days, even a whole week, without despairing. But from morning to night, day after day, week after week, penned up in a dark corner on a ship during beautiful spring days, would be enough to make the stoutest heart fail. Arvid sat half buried in a nest of peelings sad and depressed. But Robert comforted him; they must keep this in mind: admitted, they were on a boat peeling potatoes — but they were on their way to California: they were peeling their way to the Land of Gold! Once there they would sit buried in gold sand up to their thighs! And when they returned from the gold fields it would be as passengers on the upper deck, where they would promenade, smoking cigars and viewing the scenery! They would wear broad gold watch chains across their vests and heavy gold rings on each finger, every pocket of their clothing would be filled with large, rustling bills!

Spring advanced as the New Orleans floated farther south on the river, and an ever hotter sun shone down on her deck. The Mississippi widened, the shores grew more lush and the vegetation richer. And the heat increased in the galley under the deck where two Swedish farm hands sat and peeled their way to California.

The crew members who did the loading, fired the engines, filled the bunkers, served the food on the New Orleans were nearly all white men, although the officers on the steamboat preferred a black crew. This time, however, there hadn’t been enough Negroes; there were only about half a dozen. The command preferred Negroes because they were pleasanter to the passengers, happier and jollier; they entertained the passengers. The blacks could also stand the heat better than the whites; and they endured the beatings they got, while such rough treatment was not allowed with a white crew.

One evening Arvid and Robert watched as a uniformed officer beat up a disobedient Negro. Arvid wondered; were they allowed to do that to people in this country, as they did at home? Robert explained that only black-skinned people were allowed to be beaten in America, for it was written in the laws of the American Republic that all white people were equal. What luck, said Arvid, that time when God decided what color their skins should be.

In the evenings the crew — firemen, loaders, kitchen helpers, waiters — gathered on their own deck and lit torches. The flickering torches reflected in the dark river water on either side of the boat while the crew sang their songs, strange songs whose words had little meaning:

Corn and pudding and tapioca pie,

Hi ho, hi ho!

The geese play cards and the chicks drink wine,

Hi ho, hi ho!

In the crowd, on the shore,

In New Orleans,

There stands my girl on the shore!

She is young and she weeps and she is mine,

The girl on the shore in New Orleans!

Corn and pudding and tapioca pie,

Hi ho, hi ho!

When the geese play cards and the chicks drink wine,

While floating down the river to the sea!

Robert and Arvid thought that tapioca pie must taste good, and they were disappointed never to sample it.

They counted their days on the river, and the barrels of potatoes they peeled through but which never came to an end. They felt that through their work they were paying too much for their transportation on the New Orleans. But they must save their cash.

At last one day when the bell rang they heard the words they had been listening for each time the boat docked: St. Louis! They were free! The two boys threw their peeling knives onto the deck with shouts of joy, picked up their rucksacks, and ran down the gangplank. They had traveled the first stretch of the road and it hadn’t cost them a penny.

They had come to a place with crowds of people and jostling animals and vehicles on the streets. Stillwater was a river town on the St. Croix, but St. Louis was a larger town on a larger river. It was the biggest town they had ever seen, except for New York. It seemed to be fenced in by the river. But it wasn’t yet completed, and outside of New York they hadn’t seen a town in America that was completed: all were a-building, all were like a shell of a house, ready to be finished up. In St. Louis timbers and boards were strewn over the streets, hammering and digging went on everywhere. People sat eating bread and fruit outside shacks that were so primitive the boys wondered if they were lived in or in the process of being built. A great many Negroes mingled in the crowds, half-naked, woolly-haired, and Arvid remarked that there was much black hide to be beaten in this town. The blacks were slaves, they knew, slavery being permitted here in the South, but they didn’t see a single one in chains or shackles.

In St. Louis the two boys got along better than they had in New York the previous year. I am a stranger here, Robert had told the people then, but he had not been able to make anyone understand. Now he could say almost anything he wanted in English — although a little haltingly and not always according to his language book — and he understood most of what people said to him. It was harder for Arvid; he did not know many of the English words as yet, even though he usually pretended to understand everything. Robert did not let on that he knew Arvid pretended; Arvid had never learned to read or write his own mother tongue — how could he learn English?

From the pier the boys followed a broad street, perhaps the town’s Broadway, although it wasn’t half as wide as the street of that name in New York. But here, too, wonderful fruits were sold, many kinds whose names they did not know. At one stand they bought oranges, and sat down on some boxes against the tin wall of a nearby shed to eat them.

The sun felt good on their faces as they sat eating the juicy fruit; this was a fine place, and summer had already arrived.

Robert and Arvid had traveled over water to St. Louis. Now they would continue over land to California. Robert had figured out they would walk as far as possible on that road; their own legs would have to pay for the journey which their money couldn’t afford. But all who traveled over land, and on ground in general, needed a road. If they rode horses, or wagons, a road was required. Even those who used their legs must have a road bed to walk on.

Now, where was the road to the goldfields of California?

In Stillwater Robert had bought a map of the United States. These grew in number and size for every year; they expanded so fast that nearly every year a new map had to be printed of the Northamerican Republic. This was a country that grew night and day, throughout the week, the whole year round. Robert had therefore asked for the latest map which the president in Washington had issued as the official map for this country this year, 1851, a map with no state left off, however small, empty, and insignificant it might be. It had cost him one dollar and fifty cents for the latest edition, completely revised, but he would get back that sum with the first little grain of gold he saw on the California ground.

Arvid knew that if one had a map and a watch one could find any road in the world, however crookedly it ran and however bad its condition. Robert had the map, he himself had the watch. He pulled it from his vest pocket, the nickel watch his father, Petter of Kråkesjö, had given him as a parting gift. It was his paternal inheritance from Sweden, and Arvid had chained it to his vest buttonhole. His father’s labor had earned it for him; much sweat had gone into that watch, many long days’ toil, many evenings with a sore back. It was not an old-fashioned spindle watch with unreliable works, it had cylinder works. A cylinder watch had a more precise mechanism and kept better time — this watch kept time to the second.

And now they would have great use of this cylinder watch. If Robert’s map showed the road they must take, then this watch would show the time it would take to walk it.

Now where was the road they were to take to California and how long was it? How much farther to the gold land?

Robert spread his map of the United States across the empty boxes beside them. He had not had access to a table on the boat and had been unable to inspect it earlier. Now he looked at it carefully, and the longer he looked, the wider his eyes opened; could it be right? Was this map correct?

California, the newest state of the Union, was the long, narrow strip of land near the Pacific Ocean. If they walked overland from St. Louis straight west, they would reach the Pacific Ocean, and the sun setting in the west would point the way for them. But how long was the road?

“Let me see. .”

Robert used a six-inch pencil to measure as he figured the size of the United States. From the east coast to St. Louis the distance was exactly the length of the pencil. But then it took two whole lengths of the pencil and still another half to reach the Pacific Ocean!

He measured several times, but he couldn’t make the distance across the broad continent an inch shorter; they did not yet have one third of the way to the Pacific behind them. And the distance before them was two and a half times longer! Last year they had traveled one month through the country to Minnesota, this year from Minnesota to Missouri, and they were not yet halfway through America! Not even a third!

At this discovery Robert grew very serious. With a pencil and a map on an empty box he had obtained his first general view of the New World. It made him dizzy. He felt as if he had been kicked in his behind and flung back a couple of thousand miles. Arvid would be scared to death if he were to know how great a distance they had left to go; he had better keep the discovery to himself.

He folded the map quickly and said truthfully, “We have a goodly part left — America is broad!”

But where was the road to California? They must ask someone.

Robert and Arvid resumed their wandering through the town. Whom should they ask? Robert chose with great deliberation among the people they met on the street. Here came men riding sleek horses, dressed from head to foot in soft deerskin, with ten-inch-wide belts from which dangled revolvers and knives. But these riders sat so loftily on the horses — how could a walker dare stop them? Instead Robert turned to the crowd on foot, more simply dressed people; he asked those who had neither revolvers nor knives in their belts, feeling in some way on equal footing with them.

The road to California. .? Some replied at length, others in few words, but all replied willingly and kindly. Some smiled, thinking perhaps the question was a joke, some looked serious or surprised.

“To get to California is more complicated than you think.”

This was the general reply; some said about the same thing in different words: to travel to the goldfields was not an easy undertaking. And concerning the road there was no definite information; on this all agreed. When Robert had asked half a dozen people and added together their replies, he came to the conclusion that no road had been built — nay, not even staked out — to California!

The gold seekers found their way, as best they could, along different routes which had a name in common: the California Trail. People traveled in large parties, a thousand persons or more; the distance was over two thousand miles, and the crossing took four months — a whole summer.

But there was no specific road to the goldfields.

“No road. .?”

Disappointed, Robert repeated the words to himself: that was the silliest thing he had ever heard! In the Old Country, roads ran to the smallest hamlets where only potatoes and grain grew in the fields, but here a road was not even surveyed to the fields which produced gold! Nothing in the world could be more important than to build a wide, even road on which people could travel in comfort to the gold land!

“They could be lying to us,” suggested Arvid. “They might like to get there before us and take the gold?”

“No road!” repeated Robert without listening to his companion. “Of course there must be a road to the goldfields!”

Arvid thought for a few minutes, more intensely than was his custom; then he said: “If there is no road to California we might have trouble finding the place, or what do you think, Robert?”

They must stay in this town for a while and think over their situation. It was late in the afternoon and they began to look for a cheap boardinghouse. On the outskirts of town they found a place where they could sleep for twenty-five cents apiece. They could hardly expect to find cheaper lodgings in a big town like St. Louis. Their host was a fat Irishman who showed them their bunks in the Jameson Lodging House: mattresses filled with rotten straw, spread on the floor and for cover, torn horse blankets. Four men had to sleep on one mattress. Their sleeping companions had already gone to bed, two bearded horse grooms who slept with their boots on, even though a notice on the wall pleaded with gentlemen guests to please remove their boots before going to bed. The place smelled of manure, whether from the bedding or the sleepers.

Robert and Arvid reluctantly unstrapped their rucksacks. This was a poor lodging, but to them it smelled in some way of home since it exuded such a strong odor of stable; once they had lodged together in the stable room at Nybacken.

Their host was talkative and when he heard that the Swedish boys were on their way to California he was ready with good advice; he himself had a brother who had set out on the Trail last spring, so he could tell them all they needed to know.

There was a road to the gold land, in fact, three different roads — the Overland Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and one trail between these two, following sometimes one and sometimes the other. Most travelers used the Overland Trail, which started at Independence, Missouri.

“You must go to Independence and join the golden army!”

Robert had looked only casually at his map with its many western states and territories, all of them void of place-names, it seemed. Now he asked how far it was to Independence. The Irishman said that this town lay two hundred miles to the west of St. Louis.

Robert felt as if he had got another kick in the behind throwing him still farther back across the American continent. Two hundred miles!

Mr. Jameson continued. It was too late for them to join the caravan of gold seekers this summer, a whole month too late. It was May now, the train to California had left Independence in April and was on its way west. A new caravan would not leave until next spring. When the buffalo grass turned green next spring, then the gold seekers would gather again.

And so Robert and Arvid discovered they must join others with the same intention. But this spring it was too late to sign up in the gold army; it had already left. New grass must sprout on the prairie before they could join. They would lose a whole year.

Their host wished them goodnight and good sleep and left. They sat down on their mattress and opened their rucksacks, still full of the bread and cured pork Kristina had packed for them, and ate. The food prevented Arvid from talking; for him to talk while eating would have been as sacrilegious as swearing in church. But Robert too sat silent now as he chewed. What he had just heard required some thought.

While peeling potatoes on the boat, they had figured that their twenty-five dollars would take care of their food and lodging for a month’s travel from St. Louis to California. For they had hoped to reach the goldfields in a month, and once there they would have no further need for money.

And now this — they couldn’t get there for a whole year.

When Arvid had finished eating he took hold of the nickel chain on his vest and pulled his watch from its pocket. He said that whatever else happened on this journey, he wouldn’t sell his cylinder watch. They might have to go without food but he wouldn’t part with his watch even if they starved. It was his inheritance and could not be touched. And Arvid’s watch showed ten minutes after nine this May evening of 1851, in Mr. Jameson’s manure-smelling lodging in the town of St. Louis, Missouri, where they had paid 25 cents apiece for sleeping accommodations. Gentlemen please take off their boots in bed!

Robert and Arvid, once having shared the same stable room, had sworn to stick together forever, never to separate. Now they crept under the same horse blanket: they had traveled far into the world, almost to the center of America, and they needed to stick together. Tonight they felt again like comrades in service, sharing a stable room. They were once again a couple of farm hands — and far from the Land of Gold.

— 2—

Later in the summer they began to dig in the earth again — but not for gold. They got work on a farm near town whose owner wanted a potato cellar dug. Their pay was seventy-five cents a day plus board, and in the farm kitchen they could eat as much meat and potatoes and beans as they wanted. But their room was a ramshackle shed where they were worse housed than in the stable room they had lived in in Sweden. The cracks between the boards were so wide that the wind blew through unhindered. But there were no bedbugs in the walls as there had been at Nybacken, where each morning they had awakened with fresh bites on their necks; this shed was so miserable that no vermin wanted to live there.

The boys were farm hands again. They had set out to dig for gold, but when they dug into the ground they found only sand and gravel, clay and rocks. Arvid, however, couldn’t help looking at his spade now and again, letting the dirt pour slowly from the blade: perhaps. . perhaps. .! But never a glowworm spark of anything glittering. Robert counseled his friend to be patient, as they couldn’t get any farther this year they must remain here and keep alive until spring. Next year they would find something different on their spades!

Arvid worried that they might be delayed so long that all the gold would be gone before they got there. Robert reassured him. In an American newspaper he had read that a very learned man, Mr. Horace Greeley, had said that California had at least two thousand million dollars’ worth of gold. As yet only two hundred million had been dug up; there was still eighteen hundred million left. Did Arvid think that with so much there would not be enough for him? Did he want more than eighteen hundred million dollars?

When the potato cellar was finished, they were put to work helping with the harvesting and the threshing; this kept them busy during the fall, and when winter came they were put to cutting wood. Now their wages dropped to fifty cents a day, but they could still eat as much meat and potatoes and beans as before. They might have liked their jobs if they had been better housed, but when winter came the sharp wind blew through the cracks of their shed and plagued them miserably, so that they crept close together at night to keep warm.

The winter continued and the cold increased, and Arvid began to complain. Why had they traveled so far to sleep in this rotten shed? It had been warmer in the stable room at Nybacken. Had they immigrated to America in order to lie here and freeze and suffer at night? Robert comforted him; they must be patient through the winter; then all suffering and evil would be over. And what they were doing furthered their plans; they were working their way to the gold land. They had peeled their way on the river, here they had dug their way along in summer, and now they were cutting their way to California. Every single ring of the ax brought them closer to the gold land by earning money for them. And they would get there if they had to creep and crawl the whole two thousand miles!

The younger boy always found words that cheered the older one. And they continued to saw and split and stack wood in tall piles. In the evenings it might happen that Arvid asked: how much gold was still left in California — how many millions? But one evening when they returned to their cold shed after a day of work, Arvid sank down on the bunk, his hands to his face:

“I can’t stand it any longer! I want to go home!”

He began to cry: he wanted to return to Minnesota, to his service with Danjel Andreasson, to the people from Sweden he knew. He had thought about it for a long while and he had made his decision: he didn’t want to go on to California. He didn’t care about the gold any more. He would give up the riches — it didn’t matter to him if he were rich or poor. He would just as soon be poor if he only could be with people he could take to and whom he knew. He didn’t want to work for an American farmer any more and have to live in this shed; he had had it much better with Danjel. As long as he must remain a farm hand anyway. .

“But I can’t find the way back. . I can’t ask in English. . Won’t you come with me, Robert. .? Let’s go back, please, Robert!”

“No, Arvid! I won’t return! Never!”

“But I can’t go back alone. . I can’t manage. . Please, Robert, come with me!”

“No! I want to see California!”

His friend’s weeping and pleading bothered Robert but his mind could not be changed. He would go on; he would not return to his brother in Minnesota until he had found gold and could return as a rich man.

And he reminded Arvid of their mutual promise, a promise for all times and all circumstances: whatever happened, the two of them must always stick together! Didn’t he remember the Sunday when they had made a bonfire at Lake Ki-Chi-Saga? They had been sitting there at the fire, warming their blue-frozen hands, and they had sworn that they would be comrades forever here in America, they would never part company!

Would Arvid now fail his comrade, and his oath?

They talked about it until late that evening — until at last they agreed again and shook hands on the promise: when the prairie was green with next spring’s grass they would continue west on the California Trail.

Yes — I heard it so well: I heard you and Arvid agree. The two Swedish farm boys would never part in America.

I want to see California! you said. You wouldn’t change your mind. You persuaded him to stick to his promise. You can’t deny you did.

But you must know that already that first winter you had begun to doubt; your eyes had been opened, you had seen the road before you — you hesitated and thought, shouldn’t we turn back? Your eyes were no longer blinded by the gleaming gold two thousand miles away. For you knew already you hadn’t set out to look for gold! That wasn’t your reason. You took off to get rid of masters, all masters in the world. But you did not know what you were looking for instead. Something you had heard in a song. .?

And it was that first winter that I began to buzz and annoy you — perhaps because of the cold wind in the shed. Since then you have never been able to silence me for long; you have been forced to endure my sounds. And during your woodcutting winter in St. Louis that yellow, evil-smelling fluid began to run again; it is always an ominous sign.

And I have recorded and still keep Arvid’s voice: I can hear his words whenever I wish — that time, and that, and that! Please, Robert! he pleaded, like a little child. Please, Robert! Almost the same words, later. We come to that soon.

Yes, dear Robert, I have now buzzed for you so long this evening it’s time to buzz you to sleep. At last you always get so tired you go to sleep. Sleep now!

Good night, gold seeker!

XVI. WHILE THE RICHES LAY HIDDEN IN THE HOUSE

— 1—

Karl Oskar and Kristina often recalled to mind that week in June, 1855, when Robert had returned on a Monday.

Robert slept late on that June Tuesday morning of 1855, and no one disturbed him; he must be tired to death, they thought, and in need of rest. Karl Oskar had intended to do a day’s work on the church building, which had been started that spring, but as his brother had just come back, he stayed at home and did ordinary small chores. Kristina wanted to prepare good and strengthening food for the prodigal, so she robbed the chicken nests of fresh eggs, and for her brother-in-law’s breakfast she also made dumplings, which she knew he liked.

Robert rose at last and sat down alone at the kitchen table. After a while Karl Oskar came in; he had something he wanted to say to his brother which he should have said last night only everything had become so confused: a hearty thanks for the big bundle of bills — if now all this money was meant as a gift! He had inspected the bills, both by candle flame and in daylight, and as far as he could see they were real and must be good currency. He would put them in the bank at Stillwater at once. Nowadays so many bills were worth only half their face value, or nothing at all, that he hoped Robert would understand why they had been suspicious at first. To himself he thought that the only thing that troubled him about this money was the fact that he himself hadn’t earned it with his own hands.

Robert mumbled that he hoped his brother and sister-in-law would enjoy the money. Apparently he didn’t want to talk any further about the gift. He himself had little feeling for his fortune; last night he had handled the bills as if all he wanted was to get rid of them, the sooner the better.

By daylight his leanness was more marked. And his yellow skin was not a sign of health. Kristina now understood why Karl Oskar had wondered if he suffered from some gnawing disease. Perhaps he had had to sacrifice his health for the gold. And if he couldn’t buy back his health with it, he had indeed made a poor bargain.

They had many questions to ask Robert, as they wanted to know all that had happened to him during his four years’ absence. But he discouraged their questions; perhaps he would tell them more once he was rested. Now he was the one to ask: what had happened here since he left?

Karl Oskar and Kristina described to him the activities around the lake, the new houses that had been built, and told him the names of their neighbors, all new immigrants from Sweden. The population had increased so much they had now founded a Swedish congregation.

“We timbered up a schoolhouse last summer. Now we’re hammering together a church,” said Karl Oskar.

“Yes, at last,” added Kristina. “They crabbed a whole year about the location of God’s house.”

Well, each one of the settlers had wanted the church near his claim, said Karl Oskar. People had wanted it on both the north and the south, on the east and the west lakeshore, in every imaginable place. Ten different sites had been under consideration. Those Swedes who had come here were so stubborn and selfish; what could one do with ten heads, each with a different opinion and none willing to give in? It had looked as if they might have to build ten churches, for all had the same right to decide; and only with ten churches would all have been done full justice. But at last they had been forced to agree. A site had been selected on the Helsinge farmer Lars Sjölin’s claim, on a tongue of land across from Nordberg’s Island. It was a pleasant location on a promontory near the lake, as nearly as possible in the center of the Swedish settlement. It was really a good place for the church, only twenty minutes’ walk for them, so they couldn’t complain.

“But our parish is so poor we can’t even hang a bell,” said Kristina.

“We’ll raise a small steeple for the time being,” said Karl Oskar. “We can hang the church bell when we’re better off.”

To build a church was a difficult and tiresome job, that much he had learned. Everything was to be done voluntarily but some sort of organization was necessary: each household was to cut, rough-hew, and deliver three loads of lumber, and each grown man was to give twelve days’ labor. But no one could tell yet if this would be sufficient to complete the building. And many members were poor newcomers who barely had had time to raise a shelter over their own heads, and who must first of all see to their own needs. At least a thousand dollars in cash was needed to finish the church and as yet they didn’t know if they could scrape together this sum.

“They can’t agree on anything, these people,” insisted Kristina. “They quarrel about the slightest nonsense.”

“They had no chance to decide anything back in Sweden so now they make up for it in America,” said Karl Oskar.

There had been great fights about the little schoolhouse, too, before it was completed last fall. The parish elder, the Helsinge farmer Petrus Olausson, had forced them to build it on his land, half a mile from the church. The young pastor, Mr. Törner, had promised to act as teacher and kept school two months in spring and two months in autumn. During the winter there was no school as the children couldn’t get out on the roads because of the cold and snow: they couldn’t risk the children’s freezing to death in the drifts. Johan and Marta attended regularly, and Harald would begin this fall.

This was indeed news to Robert; great changes had taken place.

The children were curious about the stranger who had brought the sweets. Robert asked if they learned Swedish in school, and Johan wanted to show him how much he knew. The boy reeled off some Swedish words. Only once did he stumble, repeating from memory. Marta too wanted to show what she had learned; she found the schools reader and read the story “The Shepherd Who Lied.”

“A liar you cannot believe even when he tells the truth,” she concluded her reading.

“That’s an amusing story,” said Robert thoughtfully. “I was asked to read that story once for Schoolmaster Rinaldo.”

“The pastor says it will teach us not to lie, not even in fun,” advised Marta.

In a low voice Robert repeated the last sentence of the story while his eyes sought his brother’s. Karl Oskar quickly looked out through the window as if he hadn’t heard.

In the kitchen a silence fell. There was a feeling that anything could happen if the two brothers now exchanged a single word.

Kristina felt the silence must be broken. “The girl has a nice singing voice. Sing something for Robert, Marta.”

“What, Mother?”

“Something you’ve learned in school. This for example: ‘We’re Swedes, we’re Swedes, Although we’re small. .’!”

The mother did not sing the words, she spoke them; she had no singing voice.

“That’s called ‘The Song of the Swedish Boys,’” said the girl. “I know a better one!” And Marta threw her flaxen braids over her shoulders, stood spread-legged in the middle of the floor, and sang in her clear, thin child-voice:

“We go to school,

We stand in row,

Our hands are clean,

Our faces also.

Now let us listen

With open ears,

What teacher says,

Or it’ll be lost.

Let’s hurry and learn,

Knowledge to earn

Which is better than silver

And gold. .”

As the last words rang out Robert rose quickly from his chair; his spoon fell from his hand and clattered on the floor. He shied away as if the girl had hurt him; he stared wide-eyed at her until she backed away looking at him in fright.

Slowly he picked up the spoon. Then he sat down, silent and lost in thought. Karl Oskar and Kristina were puzzled by his behavior; Robert seemed frightened at the mere sound of a word in a song — the word “gold.”

— 2—

In the afternoon they went out to inspect the farm. Karl Oskar and Kristina wanted to show Robert what they had tilled and planted and built while he was away. He was greatly surprised at the large field with sprouting corn, wheat, rye, and oats on the slope where only four years ago nothing had grown but weeds. And such smooth, even fields! His brother had indeed worked hard.

“If the farmers at home could see these fields they would die of envy!”

The brothers walked side by side along the edge of the field. Robert noticed that Karl Oskar dragged his left leg. “What’s the matter with you? You limp?”

The older brother replied, somewhat embarrassed, that it was only the old ailment in his left shinbone; the injury he had sustained when a couple of men had tried to rob him on their journey to Minnesota; it never had healed, it ached sometimes when he worked too hard, and perhaps he favored that leg while walking.

“You slave yourself to death on your claim!”

Robert seemed serious; nothing in this world was worth aches and limps. Not even the good earth of Minnesota was worth that much.

He was a youth no longer. He had grown so old that he advised his older brother.

They looked at the fat and well-cared-for animals in the stable. Each had been bred on the place except the cow, Lady. Robert had promised Karl Oskar money for a team of oxen but now his brother had raised a team himself. And this spring one of the heifers had taken the bull, so they would soon have five cows.

“I don’t want to have any more to milk,” said Kristina.

They went inside the deserted log cabin, which was now used as a toolshed and carpenter shop.

“Here I stand and fix things,” said Karl Oskar.

In the old log house he now spent rainy days at the workbench. The floor was strewn with shavings. On the wall, deer and calfskins had been nailed up to dry. It looked like a junk shop in there. But there they had lived for four winters. When Robert compared the log cabin with the new main house in the maple grove he could see that things had improved for his brothers family in New Duvemåla.

He asked about the shanty where they had lived the first fall, but Karl Oskar had torn it down, as the old shed only spoiled the looks of the new building. He had already built three houses for his family, and now he had begun the fourth in his head.

“Next time I build, Robert. .”

But the most unusual thing they had acquired while Robert was gone Kristina had waited to show him last: a small tree that grew at the east gable of the new main house.

Could he guess what kind of tree it was? A little sapling, about five feet tall, its top reaching to Robert’s chest. The tree had large, deep green leaves, healthy branches and foliage. But he couldn’t guess. Some kind of plum tree perhaps?

“An apple tree from home!” said Kristina.

“Kristina’s own tree!” added Karl Oskar.

This Astrakhan apple tree had sprung up from seeds which Kristina’s parents had sent in a letter. It had grown to chest height in a few years. Now it stood here at their gable, thousands of miles from Sweden. Wasn’t it like a miracle?

Robert lightly pinched a leaf of the sapling; he ought to have recognized an Astrakhan tree from its wide, thick leaves with fuzz on the underside.

Kristina said that she guessed it would take a few years more before the tree bore fruit, and no one could tell if it would have real Astrakhan apples — those juicy, large apples, big as children’s heads, with clear, transparent skin that she had enjoyed at home. Their neighbors, Algot and Manda Svensson, had said that crab apples might grow on trees planted this way from seeds. Branches ought to be grafted on a trunk if one wanted to be sure of fine fruit. But she couldn’t believe crab apples would sprout in America from the fine Astrakhan seeds from Sweden.

Robert stroked the branches; the leaves felt soft to his touch. “It’s come from the old country. . It too has emigrated. .”

“That sapling is the apple of Kristina’s eye!” said Karl Oskar.

From the tremble in her voice Robert had already understood as much. Everywhere on this claim, everywhere in the good earth round Ki-Chi-Saga, a great many plants grew; the land was verdant with crops of wheat and barley and corn and potatoes. But of all the planted and tended seedlings, of all the sprouting, thriving growth, this sapling was obviously dearest to Kristina.

And he himself felt nostalgia as he touched the tree, he felt a strange compassion for the little life, a desire to protect and guard it. He felt as if it were a living being — as if four people instead of three were standing here at the gable, four immigrants.

“This sapling. . it’s almost unreal!” said Robert.

And when they walked on he turned back to look, as if afraid the tender, sensitive life might not be able to withstand the merciless winter cold here in North America.

— 3—

Karl Oskar had put out his precious copies of Hemlandet for his brother. Robert did not know that a Swedish paper was printed in America; in the part of the country where he had been he had hardly met any Swedes and he had never heard anyone talk of Sweden. Now he sat the whole evening and read the paper eagerly, and learned about the most important happenings in the world during the last year.

A great war was ravaging the Old World but Sweden had as yet not been dragged into it. Hemlandet had predicted that war sooner or later must break out in the New World also — in the North American Union — between the faction advocating love of humanity and liberty and those wanting slavery. Lately a group of courageous men in Kansas had organized the Free-States Union with the intention of driving out all slave owners. But in Georgia a white man had been fined ten thousand dollars for spreading the rumor that his neighbor had black blood in his veins. In one state slave owners were thrown out, in another it was a great crime to hint that a person was related to a Negro.

Robert said that was just the way things were in America; every place was different from every other.

“You must read the installment story!” suggested Kristina. “There you can see how the white lords torture the poor blacks!”

The story in Hemlandet was called “Fifty Years in Chains” and was an American slave’s true description of his life. The story was so horrible and touched everyone so deeply that all readers were compelled to pray to God that He would abolish the curse of slavery, she said. Yes, Robert would read “Fifty Years in Chains” by and by, he told her, but for the moment he was looking for happenings here in Minnesota.

A terrible accident had occurred down in Carver County. A Swedish settler had been out hunting of a Sunday and when he returned home and started to clean his gun he was so clumsy that he shot his seventy-year-old mother-in-law to death. The paper emphasized the happening as God’s warning to the immigrants; they ought to keep the Sabbath and never hunt on this day.

Cities had begun to spring up in America like mushrooms on a rainy August day. In Minnesota Territory no less than eighty town sites had been planned and surveyed during the last year.

At this Karl Oskar interrupted in annoyance: “That’s cheating and swindling!”

He knew the true situation. Nearly all towns out here existed only on maps. No people lived in them, for there were no houses. The paper cities were founded by speculators who were too lazy to work the earth and merely speculated in lots. Parasitical critters who lived off honest settlers! He would like to take his gun and drive these rats and vermin out of the Territory.

Robert said that the richest cities were in California. In one of the smallest towns out there, New Home Town, lived the greatest number of millionaires on the smallest number of square feet in America.

Karl Oskar picked up the paper and read about the price of grain: winter wheat in Chicago brought a dollar fifty per bushel, while rye brought only seventy-five cents and oats thirty cents for the same measure. What he had suspected turned out to be true: wheat was the flour grain valued above all else in the New World. White bread, reserved for their lordships in Sweden, was on everyone’s table in America.

“I see women are allowed to write in the papers here,” said Robert.

Following the example of American papers, Hemlandet had two articles by women. Male readers had taken exception and sent in angry letters: writing by women was contrary to the biblical and Lutheran spirit which until now had dominated the paper. The editor replied that in the future he intended to remain fearless and when he received something worthwhile written by a woman he intended to print it. He wanted in this way to encourage females who more and more were learning to write. He insisted he would still remain a good Lutheran.

“I believe he is right,” said Kristina. “I can’t think it’s sinful to learn to write.”

She felt that many Swedish immigrant women, like herself, felt inferior because they never had learned to write and were unable to communicate with their relatives at home.

“Everything is different here,” said Robert. “You are a missus and Karl Oskar is a mister out here.”

“Yes, I am now ^‘Mr.’ Nilsson!”

And Karl Oskar laughed heartily: he had been elevated here! If a farmer in Sweden were called “Mister” he would take it as an insult, believe he was being made a fool of.

“You should know how trusted your brother is in America,” said Kristina to Robert. “He and Uncle Danjel were elected to the parish board.”

“Are you a church warden, Karl Oskar!” exclaimed Robert.

“A church warden without a church as yet. Danjel and I are ‘deacons,’ we’re chosen to run the parish.”

“Deacons?! That sounds almost like a dean or a bishop.”

Kristina said she remembered that time when Dean Brusander denied the Holy Sacrament to Uncle Danjel and refused to accept him as godfather for Harald when the boy was baptized. Suppose the dean now learned that Danjel and Karl Oskar ran the parish — that in America they could select and fire ministers! Wasn’t the world turned upside down out here?

This evening supper was late again because Kristina had so much to talk about with Robert. She noticed his hearing had grown still worse, that she had to raise her voice in speaking to him. And she wondered again if he weren’t sick in some way; he moved about so slowly and heavily, and when he sat still and did not exert himself in any way, big drops of sweat trickled down his forehead. He was very thirsty and often walked over to the bucket to drink. He explained that he was weak after a cold he had caught on the steamboat coming up the river; that was why he wanted to go to bed early these first evenings.

And as soon as Robert had eaten supper he went to bed in the gable room.

Kristina looked after him as he closed the door.

“Something is wrong with your brother, Karl Oskar. You can see and hear it.”

“Yes — he’s somewhat quiet about his gold digging. And he hasn’t said a word about Arvid. .”

The old doubts were gnawing at him again; could everything be as it should with the big packs of bills his brother had given them?

Karl Oskar and Kristina remained sitting in the kitchen for a long time that evening, talking about something that had been in their minds all day long, something that had hardly left their thoughts for a minute — that something which for a whole day had been lying hidden in the bottom of the Swedish chest: the fortune that was secreted in their house.

XVII. THE SECOND NIGHT — ROBERT’S EAR SPEAKS

You’re tired and want to sleep but I must keep you awake. I am your faithful companion — I am the memories which refuse to leave you, a severe master.

You have an ear ache; you feel your heart’s persistent pumping in your ear, a dull thudding. But there is nothing you can do about it, except to lie quietly and endure it. What is it that hurts me? you have asked. No being on earth can give you a reply to that question. When you were born into this world as a human being you were condemned to being hurt. You were born with this body with its two ears, one of which buzzes at you tonight! Whose decision was it that you were to be a human being? The Lord of life and death, of course, and he also created the hurt. Why did He do it? — That is the Riddle of Life you cannot solve.

During that spring, three years ago, you still had your health, without suffering. At that time you lived with an expectation which aided you to endure patiently all troubles and tribulations; you thought the only thing that mattered was to get to a certain place on this earth. Yes, I remember so clearly everything that happened during that spring. .

— 1—

The buffalo grass was again turning green on the prairie, and new shoots were springing up, already three inches tall. Again there was fodder for the animals of the gold caravan, all the animals which would carry California-bound travelers on their backs and provide them with meat. The grass was fresh and green for only one month of the year, but it remained nourishing and desirable to the animals the year round.

Toward the end of March the two Swedish farm hands threw aside their axes, said goodbye to the farmer, and made ready to continue their journey westward; this spring they would not be too late to join up with the caravan on the California Trail.

Every day great numbers of strangers arrived in St. Louis on their way to Independence and St. Joseph, the meeting places for gold seekers. Here they obtained part of their equipment, food, fodder, tools which could not be bought farther west. St. Louis was beginning to look like a great army camp bivouacking for a few days. In every open place in the town, Robert and Arvid could see those strange vehicles, the Conestoga wagons, with their broad side boards and heavily forged wheel rims. From one side board to the other canvas was stretched on curved wooden bows over the wagon to form a covering. The boys looked with respect at the Conestoga wagon wheels which would turn over two thousand miles of prairies and plateaus, over mountains and deserts, and at last sink down in the sand where the gold glittered and shone.

The California-bound rode in wagons or on horses or mules and those who had neither vehicle nor animal must use the old “apostle horses”—they must walk. But even for those on foot, pack animals were necessary; no one could carry a heavy burden for two thousand miles.

Robert and Arvid counted the money they had saved and talked and figured carefully. How ought they to travel?

One morning as they walked about the town they were approached by a dark-hued stranger who carried a silver-ornamented Kentucky rifle. The man was not much taller than a young boy and wore a short red jacket with yellow stripes across the shoulders and chest. His hat was brown with a hatband of silver-white strings — the biggest hat they had ever seen on a human head. They thought it funny to see such a short man with a hat brim half as wide as his height. This peculiarly dressed stranger asked them if they were on their way to California.

“Yes. . yes! We are hunting for gold!” Never before had Robert found an answer in English so quickly.

The little man smiled, exposing long white teeth. His skin was honey-colored, and his strong, protruding nose reminded Robert of his brother Karl Oskar. His eyes were big and friendly and warm.

He too was on his way to the goldfields. He would supply them with all they needed on the journey if they would keep him company and help him with his mules. Had they any experience in handling animals?

“We are used to farm work,” exclaimed Robert. “We can take care of cattle.”

“Good! Let’s go to a tavern for a beer.”

They hung over the counter while exchanging information. Within the hour everything had been agreed upon: Robert and Arvid were employed for four months — the time needed to cover the California Trail — to serve as mule drivers for a Mexican whose name was Mario Vallejos. English was not the native tongue of either Robert or Vallejos, yet they talked with ease to each other in this language. Vallejos had been born in Texas. A few years ago the Americans had come and taken his land and now he wanted some of their California gold in exchange. A few of his friends were in the same situation and it had been agreed among them they would all meet in St. Joseph, from whence a large group of California-bound men were to start toward the end of April. From St. Louis to St. Joseph the distance was about two hundred and fifty miles; this was the road they must first travel. Vallejos figured they could cover an average of twenty miles a day so they would need about twelve or thirteen days to get to St. Joseph. They would travel over uninhabited regions of prairies and plains but he knew the road well. If the boys could leave then, he would like to start out tomorrow; he had only been waiting to find the helpers he needed.

The Mexican turned out to be the owner of eight mules, all at their peak age, between four and six years old. They were strong and sturdy pack animals, each capable of a three-hundred-pound load. Seven of them were light gray, the eighth was dark brown; this one was the largest in the herd and was to carry the owner himself.

Indian horses and Mexican mules were the toughest animals both for packing and riding, explained Vallejos. But his mules required constant attention — careful brushing and feeding and a friendly attitude.

Robert assured him that both he and his friend had always loved Mexican mules above all other animals on earth. No mules of any kind existed in their home country but they had always looked forward to the pleasure of driving and combing and feeding these wise animals. In fact, this was the reason they had emigrated to North America.

Their new boss smiled and seemed pleased with his muleteers.

The boys had never driven animals other than horses and oxen. Arvid looked apprehensively at these Mexican mules and worried about his chores:

“Asses, ain’t they? Unreliable critters, I bet. .?”

Before he had come to America Arvid had never seen an ass except the one Jesus rode when he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and this was only a picture in the Bible. But that ass didn’t look at all like Vallejos’ pack animals.

The Mexican soon taught Robert all about their new duties, and Robert explained to Arvid one important point: hinnies and mules were different sorts of animals, for they had entirely different parents. When an ass took a stallion a hinny was born, but a mule was not begotten in that way; with her parents it was just the opposite: a mule had an ass to father and a mare for mother. With parents, he told Arvid, it is always the mother who is most important for the offspring, and since the mule had a mare-mother she became much more important than the hinny; she was the wisest animal on earth.

“A mare as mother and a jackass for father. Try to remember that, Arvid!”

And thus Arvid learned his first sentence in English: a mare mother and a jackass father. For he must know what kind of animals he had to take care of. Arvid had heard that asses were the dumbest animals alive; on the contrary, he now learned, if you had an ass for father you were the wisest animal on earth. For all children got their sense from the mother, said Robert, and the mother was a wise mare.

“I think I got my sense from my father,” said Arvid. “My mother had a poor head.”

They helped the Mexican with the provisions for the journey and loaded the packsaddles of the mules with flour, hams, beans, rice, coffee, dried fruit, sugar, salt, and water in canteens. They were openmouthed at the sight of all the goods their boss had bought for the California Trail, and he said he would buy still more when they arrived at St. Joseph. During the four months required for the two-thousand-mile journey each man would consume 150 pounds of flour, 50 pounds of ham, 50 pounds of dried pork, 30 pounds of sugar, 6 pounds of coffee, 1 pound of tea, 3 pounds of salt, one bushel of dried fruit, 25 pounds of rice, 20 pounds of hardtack, and half a bushel of beans.

When Robert and Arvid saw all the food a single man would eat on the journey they began to understand how very far it was to California.

It took more than one day for even the most willing muleteer to learn how to saddle a mule and pack it properly. The weight must be evenly divided between the front and hind quarters, and the same for both sides; an even balance was required or the pack animal would fall on its nose or sink down on its hind legs. Robert and Arvid had only harnessed horses and yoked oxen — to place several hundred pounds on a small mule was a much more complicated matter. And Arvid decided this much: a muleteer must be wiser than everyone else on earth. In America a hired hand must be smarter than in Sweden.

And so one April morning at dawn, the Mexican, Mario Vallejos, set out on his journey westward across the prairie, with his two young helpers and his eight mules, to join the gold caravan — the train of the hundred thousand.

— 2—

The party traveled under the burning sun in daytime and camped under the chilly starlight at night. They followed in the footsteps of those who had passed here before them: soft places in the ground bore the imprints of heel irons and boot soles, of hooves and cloven hooves, and the broad wheel rims of the Conestoga wagons. But in sandy places the wind had obliterated all tracks, and on the plateaus and hard ground no tracks had been left.

The little Mexican rode ahead on his dark brown mule to locate the trail. The two youths came behind with the pack mules, each one carrying two hundred pounds for its owner. Robert and Arvid fed the mules crushed corn three times a day and watered them twice a day. They curried the animals and loaded them, followed them in daytime and guarded them at night. The longer they scratched a mule between the ears, the easier it became to take care of it.

When the mules grew hungry they folded their ears back and brayed. It sounded as if they had attacks of hiccups. The muleteers thought at first that something had got stuck in their throats; the animals wailed and hiccuped helplessly. But by and by Robert and Arvid became accustomed to their peculiar braying; they brayed when their stomachs were empty.

Vallejos considered Mexican mules most suitable for the California Trail since they required less water than horses, and in the desert they could smell water holes at a distance of two miles or more.

They were traveling across a plain and could not understand how their boss found his way. The Mexican had made himself a map for the first five hundred miles of the California Trail: from St. Joseph straight toward the Big Blue River, the first big river to be crossed. Those starting from Independence headed for Bull Creek and Wakarusa River before they reached the Kansas, the broadest and most difficult river to cross on the whole trail. He had chosen the route through St. Joseph, the northern overland route, to avoid the crossing of the broad Kansas River.

In St. Louis Robert and Arvid had begun to prepare themselves for washing gold. They had each bought a pan of good steel, which held almost a gallon of water. Now that they were the owners of washing pans, good-sized pans, they walked behind the mules and drummed with their fingers on the pans; they were ready, and they also knew how to dig.

The days were too warm and the nights too cold. At camp in the evenings they gathered dry grass and bushes and made a fire to keep themselves warm. Each in turn stood watch and tended the fire. They slept stretched out on the ground with the saddles as pillows. Arvid kept complaining of the weather in America: either it was too warm or too cold — why was it never right?

When the cold kept them both awake Robert cheered his friend by telling him what he knew about the Gold Land: in California the weather was just right the year round, and so healthy that people lived to be a hundred years old. Old people only dried up a little more for each year in the good sun, until at last nothing was left but the skin, which finally blew away over the Pacific Ocean. Out there people didn’t die in the same way as in other places. In California there were no diseases to kill people. Even suicides were impossible in that state. Californians, aged two or three hundred years and tired of living, would travel to some other state, where they immediately collapsed like empty sacks and died.

Vallejos told them that nuggets had been found in the Sacramento River weighing as much as a hundred and fifty pounds, and worth fifty thousand dollars apiece.

“One single lump! Oh Lordy, Lordy!” exclaimed Arvid. And he had served as farm hand in Sweden for ten dollars a year. If he found a single nugget he could buy the manor of Kråkesjö, where his old father was a cotter.

Gold was the word that gave them strength, dreaming of gold still held its power over them.

Each evening when Arvid wound his watch and one more day had been added to the California Trail he asked: “We’ve been on our way a whole year now — how soon will we get there?”

Robert assured him they were getting closer to the gold every day, they were twenty miles closer today. Sacramento, that was the place they were going — Vallejos had mentioned it when he sat at the fire, the map spread over his knees.

The Mexican was a good master. He didn’t ask them to walk farther than they could manage each day, and they could eat all they wanted of the provisions, so they gorged themselves on ham and dried pork. Vallejos took his share of the watch, looking after the fire for a few hours every third night. He could stand heat and cold — it didn’t bother him. He enumerated the dangers on the California Trail: the fording of the rivers, the desert heat, the Indians, the wild animals. But of people he feared only one man: The Yellow Jack. He was afraid of someone called Yellow Jack. Although he explained who this was, Robert was unable to follow his English and remained in the dark about the dangerous Yellow Jack.

At the campfire Vallejos kept himself awake by singing — always the same song, humming it, like a bumble-bee’s buzzing in the grass:

Oh, the good time has come at last,

We need no more complain, sir!

The rich can live in luxury

And the poor can do the same, sir!

For the good time has come at last,

And as we are told, sir!

And shall be rich at once now,

With California gold, sir!

Robert listened night after night to the dream song, the song of the yellow gold that would make him free. When at last he had reached the end of this road he would be free. He was a muleteer, he was still in service, but this service would be his last — the Mexican, Mario Vallejos, would be the last master in his life.

— 3—

On the ninth day after they had set out they saw for the first time the animal which had given its name to the tall grass on the prairie; at a distance they could see a herd of buffalo, an ash-gray, closed circle moving across the plain in a westward direction. It seemed to them as if the very ground were moving with this herd. The heavy tramp of the animals sounded like a muffled thunderstorm when it first rises over the horizon. So many animals in motion struck them as a revelation of the immensity of the wild regions. Several times they saw packs of furry animals — reddish, with sharp noses and long tails.

They were a small caravan of three people and eight animals. Each time the caravan passed running water — creeks or streams — the mules were allowed to drink all they wanted, but when they approached stagnant water Vallejos warned them sternly: the water holes were not to be trusted. The country grew more desolate and the ground more arid, the green buffalo grass grew thinner; the dry earth shot out from under the hooves of the mules like pelting rain. They had reached a region with no streams and they used the water in their canteens to water the animals.

In a hollow they saw a broken pair of wheels; pieces of spokes and a broken wagon tongue were strewn about. The Mexican stopped his mule and nodded meaningfully at the place, but said nothing. A few hundred yards farther on, a flat white stone had been raised on end in the ground, and the stone — a foot or two in height — had an inscription in black letters:

JACK MALONEY

Aged 18 Years

Rest in Peace Sweet Boy

For Thy Troubles Are Over

Robert understood the connection between the broken wheels and the little tombstone but he did not interpret the inscription to Arvid. Nevertheless it stuck in his mind for the rest of the day.

On the eleventh day their trail crossed a desolate, sandy plain, surrounded by distant hills. The terrain was broken by stone islands in the sand and boulders of outlandish appearance. Horrible giants in animal shape were guarding this plain, petrified monsters with human heads and beast-bodies, heads of horses and lions in stone. The sun was uncomfortably warm on earth and rocks.

Vallejos said they should arrive in St. Joseph in three days.

In the evening they made camp between a split rock in the center of the plain. It was Robert’s turn to guard the fire. In the night a wind came up from the west, a gusty wind that blew sand into the fire and several times almost extinguished it. He moved the embers farther in the lee of the rock; here the fire burned well and he dozed for a while, his head on the saddle.

With the first streak of daylight he got up to urinate. He walked over to look at the mules, tethered behind the rock. What he saw struck him dumb; there were only six animals. Two of the mules were gone; He hurried around the rock searching for them, but the two animals had vanished.

Arvid had tethered the mules last night when they camped, and Robert had warned him before that his knots in the halters were too loose. He shook his comrade roughly by the shoulder but spoke in a low voice so as not to waken their master, who slept only a few paces away.

“You didn’t tie those mules aright! Two of them broke away!”

Arvid was awake instantly as soon as he heard Robert’s words. He didn’t try to deny it, he had tied the mules to some boulders — if they had broken loose he was to blame. But he didn’t think it was because of his loose knots. Perhaps the beasts had pulled and pulled and the rope had slid over the rock.

Robert said it didn’t matter whose fault it was; both of them would suffer for this. Bad luck was the worst thing one ever encountered. If their boss should learn that the knots had been loose earlier he would never trust his muleteers again; he would fire them on the spot. As long as they were with the Mexican they had all they needed for their journey; if they were separated from him they might never get to California. They must find the strayed mules and bring them back before he woke up; they must get out and look for them at once.

According to Arvid’s watch it was four o’clock. As a rule they broke camp about seven; they had three hours in which to search.

“It’s my fault!” wailed Arvid. “I’m born with bad luck in my head!”

“Don’t lose your head. We’ll find the critters.”

The boys took off over the plain on speedy legs to search for the mules. Darkness still lay thick and in this dim light a mule could hardly be seen at a distance of fifty feet. They could see no tracks of the animals however much they scanned the ground. They hollered and called the mules by all the names Vallejos used:

“Heekee. .! Hinni. .! Cheekte. .! Heekee. .!”

Every few minutes they stopped and listened hopefully for the familiar braying, but there was no reply to their calls. They repeated the words without knowing the meaning:

“Hinni. .! Cheekte. .!”

And no tracks were visible.

Mexican mules could smell fresh grass long distances. Robert remembered that yesterday afternoon they had passed a place between two ridges where he had seen green buffalo grass. Perhaps the mules had found their way back to this place? But it was several miles and he did not think he could find it again.

They began by searching around the campsite, tramping the ground in ever-widening circles. They wandered as if they themselves were lost in the pale light of dawn. They mustn’t go too far from camp but were sure their own tracks would guide them back when they were ready to return.

An hour passed; light came slowly to the plain. They stumbled onto a dried-out creek bed and followed its gently sloping path; perhaps there was water farther down and the mules had smelled it. They followed this furrow for a good while. Water had recently run here; there were tracks of animals, big and little ones, but they must have been made some time ago, since the tracks had already dried up. The creek wound its way in great curves but all of it was equally dry. Yet they followed it, encouraged by the many tracks in its bottom. But not the slightest glimpse of a mule tail came to their eyes, nor the faintest braying to their ears.

It was now full daylight. The wind had increased and the dust blew in clouds about them. Arvid looked at his watch and exclaimed in tenor:

“It’s already half past five! Shouldn’t we go back?”

In order to reach camp for their usual hour of starting they must turn at once. Vallejos must already be up and about. What would he say when he missed both the mules and the muleteers? He might think they had stolen the animals and run away.

With heavy feet Robert and Arvid followed the dry creek back toward camp. The wind was increasing and they walked with eyes closed against the whirling dust.

“Where can the critters have betaken themselves?” wondered Arvid.

“We must find them!” insisted Robert.

They returned slowly, trying to follow their own tracks. Behind them the sun rose above the plain; the first rays felt pleasantly warm on their necks. But from the other direction came the wind and it was slow walking against it.

The creek they followed grew narrower and shallower; soon it branched out in still smaller furrows. Which one was the dry creek they had first encountered? They stopped and rubbed their smarting eyes. Where were their tracks?

They walked about, searching in vain. From which direction had they come? The sun flooded down on the strange rock formations and the yellow-brown hills — but which rock sheltered their camp? They didn’t know; they had lost their way.

The treacherous wind had swept away the muleteers’ path back to camp; Robert and Arvid were lost on the wide plain.

— 4—

For a whole day they wandered without rest. When night fell and darkness enveloped them they lay down, dead tired, on the sandy ground.

They had left the camp to look for the mules with nothing except the clothes on their backs. They had brought nothing to eat and nothing to drink, and they had wandered endless hours under the bright sun, through a desolate wilderness, until they were near exhaustion. They had tried to reach the mountains they saw against the horizon, but the mountains remained as distant as ever.

Where they lay outstretched on their sandy bed the stars were lit high above them. In the night’s darkness the emptiness of the plain disappeared. Round and about them in the dark were rocks and hills with humps and dips on their backs, like giant caravan camels resting after a day’s march. As a guardian wall around the plain the distant ridges rose like monstrous dromedaries against the heavens.

They slept but woke with limbs stiff and aching from the night cold. They opened their eyes toward the heavens. Above them the stars glittered with a cold, bluish light, like icicles under eaves. They crept closer, seeking the warmth from each others bodies.

They slept and awoke several times during the night, and as soon as the first light of morning broke over the plain they arose and resumed their wandering. Hour after hour, they continued through this region of emptiness and thirst. The coolness of the distant hills seemed closer: they exerted their last strength, dragging their feet slowly. But the wind stayed with them, dug itself into their bodies, whirled dust into nose and eyes, into mouth and ears, accumulated it in their hair; the dust worked into their armpits, between their legs, into their groins. The dust-sand clawed and chafed, pierced and hurt; they smelled it, chewed it, tramped in it, wallowed in dust — the dusty plain had moved inside them, into their intestines, it spread before them and penetrated them, dry and consuming.

The skin on their bodies and limbs felt dried out and shrunken, it cracked and ached. The dusty wind had dried out their mouths, spread to their throats, it was about to choke them: the thirst.

There could be only one relief from this torture — one word of five letters — which they were now seeking. A few times they thought they had found it. The ground under their feet sloped, and they looked into a hole. But it was too late: it had been a water hole. Now it was only a hole without water; the bottom lay empty, displaying only the hardened ridges from animals’ hooves. The water had dried out, the bottom mud lay dry and light gray, like ashes on the hearth.

And after these disappointments the thirst gripped their throats harder.

In the middle of the day, when the sun was at its height, the air over the plain was like burning embers in their lungs. They crept down into the shade behind a low hill, panting and giddy.

Their bodily juices were exhausted; their lips cracked and their skin peeled off in large flakes. Their feet ached and were terribly sore; they pulled off their boots: their feet were raw both above and beneath, exposing red, hot flesh, the seat of the pain which burned with its fire-flame.

Low, thorny bushes grew over the ground around the hill. Everything growing in this region was thorny, prickly, and odorless. In other places grass would grow — cool, friendly, soft. Here it was hard and sharp and piercing. The very leaves of the flowering bushes were sharp and hostile. Everything that grew here plagued them, scratched and pierced and stung them.

What kind of evil country was this they had gotten into? wondered Arvid. Here even grass and flowers tried to harm their hands.

He pulled out his leather pouch in which he kept his watch key; he opened the watchcase to wind his watch — it must not be allowed to stop. He always wanted to know what time it was. Even though he no longer knew where he was, at least he wanted to know what time it was. He might be lost in the world, but not in time.

Arvid was afraid dust would blow into the case and stop the watch: “A helluva lot of dust! This must be hell’s dust bowl! I’m dying of thirst. .”

Robert said he had been looking for buffalo tracks. If they could find any they would follow them to a water hole.

Arvid swallowed, and Robert swallowed, both of them kept swallowing all the time, without anything in their mouths to swallow. But all the time their thoughts were filled with the things they would have liked to drink.

Robert stretched out his ash-dry, swollen tongue and moved it across his lips, pretending to moisten them: if they only could find a buffalo cow; then he would milk her. Buffalo milk might not taste as fresh as water, but would surely slake the thirst. And buffalo milk was said to be fat and nourishing. It would give them strength to continue. If they now had luck enough to run across a cow that had lately calved. .

“Buffalo are wild beasts!” said Arvid. “You couldn’t milk them!”

Robert stretched out full length against the hillside and immediately went to sleep. Then water came to him: in clear streams it flowed toward his face and he opened his mouth and drank. Spring-cool, refreshing water poured into his mouth, trickled down his throat. He opened his mouth wider to let in more of this comforting splendor that washed toward him. He could not open his mouth wide enough to this clear, refreshing stream.

His mouth purled like a brook. And now he recognized the stream: he was lying on his stomach near the mill brook at home, drinking its water. Into that brook he had once thrown his jacket, trying to pretend that he had drowned, for he wanted to be free of all masters and follow the running stream to the sea, to the New World.

But the mill brook water had no taste. He drank and swallowed and swallowed and drank but his thirst remained. The water pleased his eyes but did not satisfy his taste. He saw it but could not taste it. It was a peculiar stream, this one. The water ran into him — he opened his mouth wide — it poured into his throat, down into his stomach, but he could not feel a single drop within his body: the water from the mill brook did not quench his thirst however much he drank. He swallowed whole barrelfuls but it helped his thirst not a bit. At last the water felt hard as stone — scratching, tearing, piercing, burning his tongue. .

Robert woke up: he lay with his face against a hard boulder and his tongue dangled from his mouth, licking the dry stone as a cow licks a lump of salt.

He had drunk without anything to drink.

Arvid had pushed both his hands under a thorny bush and was filling them with sand which he threw into the air. He was digging a hole in the ground, poking, scratching. What was he digging for? Why couldn’t he find it right here? A spring might exist anywhere, one never knew. If one only dug sufficiently deep. But it wasn’t easy with one’s hands only. .

Robert sniffed the wind:

“It stinks of cadaver somewhere. .”

“Yes, I smell it too.”

“I wonder where. .”

They arose and set out in the direction whence the wind brought them the nauseating odor. Almost immediately they found its origin: within a stone’s throw lay the half-rotted carcass of a horse. They stopped a few paces from it and held their noses. Pieces of hide indicated the horse had been dark brown; the flesh was partly eaten away, the ribs were scraped clean, white, bent, like the peeled willow rushes of a wicker basket. The head had two deep black holes: the eyes had been picked out by carrion birds. The long teeth were exposed in a wide, eternal grin.

One hind leg had been torn apart, skinned, and lay some distance from the carcass. It was raised up, in a last, stiffened kick against the sky. The steel horseshoe glittered like silver in the sun. They noticed that the rotting horse had been newly shod.

Only a few yards from the carcass lay the broken steering shaft of a Conestoga wagon, half buried in sand. One large wheel with several inches of broad rim was buried in dust to the hub, as if suddenly having been brought to a halt as it rolled.

Sick from the stinking cadaver, Robert and Arvid were ready to turn away when Arvid exclaimed:

“Look! O Jesus my Lord!”

He shied back and pointed. Something was sticking up in the sand just in front of his feet. Something white, only an inch or two long, spindly, like a skinned birch twig — and on its end was a human fingernail. It was a finger bone poking up from the ground in front of them. Arvid had almost stepped on it.

They ran away from the place, the smell of rotten flesh pursuing them.

The boys hurried on in silence, the dust whirling round their feet. They did not walk in any definite direction, only where it was easiest for their feet. They wanted to get away from the place — away. .

As they wandered across the plain, they felt their strength wane and they stumbled. But they must keep moving forward. They must not come to a stop. If they came to a stop they were sure they could never move on again. And one who was unable to move forward on the California Trail was also unable to move back.

Once Arvid stopped and mumbled hoarsely:

“I almost stepped on. .” He moved his hand to his cracked lips. “Robert! It was a forefinger. .!”

He was sure. And the finger in the sand had pointed right at them.

— 5—

The sun was getting low, losing its power. It grew cooler; the shadows near hills and boulders lengthened toward evening. They staggered along drunkenly, a vise of dryness arid thirst squeezing their bodies. Their guts shrank into a knot. Their legs flagged and bent under the increasing weight of their bodies.

Arvid stumbled into a hole; he made no effort to get up. He fell headfirst and lay still:

“Without anything to drink I’m unable to go on. .”

Robert sat down beside his comrade, taking him by the shoulder, but felt dizziness come over him; the ground around him was wavering; he must sit there until it stopped.

Arvid rose to his knees and began to dig in the sand with his hands. He made a scoop of his fingers and dug holes a foot or more in depth. Below the surface the ground was darker and felt cooler. If he should find water here — then he could throw himself on his stomach and. .

Robert followed the motions with his eyes, unable to understand. What was Arvid doing? What was he digging for? The holes he dug were immediately filled up and obliterated. With his scoop he caught nothing but dust, and it poured back between his fingers and became part of the ground again. Yet Arvid continued without stopping, digging in hell’s dust bowl.

“It’s all my fault. . The mules ran away because my knots were too loose. .”

Dizziness had for a moment so overtaken Robert that he did not know what Arvid was talking about. Mules that had run away — loose knots in a halter — how did that concern him? Only one thing concerned him now.

He understood their predicament but couldn’t understand how they had got into it. They were in a dust bowl; they were wandering about alone in a desolate region where the ground, the hills, the boulders were nothing but dust, small whirling hard grains. Were they in a desert where everything had been burnt by the fire of the sun? What were they doing here? What were they looking for in this wide, empty space? Why had they come here? What were they looking for in a region that had nothing to offer? They had reached a land of nothingness, and it now closed in about them, terrifyingly. It had caught them in its ravenous jaws. There they sat, like prisoners in a trap.

Arvid went on scooping and scratching with his hands in the sand, like a dog covering its dung with earth.

It wasn’t gold he was digging for now.

XVIII. THE MISSING GOLD SEEKER

— 1—

Wednesday morning Karl Oskar left at the usual hour for work on the church building. A few days earlier Kristina had taken down her loom and now was busy cutting cloth for garments. As soon as Karl Oskar left, she spread the linen over the table in the big room and began to measure, mark, and baste. Seven in the family needed new clothes; no longer was she able to patch upon the patches of the old. She had been sitting at the loom during the winter, now she was sitting at the sewing during the summer. She was not an expert seamstress but the garments must do however they turned out. The children were growing fast so she measured generously in order that they wouldn’t outgrow their clothes too soon. For the boys’ clothing she allowed three extra inches for sleeves and pants.

When Robert had dressed and eaten his breakfast, he sat down near Kristina and watched her cutting and basting. It seemed he was willing enough to talk to her when they were alone; he was more reticent with Karl Oskar.

He said that from now on she would not need to sew and struggle; since she now had money she could buy dresses for herself of the finest cloth she could find in the stores. She laughed in reply. The first things she intended to buy with her money were not silk and velvet to deck herself in; there were a thousand things she needed much more.

Her one great concern during these days had almost been forgotten at Robert’s unexpected return. For a few weeks she had known she was again pregnant. With this certainty she had also discovered that suckling did not prevent pregnancy; she was still giving the breast to Ulrika, and yet, meanwhile, Karl Oskar had got her with child. And the birth would take place in the winter, the most inconvenient time of the year.

But after what had happened Monday night she had almost forgotten her new discomfort.

She threw a glance at the Swedish chest as if wishing to assure herself that it still stood in its place. She said that first of all they must get that great sum of money to a safe place. They couldn’t have it lying here in the house. Any day now Karl Oskar would have to go to Stillwater and put the money in the bank.

Riches had come to their house, but for her nothing had changed from one day to the next. She still had her chores, which she couldn’t suddenly run away from. But when she had had time to gather her thoughts about the immense bundles of large bills, she had begun to figure how best to use them. Dizzying visions about what they now could afford paraded through Kristina’s mind. Above everything else she wanted help with her work, hired help to relieve her. The money would be a hedge against the fatigue which at times almost crushed her, particularly at the beginning of a new pregnancy; then she had to sit down and rest in the midst of a chore because everything turned black before her eyes.

She wished indeed to thank her returned brother-in-law for every blessed moment of rest his gift might bring her.

“You are a generous and good man, Robert.”

“You have always been kind and good to me, Kristina.”

Even if Karl Oskar was not entirely free from doubts about his brother’s money bundles, because he did not fully trust paper money in America, no one could make Kristina waste a single thought on the possibility that Robert had returned and brought them false or useless money.

“I guess board and room costs a lot back there in the goldfields?” she asked.

It was unbelievably expensive, Robert told her, turning his right ear toward her. A meal cost ten dollars, the poorest lodging fifteen dollars a night, and a pair of pants fifty dollars. All were out after gold and no one was willing to do ordinary chores. The governor himself had to cook his own food and wash his dishes because his servants had fled to the goldfields. No one in California would work for anyone else, however high the pay. The gold diggers had to do everything for themselves; they couldn’t get a shirt washed at any price; they sent their dirty laundry by ship across the Pacific Ocean to China. It was their only way to get something clean to cover themselves with — the people of Asia washed for the people of America, the dirt of one continent was rinsed off on another.

“To think they freight dirty laundry to China! It sounds crazy!”

She tried to draw him out of his reticence about his experiences in California:

“You must have had a hard time out there? What luck you got away with your life!”

“Got away with. .?” Robert repeated Kristina’s words slowly, while his wide-open eyes looked at her thoughtfully. “You think I got away with it. .?”

Her hand around the cutting shears came to a standstill, she stopped her shears in the middle of the cloth. A quiver in his voice had startled her.

“Life, Kristina! It’s worth nothing on the Trail! Nothing at all!”

“Nothing. .? How is that possible. .?”

“Life has no greater value than a grain of sand. No one cares about his life. But all care for gold. Do you know why, Kristina?”

“No. .?”

“I’ll tell you a story.”

And he began. . A man in one of the wash gangs suddenly died. He had been in good health in the morning when he walked down to the river, but as he was cradling gold a fever suddenly overtook him and killed him, and when his gang returned home in the evening they carried his corpse on a couple of posts. They would bury him next morning. They dug a grave in the sand close to a rock and sent to the nearest camp for a minister to read and sing over the corpse. For a coffin they used an empty box which had contained smoked hams. The box was too short for the dead man, who had been tall, and they had to bend his knees. There was no lid for the coffin so they covered the corpse with a red shirt.

When the coffin had been lowered into the grave the dead man’s comrades gathered around the grave, took off their hats, and bowed their heads. Everyone looked at the ground, all were silent, the way it was in a church. And the minister, who was also a gold digger, took out his Bible and began to read the ritual.

But when he had read only one short Bible verse he stopped in silence. He only stood and stared at the ground. He turned the pages of the book a little, but he didn’t read any more. He only stood still and stared into the open grave. The men who had dug the grave for their dead comrade wondered what was wrong with the minister. His hesitation would drag out the funeral if he didn’t read faster. They were all in a hurry, it was a warm day, they were thirsty and wanted to have something to drink as soon as it was over.

But the minister never completed the service. He read no more Bible verses. Suddenly he hurled the Bible away into the bushes, its leaves fluttering in the wind, and threw himself face down on the ground; with both hands he began to dig in the sand at the edge of the grave.

The men thought at first that the minister had had a sunstroke and lost his mind. But then they noticed he was picking up something and putting it into the pocket of his frock. As soon as they realized what it was, they too threw themselves into the grave, scratching and digging with their fingers as fast as they could. For they had discovered the same thing the minister had seen when he began reading over the corpse: nuggets were glittering down there.

The minister, when he first made the discovery, didn’t know how to keep the secret from the other men, for of course he wanted to be alone with the gold. At last he couldn’t hold back any longer.

Soon a great fight broke out over the nuggets in the grave. The box with the corpse was overturned and trampled to bits, and the men used the pieces as weapons. Then they tore into each other with their fists, and finally knives and guns came out. It ended with the minister being shot to death and one of the mourners being pierced through the heart with a knife. Several others were badly wounded. The survivors made peace and divided the gold from the grave among them.

So there turned out to be three funerals instead of one. The old grave was turned into a gold mine, a huge one, and the three graves were dug some distance away. Now they had no minister to perform the ritual, since he too was a corpse, and there was no reading over the graves. Instead they fired four revolver shots. The survivors wanted thus to honor and reward the dead comrades who had fallen in an honest fight for gold, concluded Robert.

While he had been telling the story Kristina had held her wool shears motionless.

“What a terrible story!”

“Karl Oskar thinks I’m always lying,” said Robert “It’s best to keep silent while he’s around. But I know you believe me, Kristina.”

She believed every word — while he talked. Only when he had finished did wonder and doubt cross her mind.

“If this is the truth then they live like wild beasts in California.”

“No one cares about his life. But all care about gold!”

“They’re out of their minds if they value gold higher than their lives.”

Robert leaned toward her and spoke in a lowered voice, as if confiding a great secret to her:

“The gold diggers are people who want to die.”

“Ah, nonsense! They must want to live and get rich and enjoy their riches.”

“But why should they give their lives for nuggets if they didn’t want to die? They would rather lie in their graves than give up the gold.”

“You talk so strangely, Robert.”

She forgot her sewing and looked into his drawn, wan face. The skin was taut across his forehead and cheeks and it looked as if the bones beneath were trying to push through.

“But you yourself? Did you go to California because you didn’t wish to live any longer? To kill yourself?”

“I meant the others. It was different with me. My real errand was not to dig gold. .”

And he looked beyond her, out through the window, at the tall maples outside, as he added, emphatically, “I did care for life. But I didn’t know this until afterward.”

“Afterward. .?”

His speech was full of riddles. But now he gave no further explanation; he rose and went to the kitchen, where he picked up the scoop to drink. The bucket was empty; he hung it on his arm and went toward the spring. He moved with tardy, clumsy steps; he no longer had a young person’s quick and easy walk.

When he returned with the bucket filled, Kristlna could hear him panting from exhaustion.

“You needn’t carry in water if you don’t feel up to it. The bucket is heavy enough for a healthy person.”

“I’ll manage.”

She said that it was good luck they had found such a fine and large spring which gave healthy and clear water in abundance, and tasted so good. The spring was invaluable to them, even though they had to walk a good bit to it.

Robert drank and hung the scoop on its nail above the bucket. Then he came back into the room where Kristina sat with her sewing, and watched her as she forced the shears through the cloth, following the white chalk marks she had made.

He said, “You know, I don’t hear well with one of my ears, Kristina. I didn’t hear what you just said — what was it?”

She repeated what she had said about the clear water from their spring.

After that he sat silent for a long while.

— 2—

The intense heat of summer had started in earnest that week. In Minnesota’s oppressive air the chores were performed languidly; physical motion was an effort. Kristina was using her shears and her needle — the lightest tools a person could use — but she often dried her perspiring forehead with the corner of her apron. Yet it was cellar-cool here inside compared to the sweltering heat out in the sun.

The lake water was already tepid, and Johan, Marta, and Harald — the three children she called “big”—had, after persistent begging, obtained their mother’s permission to go bathing in the shallow inlet near their field. Kristina would have liked to cool her own body in this heat but she felt it could be dangerous for her to bathe in the lake while she was pregnant. She asked Robert to go with the children and see that they didn’t go too far out.

After the noon meal Robert said that he would like to go out and wander about in the forest; he wanted to go and see the Indian cliff where he had gone hunting when he was home.

Kristina remembered to warn him that a fatal accident had taken place last spring below the Indian. An American settler from Hay Lake had been found dead under a boulder which had fallen on him. The cliff was cracking and new blocks were falling in big piles all the time. It took only a small stone to kill a person, if it happened to hit the head; he must be careful and not go too near the Indian.

Robert smiled, exposing his gaping gums. He was not a settler; he had not stolen any land from the brown people; he didn’t believe the Indian would fling any stones on an innocent person.

Kristina looked after him as he disappeared in the forest. He had said that he had enough, that he had freed himself of masters and need never move a hand any more. For the rest of his life he wouldn’t have to do anything except enjoy his riches. He could use his time as he wanted and wander about all day long. But Robert was not calling on their new neighbors, the white settlers who had recently moved in, he was calling on the Indian, the brown cliff, where such a strange adventure once had befallen him.

Kristina went into his room to make his bed while he was out. As she turned the pillow she made a discovery: under it lay a watch, with a broad yellow brass chain coiled around it.

She stared in disbelief. Cautiously she picked up her find. Robert had not displayed a watch since his return. As far as she knew he had never owned a watch. And if he did own one, why didn’t he wear it? Why did he keep it hidden under the pillow of his bed? If he had bought a watch now that he could well afford it, why didn’t he dare show it?

It couldn’t be a stolen watch, she felt sure. But why had he hidden it under his pillow?

She noticed it was a long-used watch; it was nickel-plated, scratched, and badly worn. She put it to her ear: it had stopped. It had stopped at fifteen minutes after twelve, whether at noon or in the night. The key to wind it was fastened to the chain. Perhaps the watch had stopped because it had not been wound, or perhaps the works were broken.

Kristina replaced her find under the pillow after she had made the bed, but her thoughts were occupied with it as she returned to her sewing.

She began basting a coat for Karl Oskar but had barely taken twenty stitches when she saw, through the window, an Indian approaching the house. At first a sense of fear hit her — just now when no menfolk were at home. . The Indian went to the back of the house and came into the kitchen, and then she recognized him; otherwise these brown people were so confusingly alike that she couldn’t tell one from another. This one was a very old Indian with thin, stringy hair, sunken cheeks, and wrinkled skin that reminded her of cracks in dried clay. Last winter during the intense cold he had come several times; she had boiled milk and given it to him. Each time he had sat long by the warmth of the fire. He spoke some kind of English and Karl Oskar had understood that he had been converted to Christianity by some missionaries who preached among the Indians. He insisted he was a hundred and fifty years old but Karl Oskar must have misunderstood him.

As soon as Kristina recognized the caller her fear vanished; this old Indian was not dangerous. He carried something which he handed her with a few grunts. It was a piece of meat, a large shoulder of venison.

The Indian had brought her a gift, and surprised and pleased she thanked him in Swedish: she had just been wondering what to have for supper — what a fine roast this would make!

The old man had carried the piece without any protection and she soon discovered dark spots on the red meat: flies. That looked suspicious in this heat. She smelled: the odor of the meat was also suspicious.

Kristina knew at once that this venison had turned bad; then she also discovered white spots: maggots. But she did not show any sign of this, she dared do nothing but accept the gift. She neither wanted to nor dared hurt the feelings of the Indian. His people did not discriminate between fresh and spoiled food; to an Indian stomach the meat was of course acceptable; the giver would undoubtedly have eaten it willingly. The brown men could stand any kind of food. In that way they were almost like their hogs, who even could eat and digest rattlers.

She smiled at the old Indian and thanked him many times, putting away the venison as if it had been a great and valuable gift. In return she gave him a fresh loaf of their new wheat bread, and he smiled back at her with his broad wrinkled mouth and uttered many grunts that sounded friendly and grateful. They must have been words of thanks in his language.

After he had left and was out of Kristina’s sight, she picked up the evil-smelling venison and carried it to the dunghill behind the stable, where she threw it as far as she could. What would the giver have said had he seen this? Probably he had carried his heavy burden a long way today.

Even though the gift consisted of unusable food it had strengthened Kristina in her belief that the brown people were not evil and heartless. She had experienced it before: if one showed them kindness, they would do the same in return. They could be as grateful as white Christian people. Perhaps there was not too great a difference in the souls of whites and Indians. If the Indians were left in peace, they would leave the settlers in peace. But when they were taken advantage of they became violent and as ferocious as wild beasts. Now these hunters were beginning to suffer from starvation because their game was disappearing, for the white people had hunted and killed almost all the game in the forest. She had heard people say that the Indians would never of their own will give up their hunting grounds, since they could not live without them; in the end they would rise in a great war against the settlers.

As the afternoon wore on Kristina waited for Robert to return from his walk in the forest. Karl Oskar came home from the church building at his usual hour and then she remembered her discovery in Robert’s bed and asked him to come with her into the gable room. She lifted the pillow. The moment Karl Oskar saw the watch he exclaimed:

“It’s Arvid’s!”

“Arvid’s. .?”

“I recognized it at once!”

He picked up the watch and looked closer at it. “I’m quite sure. It’s the nickel watch Arvid got from his father when he left Sweden. He showed it to me many times, he always bragged about the cylinder works.”

Kristina had grabbed hold of her husband’s arm.

“Arvid’s watch! Oh dear Lord — what does it mean?”

Karl Oskar was weighing the watch in the palm of his hand. “It can only mean that Arvid is dead.”

A man used his watch as long as he lived. It measured his allotted time. No one gave up his watch before his death.

“I thought so. .”

This watch had cost ten riksdaler, twelve with the chain, Arvid had said that day when they all met and started out on their American journey. It was the sum of money his father, Petter of Kråkesjö, had been able to save during his forty years as cotter under the manse. It was Arvid’s paternal inheritance Karl Oskar now held in his palm.

But where was Arvid himself? Two gold seekers had set out on the California journey. Two days ago one had returned. The other was still missing. And concerning the missing one Robert had given only the vaguest information.

Karl Oskar said that while working at the church building today he had told the other men that his brother had unexpectedly returned from California. Danjel Andreasson had immediately asked about his former hired hand and had been greatly surprised when he learned Arvid had not returned. Robert and Arvid had served as farm hands together in Sweden, and here in America too they had kept together as the closest of friends — how had it come about that they had separated? And Danjel had simply echoed Karl Oskar’s earlier thought when he said that with Robert returning alone one could only assume that Arvid no longer was alive.

And under Robert’s pillow Kristina had found the confirmation.

She now looked at the watch with different eyes. It was connected with a human being she had known and never would see again, because he no longer existed.

“Poor Arvid! I wonder how he came to his end?”

“I’m afraid we’ll never know — at least not from Robert.”

“Why does he hide it?”

“Why does he hide everything from us? As yet he has barely said a word about himself. And no one knows when he lies or tells the truth.”

Robert told stories about happenings he had been in on, said Kristina, but she had never noticed that he invented them with evil intentions, in order to hurt someone or gain something for himself. He had never hurt anyone with his lies except himself.

“This is something he doesn’t want to be known,” said Karl Oskar. “But I’ll show him the watch. He must tell us about Arvid!”

“But if you won’t believe what he says. .”

“He has lied too much to me! And now I begin to wonder again: how about those. .?”

He cut the sentence off as if he had bitten his tongue. But Kristina understood: those bundles of money!

Yes, he continued, what was the story about Robert’s money, those big bills he had pulled from his black satchel? And the question came back again: was the money real? And he remembered something he had noticed; two letters sewn on the satchel. First he had thought one of the letters was an N, and this would have suited if Robert also had sewn on the initial for his first name. But now as he examined it closer he thought it looked rather like an M — and that he couldn’t understand since it fitted none of Robert’s names. The pouch must have belonged to someone else. Who had been the owner? And what kind of money did it contain?

And now had come the discovery of Arvid’s watch.

“No!” exclaimed Karl Oskar. “I can’t wait till Saturday! I must know about those bills as soon as possible. Tomorrow is Thursday — I’ll speak to Algot at the building — we’ll drive to Stillwater on Friday.”

“I don’t believe Robert would deceive us with the money he has given us,” said Kristina firmly. “You mustn’t suspect your brother of such an evil thing!”

“What can one believe after this? What can I think?”

Karl Oskar put the nickel watch into his pants pocket.

Kristina was beginning to worry about Robert, who had wandered off into the forest right after the noon meal and hadn’t returned by supper. But it was like him to wander off like that, explained the older brother. He had acted that way ever since he was a baby. Father Nils and Mother Marta used to hang a cowbell on the boy so they could find him out in the wastelands.

Karl Oskar was hungry and tired after the day’s heavy timber work and sat down to eat. There had been only four men working today; this way the building took time. A church forty-eight feet long, thirty-six feet wide, and eighteen feet high could not be finished this year. But they must try to get the roof on before winter set in. Some of the men were sluggish about showing up. Like Anders Månsson — he had put in only three days so far. He probably lay drunk in his bed most of the time; rumor had it he was getting quite bad. But Petrus Olausson, who was the inspector for the work, kept after the men and saw to it that everyone did his share; he was particular and honest in that way. And he wasn’t difficult to get along with, as long as religion and godly things didn’t come up. In such matters he was as stubborn and pigheaded as an old horned billy goat. However, since he no longer tried to enforce his will in their house, Karl Oskar had no trouble getting along with him.

Today during lunch hour Petrus had got into a disagreement with Jonas Petter, who had started to tell one of his bed play stories. It was about a rich farmer back in Ljuder who hired the village soldier to provide him with an heir. Jonas Petter had started telling the story at Ulrika’s party, last Christmas, and he wanted to finish it this time. But he had barely begun when Petrus grew fiery red in his face and forbade him to tell lewd and obscene stories while they timbered up the Lord’s house. Jonas Petter got annoyed and said Olausson wasn’t his guardian even though he was in charge of the building, and the two men had exchanged some rather unpleasant words.

But Jonas Petter had stopped his story about the farmer and the village soldier, so now it might be a couple of years before he found an opportunity to finish it, laughed Karl Oskar.

It was dark, but Robert had not yet come back. Kristina felt something might have happened to him: he had wanted to go to the Indian cliff and she had warned him about falling boulders. And he wasn’t well; he ought not to take off so far into the wilderness.

But Karl Oskar felt his brother could take care of himself; he knew all the paths hereabouts, and he had just returned from a much longer and much more dangerous journey.

At bedtime Robert still hadn’t shown up. Kristina pleaded with her husband.

“Please go out and look for him!”

By now Karl Oskar too was a little worried. He pulled on his boots — yes, he would go out and look. But it would be difficult to search for Robert in the dark. No one knew in which direction he might have gone.

Just then heavy shuffling was heard and Robert stepped into the kitchen, where he sank down on the nearest chair. His boots were muddy and he dropped his hat on the floor; he was completely worn out and panted heavily.

“You’re late!” said Kristina. “Supper is cold.”

But Robert shook his head; he didn’t want any food. A mug of milk would be all he wanted tonight. His stomach was upset — he had vomited a couple of times out in the forest. It might be the heat, he was better now and would go to bed at once.

He was seized with a fit of coughing; when it let up he began to drink the milk, in small swallows, while he talked.

He had been sitting, just resting, below the Indian head — he hadn’t been able to tear himself away from the place. The cliff had changed since he saw it four years ago. Now the Indian had deep wrinkles in his forehead, his eye sockets had grown deeper and blacker, and all his teeth had fallen out and lay as heaps of stones below him. Yes, like Robert himself, the Indian had lost his teeth. And now he sat there, back on his rock, and looked out over all the new houses around the lake, and he seemed profoundly sad. The Indian was mourning, not a single person, but thousands of people — his people, all those driven away by the white settlers. The Indian’s face was draped in sorrow, a thousand times enlarged; when one’s forehead cracked to pieces, and one’s eyes fell out, and the teeth dropped from one’s jaws — and all this in only four years — surely, such a person had gone through deep sorrow.

They listened in confusion to this speech about the sand cliff. It sounded almost as if Robert were talking about himself. He had deep furrows in his forehead, young as he was, his eyes were popping out, their gleam gone, and he had lost his teeth.

“Great big pieces have tumbled down!”

They ought to go there and then they would see that he told the truth. Big chunks from the very eyes of the Indian had fallen down. Had ever a human being in all the world wept such tears? Tears of stone, enduring tears that would remain as long as the earth stood. Those were the tears wept only during the great weeping for a whole race that was being destroyed. A thousand years from now people would still come and look at those enduring tears below the cliff of Ki-Chi-Saga’s shore. The piles of stones would remain there and tell of all those who had suffered disintegration in this country — the destruction of thousands of people.

The Indian’s eyes were so cracked he could hardly have any vision left. Probably he had already mourned himself blind.

Robert only wanted to tell what he had seen in the Indian’s face today; it was because of this face that he was late; why he had been unable to tear himself from the place. He only wanted to explain why he had stayed out so long.

When this was done he said goodnight to his brother and sister-in-law and went to his bed in the gable room.

Kristina said, “What happened to Robert while he was away? This morning too he used riddle-words I couldn’t solve.”

And Karl Oskar felt for Arvid’s watch in his pocket; he had meant to pull it out this evening, but had entirely forgotten about it while his brother talked of the Indian who had cried out his stone eyes. It sounded like the fairy tales he used to hear in his childhood — and all this his brother had managed to make up during the short time it took him to sit down on a chair and drink a mug of milk! That was how easily he could make up stories!

Now Karl Oskar would wait until morning to demand information about the watch’s owner: the missing gold seeker.

XIX. THE THIRD NIGHT — ROBERT’S EAR SPEAKS

It takes no longer to die than it takes to lift the hand and point a finger. I have tried to buzz that fact into you many times. You won’t believe how suddenly death can sweep a man off his feet and into his grave on the California Trail. I have impressed it upon you, and now you have seen it yourself: at sunrise healthy and red-cheeked, at sunset dead and buried. It is Man’s lot, it is yours.

But I’ve said nothing to Karl Oskar and Kristina. No one but you can hear what I say; you can trust me. I never betray you. Karl Oskar and Kristina can guess nothing; they believe you have returned from California, and you’ll hurt them least by letting them keep that belief. You could say to your brother: Gold is nothing! Nothing but deceit! But he would only wonder, and doubt you still more. He is already worrying — you can see it in his eyes when he doesn’t think you are looking. He is suspicious of the great bundles of money you gave away. He’s afraid they’re useless. He can’t get over his suspicion that you’re fooling him. But Kristina believes you, you can see that.

You noticed she had found the watch under the pillow and taken it away. They want of course to know what happened to Arvid. But you have no reason to tell them, unless you want to. . Best this remain between Arvid and you forever: no third person would understand. And never a sound from me; all you hear, when I buzz you all night long, are your own sounds.

You don’t think you can sleep in peace tonight? Listen now, how I buzz and whiz, like the howling wind that lured two muleteers to a dust bowl and thirst — that treacherous wind on the plains that covered their tracks and prevented them from finding their way back. Tonight you’re tired — and the more tired you are, the stronger my buzzing, the better you hear me:

Listen, gold seeker!

Why are you wandering about, out there on the plain? What are you looking for?

— 1—

The sun’s fire had burned down toward evening. The ashes of coolness spread across the plains. The dusty ground, burning in daytime, cooled during the night. The oppressive dust-laden air gave way, and less effort was required to move.

Robert and Arvid continued to wander. They must not stay in one place, must move on, forward. They managed to keep their feet moving even though every step hurt. They stumbled across the plain, they held onto each others arms for support, to keep upright. Two twisting bodies straggling along, held together in a firm grip; two bodies walking steadier than one. Two boys walking arm in arm, like a couple in love, like a boy and a girl walking across the grass of a blooming meadow on a cool June evening.

For they were inseparable and would never part.

A few times they saw creatures moving over the plain, red-furred, sharp-nosed animals sweeping by in small packs. They were the size of small dogs and moved as quickly and softly over the ground as the very wind. They must have been carrion beasts, feeding on the dead horse.

Dusk was falling; no longer could they see holes and crevices where they stepped. Arvid fell down. Robert grabbed him under the shoulders and helped him to his feet again, even though he would have preferred to stretch out and lie on the ground. He brushed the dirt from his comrades neck, but he could not get rid of the grains of sand that chafed under his eyelids.

As they walked on, Arvid pulled out his watch; before it got too dark he wanted to know what time it was. His father had instructed him to keep the cylinder watch well cleaned at all times. Now he was afraid that sand might have got into the vest pocket when he fell; if a grain of sand got into the works it might stop the watch.

Arvid held the nickel watch against his swollen, cracked lips and blew on it as it dangled from its chain, blew away the sand. Then he turned the lining of his pocket inside out and brushed it well with his fingers before he put the watch back in again.

Around them cliffs and sandhills donned the black cape of night and assumed nocturnal shapes. Once again they became monstrous creatures: a buffalo ox’s horn-crowned royal head was placed on a mule’s narrow, spindly body, and a desert wolf with a thirty-foot tail opened its deep cliff-jaws in front of them. And the wall of distant hills underwent its metamorphosis and produced camels and dromedaries with humped backs and swaying necks. After the caravan day the desert’s beasts of burden had lain down to rest in a circle under the stars.

They had gone out to search for a pair of stray mules, but a little while ago they had come across another animal:

“The horse had just been shod!” said Arvid.

Robert too had noticed this. The horse lay dead, and half eaten away, but his shoes had glittered brilliantly in the sun. It was doubly evil to meet death with new shoes on one’s feet. They gleamed like silver above the rotten flesh. And the separated, lone hind leg had stiffened in the sand in a final vain resistance. It rose in an accusing kick against the Lord in heaven. Poor lone hind leg in the wide plain!

But Arvid had seen something still more lonely than the hind leg; he had almost stepped on it.

“It was a forefinger! It pointed right at us!”

The evening coolness had cleared Robert’s head and he could again think clearly; his thoughts were circling around one single object, one only — the one they were now looking for.

He had thrown away his shoes and the sand felt cooler when he walked barefoot. But inside he was filled with dry, hot, burning embers which had plagued him for more than a day now. In the blisters on his lips this fire burned and stung; his tongue grew into a swollen, smarting lump, tasting of hard, gray earth from the dried-out water holes. It had to be somewhere, somewhere they must find it. It couldn’t have dried up everywhere, somewhere it must still well forth. They must go on searching, they would find it at last.

Before they got lost they had seen water in many places, and the holes had not been dry. It couldn’t have dried up all at once. If they only could find some grass again, then surely they would be close — that short, thick grass, the buffalo grass. . Only yesterday they had seen it on their journey — or was it the day before yesterday? Which morning was it he had awakened and found the two mules gone? Was it yesterday, the day before yesterday, or the day before the day before yesterday?

Somewhere they would find it.

They had traveled many hundred miles to join the gold caravan, the train of the hundred thousand. Now they were looking for something very common: water.

— 2—

Over the biggest dromedary’s dark hump the moon rose. From the moon disc — three quarters filled — a pale, clear light was diffused over the sandy plain. Now they could continue their search, they would be lighted by the night sun.

They had walked only a short distance when they found themselves in a hollow. Arvid was the first one to discover it: something gleamed in the moonlight at the bottom of the hollow. He saw it only for a second — then he let out a hoarse howl.

Violently he pulled his hand from Robert’s, rushed forward a few paces, and threw himself headlong on the ground. Robert had seen nothing as yet, as he came stumbling behind, half asleep. What was the matter with Arvid? Did he see water again? Twice before he had seen it, but only in his imagination; as soon as they had reached the place they found only dry sand.

But now Arvid was lying on his stomach, drinking from a small pool in the bottom of the deep hollow. It had been a big water hole, but had now narrowed to a small pool. And Arvid was guzzling and drinking. It was not imagination this time; at last they had found water.

Robert not only saw the water, he could hear it from the noise his friend made. But when he came closer he could see in the clear moonlight that it was no fresh, gushing spring they had found. It was a mud hole with stagnant, thick, dirty, opaque water. It did not look like good drinking water. In the ash-gray mud around the pool were deep, hardened tracks from animals.

He threw himself on his knees beside his comrade to drink. But such a nauseating odor filled his nostrils that he pulled back. The pool stank from something rotten, cadaverous. His desire to quench his thirst was checked by a feeling of nausea.

But Arvid was stretched out full length on his stomach, his whole chin in the pool, like an animal that drinks by putting its snout into the water. He was lapping and drinking in long swallows — puffing, panting, snorting, drinking. He got water in his windpipe, he coughed, it bubbled in the pool.

“It stinks like hell,” mumbled Robert.

Arvid did not worry about the odor; he was not using his nose; only his mouth and throat were open. He continued to drink, sucking in the water like a cow, gorging himself drinking. For each swallow he let out a deep, muffled, satisfied groan.

“Is it all right? It smells like stale piss.”

Robert again bent down over the pool, driven by his insufferable thirst. His mouth touched the water — he must overcome his nausea, he must drink. Anyone as thirsty as he must drink anything fluid, however nasty it smelled. But in the moonlight it seemed as if the water was cleaner and clearer on the opposite side of the pool. He crawled on his knees away from Arvid to the other side. Here it did seem less nauseating.

Beside him a post had been driven into the ground, with a piece of board nailed to it. There were letters on the board, clumsily written in chalk. After one look at the board Robert was on his feet again:

LOOK AT THIS

Don’t Drink — The Water Is Poison — The Death

The post with the narrow board across it rose beside the water hole like a cross on a grave. Robert looked at the wooden cross for one long, frightened second, then he yelled, “Stop, Arvid! Its death!”

In his fright he was using English words which his friend did not understand.

“Come, Arvid, and look at this post! It says the water is poisoned!”

And at once he could hear what the Mexican had said: the water holes along the trail were not to be trusted. Someone had drunk of this water before and discovered it was poisonous and put up the sign to warn others.

“For Christ’s sake, stop drinking!” He grabbed his comrade by the shoulder to pull him from the water. But Arvid had already raised himself up on his knees. He had drunk a lot, he had satisfied his thirst. Water trickled in big drops from the corners of his mouth; his chin with its scraggy beard looked like a dripping muzzle. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and belched.

“Helluva dirty water. Don’t quench the thirst much.”

“It’s poisoned!”

Robert pointed to the sign where the warning could be read in large letters. But it was in English and meant nothing to Arvid.

“For God’s sake, don’t drink any more!”

“Well, it wasn’t very good water. It’s stinky!”

“Arvid — you must puke it up!”

“The hell I must. .?”

“Don’t you hear — the pool is poisoned! You’ve drunk your death!”

“Well, it couldn’t be that bad. .?”

Robert pulled Arvid away from the water, into a thicket of low bushes at the edge of the muddy pool. His friend must not be tempted to drink any more.

“Puke, Arvid! Put your fingers in your throat! Get rid of the water!”

But Arvid refused to think that he had drunk death into his body. His belly was full of water, brimful, but he felt no discomfort. He refused to put his fingers in his throat, he didn’t want to vomit. All he wanted was to lie down and go to sleep. His stomach felt a little heavy after all the water, a rest would be good. And with a tired sigh of contentment he stretched out on his back under the bushes.

“Please, Arvid — listen to me! You must get rid of the water!” Robert tried to put his own fingers into Arvid’s throat and make him vomit.

“Let me alone! I’m all right! Let me sleep now. .”

There was nothing more to be done with Arvid. He just wanted to sleep, right in this spot. He refused to move an inch. Why should he put his fingers in his throat? He wasn’t sick. All he wanted was sleep; it was the middle of the night and he was more tired than any person on earth had ever been before.

Arvid pushed his head under some low branches as if he wished to hide it. He went to sleep at once, snoring noisily.

Suddenly it became very dark; a great cloud had crossed the moon and cut off its light. The contours of the landscape with its cliffs and boulders and sharp grass and bushes were enveloped in darkness. Somewhere under that black mantle lay the chewed-off horse shank with a new shoe, and near it a white finger pointing from the sand.

Robert sat beside his sleeping comrade, staring out into the desolate night. His vision could not penetrate far in this darkness. He could not see the pool, even though it must be less than thirty feet away. He could not see the wooden cross that was raised beside it. But it was there all right, the words remained where they once had been chalked on the wood: Look at This — The Death. Death remained, it was near. It had only hidden itself. Perhaps it did so at times, to fool one. But it was there, and kept close to them.

He had two names for death, each sounding very different to his ear: the Swedish word sounded hard and frightening and threatening: Döden! It would be the clarion call over earth on doomsday morning: Döööden! That word cut like an ax through bone and marrow. Its echo was fear, a sound without mercy, a wailing without comfort. But the English death sounded soft and peaceful, quiet and restful. It didn’t call for an end to life in threatening and condemning sounds. Death was soft-voiced, merciful, it approached silently, kindly. It brought comfort and compassion to a person at the end of his life. Death — it was a whisper in the ear, it didn’t frighten or terrify. It said in the kindest of words how things stood; it said in all friendliness: Now you will die.

But it was only due to the softer word that the English death sounded kinder than the Swedish, and words were nothing but foolery and cheating. The English, lurking back there in the dark only a few paces from them, it too had no mercy.

Arvid had drunk of death’s water and now he slept and was satisfied. Robert had not drunk, he still had the thirst that consumed life in him. If he drank from the pool he would die. If he didn’t drink, he would die.

He moved his dry, swollen tongue; he said something to God. He wanted to tell the Lord over life and death that he did not wish to die. He wanted to explain that life was dear in the moment it was to be taken away. Never was it dearer. Never had it been dearer to him than during this night in the wilderness. How could his creator demand of him that he, only in his twentieth year, be consumed by an unbearable thirst, his body to disintegrate until only whitening, clean-gnawed bones would remain? Like the rotting hind leg of the horse, helplessly kicking toward the heaven? No, he wanted to keep his body intact, walk on his feet over ground that was covered with soft, fresh, green grass — and he wanted to drink of the clear, fresh, running water on earth!

Water, water! He must find it!

Exhausted, Robert sank down against the body of his sleeping comrade. Confusion entered his thoughts, his head grew dizzy, and he sank into a hot, febrile slumber. As he slept he wandered about on green paths, and found running brooks that streamed over his face, filled his nose and mouth, and watered freely a verdant earth.

He dreamed deep, wonderful, purling water-dreams.

— 3—

He was awakened by a groan; first from a great distance, then closer, until at last it was close to his ear:

“Ooohhjj — ooojjhojj! My guts! They kill me!”

Arvid was rolling over in the sand, pulling his knees against his chin, twisting himself into a bundle, stretching out again, throwing himself to and fro, rolling over. He fumbled for Robert, got a cramp-like hold on his arm. Robert’s hands found his and their fingers twisted together in a knot. Their tied-together hands held them together:

“Its killing me! Its tearing the guts out of me! Help me, Robert! Please, help me! Help. . me. .”

Two great swollen eyes stared in the dark from Arvid’s face. He held his hands against his stomach and rolled over again. Then, violently, he pulled away his hands and dug them into the sand, scratching wildly, kicked the sand with his feet until it whirled in a cloud around them. He was digging a hole where he lay, poking himself down into the earth, as his cries became a howl.

“Oooooh! Oooooohh! God. . help. . me. .”

Death had arrived — Arvid had death in him. He had unsuspectingly opened his mouth and in deep swallows let it enter his body. Now it tore at his guts, and he screamed out his pain as loudly as his voice could manage.

Robert felt in the dark for Arvid’s flailing hands. If he only had had some medicine, a few drops to give him, some salve to put on, any help. But he had nothing to offer.

“OOOOHHJJJ! Help me! Please! Help! OOOJJJ!”

Arvid dug, beat wildly about him, yelled until his voice and strength failed. As he weakened, his wail sank to a pitiful whine, a quiet whimper, a feeble sound like a bird’s peep.

The intense pain continued for a few hours. At last Arvid emitted only a weak, slow complaint. In his pain-ridden impotence he groped again for his comrades hands and crept close to him on trembling limbs. They lay twined together. Robert could feel Arvid’s burning breath panting in his face; against his chest Arvid’s chest pumped like a smiths bellows.

“Don’t leave me. . please. .”

The two comrades lay close together. They had come together from Sweden to North America, they had started out together on the California Trail, they had traveled together thousands of miles, and now they were still together. They had sealed with a handshake their intention never to part.

“Don’t. . leave. . me. .”

Arvid had once wanted to turn back from the California Trail, but had kept his promise and stayed with his friend. Now he could trust Robert to stay with him. The two of them would never part — how many times hadn’t they repeated that. And Robert said it here again:

“. . never leave you. .”

Arvid could trust him — they would never part. But as his cries gradually died down there was nothing to keep Robert entirely awake. He slid into a sort of doze, between waking and sleeping. He felt Arvids fingers fumbling for his, and he held on to them even harder. A cool wind swept under their clothing — he moved closer to his comrade, who now lay almost silent, his breathing sounding choked. Something inside him was closing his windpipe.

It was still dark and Robert did not notice when Arvid unhooked his watch chain from the buttonhole and pulled the watch from its vest pocket. But his ear registered something he had grasped in his slumber: Take good care of it. . good care. . good. .

But just now Robert wasn’t listening, he was where he wished to be, tossed high over mountains and deserts, up to the stars and the sky. Up there he met an immense river that flooded out of heaven. In that river he sank down, sank down to the bottom, to the bottom — and the bottom at last turned into the sand where he was lying. He lay there thrown down from heaven.

And then it was morning.

The sun stung his eyes with its ray-spears and awakened him. His eyelids smarted from sand. He rubbed them, looked about, and got himself together: everything came back.

“Arvid. .!”

Arvid lay close to him, stretched out on his stomach. He lay on his face in the hole he had dug with his own hands. His hands lay beyond his head, the palms turned up, full of sand. He did not move, he lay still, like the ground under him. His face was turned down, his nostrils in the sand. Robert stretched out his hand, felt his comrade’s cheek lightly, and turned the face toward him. Arvid’s eyes were glassy, their vision broken, yellow sand grains clinging to the eyeballs.

Robert called Arvid’s name several times, but he did not reply.

As he turned Arvid’s face something stuck to his fingers; his fingers were red, bloody. Arvid’s chin was furrowed with wide, red streaks. He had vomited blood in great quantities. In the corners of his mouth it had coagulated into thick, blackened lumps, it had spread across his cheeks like blossoming flowers.

Robert could not grasp or understand it. He had blood on his hand; he must have pricked it on a thorny bush until it bled. All the bushes tore like claws, the grass was sharp, the very ground tore wounds in one’s feet. He called Arvid — he called louder but received no answer. He noticed that Arvid’s fingers were bent like scoops; he lay there unmoving but it looked as if he were trying to dig his own grave. Or what was he digging for?

And over the golden brown hills the sun’s flame flared again. A new morning had dawned in the land of dust and stone, heat and thirst.

— 4—

Robert’s dizziness returned and he lost consciousness. He again heard the sound of approaching water; new rivers streamed over him and he lay down to drink. But into his mouth ran a hard, crunching water which hurt his swollen tongue. He spit out the sand he had been chewing.

Arvid had found a water hole and had hurried to drink. The hole stank of old urine but he drank and felt no discomfort from it and then he lay down to sleep. He awakened and called and called, but he was still lying there. They were not separated.

They had set out together to look for gold, for they wanted to be rich and free. And there lay Arvid on his stomach, digging with his hands. Help me! he had cried, and dug as if this would relieve him. He was digging for gold but the only thing he dug up was potato peelings, whole piles of them, a whole heaving boat full of them. And their boss had been angry and called Arvid a son of a bitch. What luck he didn’t understand English — it might have hurt his feelings. Arvid had once been accused of going after a heifer and had been given the name “The Bull of Nybacken.” He had emigrated to get away from that name, he had traveled all the way here, to dig this hole where he now lay so quietly.

Beside his comrade’s arm lay something that glittered. It wasn’t gold, it was Arvid’s watch, and it was only nickel-plated, with a brass chain. It was the chain that glittered. And Arvid was so careful with his watch. Why had he thrown it away like that? It could easily get sand in the works. He must retrieve it — he stretched out his hand for the watch and held it to his ear: it had stopped. Sand must have gotten into the works then. It had stopped a little after eleven, but now it was early in the morning.

So since Arvid was still here, they weren’t separated. Arvid lay still, he had covered his face with flowers. There lay two big roses right over his mouth, dark red now in the sun. Robert stared vacantly: where had Arvid found those beautiful flowers on his face?

“Comfort me! Help me!” And he had comforted him and said: “I won’t leave you. .”

Arvid had drunk and sated his thirst. But Robert was still thirsty; he must drink, or he wouldn’t manage to get to California. He must get up and look for a water hole. Must move on, mustn’t stay in the same place: the one who couldn’t move forward couldn’t move back either.

Oh — back there the stream is spurting forth! A spring must suddenly have opened up. But the water is running in the other direction, it’s running away from him: it’s out of his reach. He must run to catch up with it! Water — water — now at last he had found it!

He yells until he loses his breath, he cries out in wild joy:

“Arvid! Arvid! Hurry! Come here and let’s drink! Water! Come. . Come. .!”

He rose on wobbly legs. But Arvid remained still.

But this was a running spring, with clean, clear, healthy water. It wasn’t a pool, stinking old piss. And he ran after the water that streamed over the sand. It was a broad, gurgling stream; it ran faster, he followed, he hurried his steps, he ran as fast as he could, used all his strength. He was barefooted but didn’t feel the sharp ground grinding against his sore feet as long as he saw the stream in front of him.

But it ran faster than he could run. And all at once it was gone. He scanned the broad plain — where had it gone to? It had gushed forth from the earth — and it had run into the earth again.

He stopped and stood there like a hunter who looks disappointedly after escaping game.

Robert wandered alone in the wilderness. The world was nothing but a plain, a sun above it, and a firebrand in his throat.

In his confused mind one thought remained: he and Arvid had promised to stick together. But where was he? He was alone now. They must have lost each other. He must find his way back to Arvid. He knew where he was lying — stretched out in a ditch with two red roses on his mouth. He must walk back to that place. There was a thicket of low bushes there, with thorns on them, and next to them a water hole with deep tracks in the gray mud from animals that had come to drink.

He scouted, he fell, he rose again. The sun burned and he crept into the shade under cliffs and boulders. He sat down to rest. But the stream came running by right in front of him. He rushed up and staggered after it until it was gone.

He chased many running streams which he could not catch up with. He walked until the sand under his feet disappeared and turned into grass. It felt different — softer, nicer. He tramped through short, withered grass, buffalo grass. He recognized it easily; their mules liked that kind of grass. And wasn’t he looking for a pair of mules that had strayed? And didn’t he just hear their names called? He listened. No, he must have been mistaken.

It was good to go barefoot on grass instead of sand. Especially with sore, chafed feet. Something thundered and roared in his ears — was it water streaming? It was far away. But the sound of a call again penetrated through the din in his ears, clearer now. There it was again — the names of the mules. He remembered their names — or what was he hearing?

“Heekee. .! Hinni. .! Cheekte. .!”

He himself had called those names only a little while ago, when he and Arvid looked for the strayed animals. It must be the names that now echoed in his ears. Heekee — Hinni — he and Arvid did not know what those words meant, for they had not named the mules. It was someone else calling now. He had heard that same voice call animals before, and the animals had been dirty gray, as big as heifers, long-eared and spindly-legged. They had coal-black eyes and braying voices. They carried heavy packs, moved slowly on their spindly legs, the sand whirled softly around their small hooves as they crossed the plain. They were tame, sluggish, trustworthy riding and pack beasts one could talk to and scratch behind the ears: Mexican mules—that was their name.

“Hinni! Cheekte. .!”

Mexican—now the call was clearer, sounded closer, and he recognized the voice. He had heard it sing round the campfire:

Oh, the good time has come at last,

We need no more complain, sir!

It was because of this that he and Arvid now were walking about here, side by side:

We shall be rich at once now,

With California gold, sir!

The singer of this song had packed huge gourds, enclosed in woven straw, and from those vessels he had often drunk. Drunk. .! What did the Mexican call those containers. .? He searched in vain for the word, the name. And what was the name of the man who had sung at the campfire? A small man, in a red jacket and brown pants with yellowish tassels and the broadest hat any man in creation had ever worn.

Oh, the good time has come at last — he tried to repeat the words and answer the singer, but his swollen tongue produced only a hoarse croaking. His reply did not reach far enough, did not reach his master — yes, that was his boss’s voice. And he was calling his strayed mules, not him. He was Robert Nilsson, a farm hand from Sweden, on his way to the land of gold. If he only managed to croak and bray, perhaps his boss would think it was his mules replying. But he needed water — he had drunk before from his master’s gourds. .

The voice came closer. It was next to his ear. But at that moment he himself was removed, slid away, fluttered out into the distance without being able to stop it. In the very moment when the familiar voice spoke into his ear, he was pulled away, flew into the air over the plain; he swam high above sand and grass, over the earth, above hills and cliffs, he was lifted all the way up into the heavens and all the stars gleamed and glimmered before his eyes. Now he was so high above everything that never more would he come down to earth.

But up there in heaven stood a very little man in a red jacket and broad hat; he leaned over him, and he had black eyes, kind mule eyes, and a nose that was almost as big as Karl Oskar’s. Judging by the nose it could be Karl Oskar, his brother. And he spoke like a brother.

“Poor boy! My muleteer. . I’ve been looking for you. .”

And he was on earth again and lay on his back in the buffalo grass. He had fallen down from the heavens and the stars and he held something in his arms, held it hard: with trembling hands he held onto the straw enclosure of the gourd — the calabash.

“Oh, poor fellow. . Just in time. . My muleteer. .”

Robert drank. He drank a water that stayed with him. It couldn’t flee, it was shut up in a bottle, in a gourd which he had caught in his arms—this water did not run away from him.

You can figure it out if you wish. Arvid had been dead now for three years. Of the cotter’s son from Kråkesjö manor there is no longer any sign in the sand. The wind has long ago covered him with sand.

He emigrated a long way to his grave. He found a quiet place, a silent and peaceful room in the earth.

REST IN PEACE SWEET BOY

FOR THY TROUBLES ARE OVER

But the cries of his death agony, his calls for help, his ailing — all these I have saved for you in here. How did you like it when I let you listen to them again a moment ago? Didn’t they sound as real as ever? Piercing, penetrating like that time? Haven’t I kept them well? Could you hear any difference in the cries from that first time?

“Help me, Robert! Please help me — I’m dying. .”

How many ears do you think have heard this pleading before me on this earth? But not all, by far, have kept it so well as I. Each time you hear this pleading sleep comes late to you. It was during your wait for sleep that you began to ponder your lot in life.

It’s nearly morning but you are still awake, tossing your head back and forth on the pillow, trying all sides, unable to find the one which will silence me. I understand so well that you want to get my sounds out of your head. But I assure you: I’m your most faithful comrade. You and Arvid had to part at last, but you and I shall stay together. I will never leave you!

Listen! I buzz for you through the long hours of your waking! Listen, gold seeker, where you toss on your bed!

I have preserved the sound of the wind over that plain — can you hear how it roars across those empty spaces in that country of stone and dust and thirst? And the wind roars over the earth at will throughout the night! It quickly obliterates a wanderer’s tracks and covers in short time a wretched, naked, lone finger pointing accusingly from the sand.

XX. WILDCATS OF MANY BREEDS

— 1—

On Thursday morning — as on every weekday morning — Karl Oskar was up and about before daylight. As soon as he was dressed, he raised the lid of the old Swedish chest against the wall and took out two bundles of money, which he held in his hands for a few thoughtful moments. He had done this each morning since Robert’s return.

Cash—to him it was the most annoying word in the English language. Cash — it was what he lacked. No cash, Mr. Nilsson? You must pay cash, Mr. Nilsson! How many times hadn’t he received that reply like a humiliating box on his ear when he had asked for credit in a store. No Cash? Those two words could be used to sum up a settler’s situation in Minnesota.

Yet here he was, handling two bundles of crisp cash — four thousand American dollars, fifteen thousand Swedish riksdaler! After five years on the new place, these bundles would now end all his worries about cash. But these bank notes had fallen in his lap too unexpectedly. How could a man, from one day to the next, grasp that he had become rich? That was why each morning he needed to feel his riches and see the money with his own eyes.

Karl Oskar pinched the black and green bills. Were they worth their stated value? Could he trust the gift even though he could not trust the giver?

For only one more day must he control his impatience. Tomorrow he would get the information from the bank. Although he had agreed with his neighbor to drive to Stillwater on Saturday, after the discovery of Arvid’s watch in Robert’s possession his suspicion of his brother flared up anew. By going to the bank on Friday he would cut down his uncertainty by one day; by tomorrow he would know the truth!

Karl Oskar would have to be a little late for his work on the church building this morning; he must have a talk with Robert before he set out. He put the money back in the chest and went out to do the morning chores in the stable.

Meanwhile, Kristina began to prepare breakfast. She had been thinking over what Robert had said to her yesterday, and the more she thought of it, the greater riddle it became. She had known her brother-in-law for ten years but yesterday he had seemed to her an utter stranger.

She wondered that Karl Oskar and Robert could be brothers. How could two people of such opposite natures have been begotten by the same father and carried in the same mother’s womb? As long as she had known these two men Karl Oskar had been the big brother and Robert the little brother, but there was a difference even greater than the ten years that separated them. It was their natures — their characters and dispositions — that made them so unlike. Karl Oskar was like most of the hard-working, enterprising settlers out here, but Robert was not like any other person she had ever known. There was something both stimulating and disconcerting about him; he held his own with his clever talk but at the same time he was unpredictable — no one could guess one moment what he would do the next. And at times he behaved as if he himself didn’t know what he ought to do here on earth — as if it didn’t matter one bit how he whiled away the time, as his life flowed to its end.

Karl Oskar had often said that he regretted having brought along his younger brother to America; Robert fitted this country like a square plug in a round hole. He was too soft and lazy and lacked persistence, insisted the older brother. But Robert had succeeded so well that he had become rich before any other settler from Ljuder! What would Karl Oskar now say about the little brother he had considered useless? Monday evening Robert had silenced Karl Oskar with the black pouch; as soon as he had displayed his money, the roles of the two brothers were reversed. The older one could no longer reproach and scold the younger one. Now it was Robert who did the talking, now it was he who knew what was what. The younger had become more important than the older, and who could now say that Robert didn’t fit in America?

Since last Monday evening Robert had been the big brother and Karl Oskar the little brother. It was strange the way things had changed between the brothers!

Yet Robert, this new big-brother who had returned from the gold-land, had not said twenty words about his riches. No one could say that he bragged about them, no one could accuse him of big talk. And Kristina — like Karl Oskar — felt that there was something wrong and perhaps frightening about his silence.

On Thursday morning Robert was up earlier than had been his wont since his return, and he came into the kitchen before Kristina had put the food on the table. His eyes were pale and bloodshot as if he hadn’t slept. She had noticed that he slept badly; a few times she had heard him go to the kitchen to get a drink.

She put the food on the table and called Karl Oskar, who was surprised that his brother was up already; this was the first time since his return that he had shown up at the breakfast table. He yawned broadly, exposing the tooth-empty upper jaw. His appetite was poor; he chewed slowly and had trouble swallowing. Kristina urged him time and again to eat some more; he ate less than the little boys, Johan and Harald, who ate their breakfast standing up at the table — children were said to grow faster if they ate standing upright. For Robert’s sake Kristina had baked a big corn omelet but he took only a small piece of it on his plate.

It was unusually quiet around the table in the kitchen this morning. But when everyone had finished Karl Oskar pulled the nickel watch from his pocket and placed it beside Robert’s plate.

“Why do you have Arvid’s watch?”

Robert showed no surprise or confusion when he saw the watch, which appeared near his plate like an extra dish of food that he must eat before he left the table:

“I put it under my pillow. I noticed it was gone.”

“Why do you hide the watch? Why don’t you dare tell us the truth? Why don’t you dare tell us that Arvid is dead?”

That was three questions at one time. But Robert only replied:

“You have a right to ask, Karl Oskar. That you have.”

He was interrupted by an attack of persistent, hollow coughing.

“The first evening you said Arvid had remained in the goldfields.”

“Yes, I said he remained out there. He did.” Robert’s coughing spell was over.

“But you didn’t say he was dead. That he had sacrificed his life.”

“Who doesn’t sacrifice his life on the Trail? Everyone does — one way or another. .”

“You talk in riddles! Tell us the truth right out!”

Karl Oskar was getting impatient and loud, but his younger brother remained calm. He picked up the watch and coiled the broad brass chain slowly around his forefinger. Kristina rose and began to clear the table; without interfering in the conversation between the two brothers she was listening intently. She told the children to leave the table.

Robert twisted the chain of Arvid’s watch tightly around his finger until it resembled a thick golden ornament. He squeezed the watch inside the palm of his hand. Kristina noticed his elbows were beginning to tremble.

Roberts eyes looked so big and glassy today; she felt his forehead with her hand.

“You’re burning hot! You have a fever!”

Karl Oskar had sounded angry and she whispered to him not to cross-examine his brother in this way; they could see he was sick.

Her cautioning had its effect. Karl Oskar rose, and put his next question in a milder voice.

“We two are brothers — why don’t you confide in me?”

“The very first evening I came home you said to me, ‘Stop lying!’ I had just begun to confide in you. But you didn’t believe me. You said, ‘I know you’re back without a single nickel!’”

Robert had risen too; he straightened his narrow, caved-in shoulders. They stood shoulder to shoulder and as Robert straightened up it was apparent that he was a couple of inches taller than his older brother.

Not even physically was Karl Oskar any longer the big brother. And his cheeks reddened slightly as he remembered that on Monday evening his “little” brother had got the upper hand: This is just a little pocket money!

“But couldn’t we be honest with each other again? Why did you hide the watch? No one is going to think that you killed Arvid to take his possession!”

Robert turned his face quickly toward Karl Oskar and his reply came as a sudden thrust.

“Maybe you have guessed it! Perhaps I did kill Arvid! Perhaps it was my doing. .”

“Are you out of your senses?!”

“He wanted to return. . once. . but I. .”

Robert stopped suddenly, his shoulders caved in again, as if he were defending himself against a blow. He pressed his hands against his head and panted:

“I can’t. . Leave me alone. . I’m not strong enough. . Please, Karl Oskar. . leave me in peace. . dear brother. . forgive me. . I can’t stand it. .”

He rushed to the door and opened it with a heavy jerk of the handle. While they stood there, perplexed at his sudden outburst, he ran out of the kitchen as if he were pursued. They looked after him through the window — he had thrown himself face down on the ground near the newly planted gooseberry bushes. There he lay, unmoving.

“Leave your brother alone,” advised Kristina. “You can’t do anything else. .”

“No,” Karl Oskar sighed irresolutely. “What else can one do? Nothing, I guess. .”

He knew that Robert would never take back a single word of what he had said, never admit one of his lies, never would admit that he did lie. Would they ever know the truth about Arvid? Would they learn what had happened to the two old farm-hand friends after that day four years ago when they set out on their journey to California?

But one piece of clear information they would get — by tomorrow they would have the truth about the gold-seeker’s riches.

— 2—

Karl Oskar left to work on the church building. A few moments later Robert came back in, like himself again. Today, once more, he wanted to take a walk to the Indian, he said. And Kristina watched him stroll off through the pine grove to the west.

She went into the gable room to make up his bed and there she discovered large dark red spots on his pillow slip which hadn’t been there yesterday. The spots could be nothing but blood oozing from his bad ear during the night.

She began to wonder if Robert didn’t suffer from some consuming inner illness; he had a nasty cough, and sometimes he couldn’t eat their food — such troubles were not caused by a bad ear. Did he perhaps have chest fever? When she was alone with him she would ask him about this; he seemed to confide in her rather than in his brother. For the moment the red spots on his pillow slip told her more about him than he himself had done so far.

Kristina sat down to her sewing and picked out the basting from a pair of pants she was making for Johan. It was still early in the day but the heat was already pressing perspiration through her skin. The older children had gone down to the lake and must be splashing about in the inlet. Outside the chickens cackled; she now had a score of laying hens, all from the eggs of the hen Ulrika had given her two years ago. The cow, Miss, had lately calved but was not yet recovered and stood tethered down in the meadow. She had already had time to fill her belly and sought shade under a tree where she stood and chewed her cud.

Just then the oppressive, heavy stillness of the summer day was broken by loud cries from the children. Kristina dropped Johan’s pants on the floor and was outside in a second.

Johan and Marta came from the lake carrying Harald between them. Harald’s face was red and his eyes wild-looking, as he screamed loudly. The mother took the boy in her arms, carried him inside, and put him on the bed in the gable room. There was no use questioning the little one — he couldn’t talk; he panted for breath, groaned and puffed, bubbling foam escaping from the corners of his mouth.

The mother felt a sudden pressure across her chest.

“What happened to the boy? Did he fall and hurt himself?”

“It’s the wildcat! A great big wildcat!”

Johan and Marta were talking at the same time. While they had been out in the water Harald had crept in among the bushes on the shore. Suddenly he had come rushing back, yelling at the top of his voice, and they had heard a horrible growling and hissing: Harald had come across a big wildcat that was hiding in the thicket. They too had seen the evil critter that had frightened Harald; it was gray and had a thick cropped tail and thick legs. They had seen his head sticking out from the bushes, an enormous head with long whiskers — exactly like an ordinary cat but much bigger.

Johan and Marta had been so scared when they saw him they too had yelled, and the screaming of the three of them frightened the cat, who sneaked back into the bushes again. They had rushed home but had to carry Harald, who was so frightened he couldn’t walk by himself.

Kristina pulled off the boy’s clothes to see if the wildcat had wounded him, but she could find no claw marks on the little one’s body. It must have been the scare that affected the boy. But she felt sure the littlest of the brats had been in danger of his life; these big cats were said to kill children of his age. She had heard that those treacherous wildcats got right into houses. Karl Oskar had once shot such a beast down at the lake.

Kristina went to fetch some sweet milk from the spring where she kept it sunk in a bucket to preserve it in this heat. She tried to make Harald drink.

“Dear sweet love, don’t be afraid — that ugly cat. .”

A little child could lose its voice from sudden fright. But by and by the boy’s voice returned; he stuttered a few syllables; soon he managed an occasional full word.

“The cat. . he groaned. .”

“Horrible creature!”

After a while Harald seemed all right again and could talk fairly well, but she had better keep him in bed for the rest of the day. Kristina warned the other children not to go near the lake. The big wildcat might still be there, lurking in those heavy bushes that hung over the water in the shallow inlet.

Kristina had barely sat down to her sewing again before she was interrupted by a caller — a dear caller: Ulrika Jackson had come to visit New Duvemåla.

Ulrika was on her way home from St. Paul, where she had caught a ride on a cart and decided to stop in since she was so close. She hadn’t seen her namesake for several months. Kristina’s naming her lastborn Ulrika had pleased her more than a proposal from the President of the United States would have — if she had now been unmarried.

The first thing she asked was how much the girl had grown since her last visit. Ulrika herself had had a new baby last winter, her second child in wedlock — again a girl. It seemed to be her lot to mother females only. She still hoped to bear a male who could be consecrated as a holy preacher. Why didn’t the Lord wish to make her worthy to carry in her womb a future servant of his church? She supposed she had in some way annoyed God. But in what way?

Today for her journey to St. Paul she was wearing a new dress, with big puffed sleeves and a wide collar.

“Miss Skalrud says I deck myself in too much lace and flowers and embroidery,” said Ulrika. “The Norwegian says, ‘If you don’t get to be a priest’s mother it’s only a punishment for your vanity!’”

Kristina inspected the new dress: all upper-class ladies in America had puffed sleeves and wide collars, and they were not considered sinful or blasphemous decorations. Or did they tempt the menfolk to fornication? Ulrika’s new dress fit her well and was most becoming to her. Kristina couldn’t believe that because of puffed sleeves and lace and embroidery the Almighty would make Ulrika unable to bear male children.

“I would be glad to dress in potato sacks if I thought it would help,” exclaimed Ulrika. “But I keep hoping for next time. I’m only forty-two — I’ll be fertile still for a few years!”

Kristina explained why she was keeping Harald in bed and told Ulrika about the wildcat lurking in the bushes. When Ulrika also heard about Robert’s unexpected return her curiosity was aroused and she showered Kristina with questions: What had happened to Karl Oskar’s brother in California? How much had he told them? Had he earned any gold to bring back? Kristina replied evasively. Robert had gone out but Ulrika herself could ask him as soon as he came back. So far he hadn’t said much. She looked askance at the Swedish chest and was sorely tempted to confide in Ulrika about what lay hidden in it, but she dared not because of Karl Oskar. Nothing must be said to anyone as yet.

Robert did not return for the noon meal. Ulrika took his place at the kitchen table once she had thwarted Kristina’s attempts to set the table in the big room in honor of her guest.

“I’ve been to St. Paul to visit Elin.”

“Elin? Has your girl left Stillwater?” asked Kristina in surprise.

“Yes, she has a new job.” Ulrika became so serious that it surprised Kristina. She went on: “It was a hell of a thing. There are worse wildcats than those on four legs.” And Ulrika began to talk about the two-legged ones.

A great scandal had happened in the Baptist congregation in Stillwater. For more than four years Ulrika’s daughter Elin had been maid to Mr. Paul Hanley, the most prominent and richest member of their church. Hanley and his wife had been kind and generous to Elin. But a few times during the last year Elin had complained that Mr. Hanley acted peculiar toward her. She was asked to help him pull off his boots, she was told to sew buttons on his clothes while he had them on, and when his wife was away he called Elin to his room after he had gone to bed and asked her to make the bed while he was lying in it. These were chores he had thought up for the innocent girl, who wondered what it was all about.

And a few weeks ago she had come running home crying. He had tried to lead the girl astray and fornicate with her. His wife was at a party; he had called Elin to make the bed again — and then he had pulled her to him and thrown her down on the bed under him. Only with the greatest effort had she struggled free — luckily Elin was a sturdy, strong, full-grown girl — and, scared to death, she had rushed home to her mother. Ulrika realized at once what great danger the girl had been in: six or seven hooks had been torn loose from her petticoat.

Ulrika had gone straight back to Mr. Hanley and called him all the names he had earned, both in English and Swedish: adulterer, seducer, virgin-robber, horkarl, knullgubbe. He denied everything and called Elin an inveterate liar. But Ulrika had walked right into the elegant bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Hanley and, as luck would have it, happened to see four of the torn-off hooks and eyes from Elins underskirt right on the floor next to the bed. She recognized them at once, she had sewn them on herself when she had made the petticoat for the girl. She picked them up and stuck them right under Mr. Hanley’s nose: she had sewn those hooks and eyes to her daughter’s clothes — how did they happen to be in his bedroom, next to his bed?

At that the hardened seducer admitted that he had fondled his beautiful girl servant, but it had not been with any sinful or lewd intention. On the contrary: God himself had sent him the thought that it was his fatherly duty as her master to test the girl’s chastity. She was so attractive and thus constantly exposed to temptations and to the desire of men wishing to seduce her. As a true Christian it was his duty to guard the innocence of his girl servant. He had seen men approach her with decidedly dishonorable intentions, and he would hate to see her led astray by immoral men, into deaths destruction, so often the lot of beautiful servant girls. But the girl had not understood that with his fondling he only wanted, in a fatherly way, to test her chastity. And for this he was very sorry, since he had only touched her with pious intent.

But Ulrika had replied bluntly to his false excuse: Elin had a mother who guarded her maidenhead. And he — married as he was — what kind of guardian of girls’ chastity was he? Searching so forcibly in their underwear that hooks and eyes were torn off! Instead of leafing through petticoats he ought to leaf through the Bible and find the verse where it says: adulterers and those who break the vows of holy matrimony God will judge.

She demanded the balance of Elin’s wages on the spot. The girl would not come back to a service where she would fear to be raped by the master the moment his wife left the house. A wildcat might be a hairier beast than Mr. Hanley but hardly more dangerous. Ulrika had long been aware that that elegant gentleman suffered from secret desires for women; his pants protruded as soon as he heard the rustle of a skirt; such things an experienced woman knew by instinct.

She had told everything to Henry to make him get after the adulterer. And finally Mr. Hanley had confessed privately to the pastor, saying he was crushed with remorse. And Henry, who loved a human being more the greater a sinner he was, had given him absolution. They would keep the incident quiet and Mr. Hanley would remain as one of the trustees of the church — he had, over the years, contributed great sums to the congregation. And Ulrika, who once in her old body had been a great sinner, felt that he should be forgiven this time. But this she had said to Henry: if Mr. Hanley made any more attempts at rape, then she herself would openly tell the whole congregation about his try at Elin, and to prove it she would show the hooks from the girl’s clothes which she was keeping for that purpose. That would quickly push him out of the church.

And Mr. Hanley, although he was on secret probation, had already engaged a new girl who was almost as good-looking as Elin. So it didn’t seem as if the man was trying to avoid new temptations to sin. And now Ulrika wondered: would the hooks hold in the new girl’s petticoat when the master undertook his chastity test?

Elin had immediately got a fine position with the chief of police in St. Paul and was paid three dollars more a month than Mr. Hanley had given her. Ulrika had visited her daughter in St. Paul and was glad she liked it so well with the new people. After all, perhaps Mr. Hanley’s chastity test had been a good thing as it might contribute to her luck in life; as a servant to the chief of police himself, her maidenhead should be safe from two-legged beasts in pants.

Kristina had listened to Ulrika without interrupting her. Now she said, “There, you see — American men too are not to be trusted!”

“Yes, a beautiful woman is in trouble anywhere in the world,” sighed the experienced Mrs. Jackson.

Kristina tried to persuade her guest to stay overnight; they had plenty of sleeping places in their new house. But Ulrika was in a hurry today.

“No, I’m sorry, but we have speak-meeting in the church tonight. And Sunday we have love feast and bread-breaking, and that kind of meeting has to be prepared for days in advance.”

Ulrika would return home on the lumber company ox wagon, passing along the road near Sjölin’s claim, opposite Nordberg’s Island, where the men were just building the Lutheran church. She had been to that spot before, and even though she was a Baptist she must say the Lutherans had found a nice and pleasant place for a Lord’s temple there on the crest of the hill, with all the foliage around it. But however nicely a church was situated, false teachings could be preached in it.

Kristina said that Ulrika must also take a look at their cemetery, which had been consecrated last fall, a short distance farther on along the shore. As yet no grave had been dug in the cemetery.

Little Ulrika was having her noon nap, the other children were taking care of themselves, so Kristina walked with her guest almost to the edge of Olausson’s claim, where the ox team would meet her.

Ulrika’s visit had stimulated and cheered Kristina, taking her mind off the things that had been disturbing her. As she walked back it struck her that she never was on intimate terms with the neighbor women even though she often saw Manda Svensson and Johanna Kron and others. They talked only of daily chores, children’s troubles, their pregnancies and births — those they had experienced or were anticipating. These women came to her with all the troubles she had enough of, was in the midst of, which almost overwhelmed her, and therefore a visit with them did not especially enliven her. Nor was she able entirely to open herself to them and confide in them. Perhaps she had changed during her long isolation; she herself had been separated from people for so long that she could not admit anyone to her innermost thoughts.

Even Karl Oskar had once asked if she had grown shy of people. Whatever the reason, Ulrika was and remained her only intimate friend among women in America.

— 3—

Robert had returned from his walk in the forest and was lying on his back in the shade of the huge sugar maples outside the house. Kristina was short of breath after her walk in the heat and sat down on the stoop for a moment. She said jokingly that she never knew where Robert kept himself during the day. Even though he was a grown man she thought they should still hang a cowbell on him so they would know where he was.

Robert smiled back. It was true — he had run away many times but he always came back.

He had a book in his hand which he showed her. It was the History of Nature he had brought with him from Sweden. He had left it here and he had just found it among the junk in the old log house. The book was torn, the pages held together at the back by a few thin, twisted threads; it wasn’t much to save.

“But I just ran across an amusing chapter. Listen to this, Kristina!”

And Robert read aloud:

“About Gold and Gold Coins.

“Gold is always found as a metal, sometimes mixed with silver. It is found in mountains, embedded in pyrites or quartz; but most gold is found in the earth, usually in fine grains. Then it is mixed with sand. Sometimes bigger lumps are found. Because the gold grains are so much heavier than the sand grains one can wash away the sand with water leaving only the gold; this is called washing gold.

“Gold cannot be changed either by air or fire if it is pure; that is why gold is called a noble metal.

“Pure gold is more than nineteen times heavier than water. .”

He looked up from the book: “Did you hear that, Kristina? A noble metal! Nineteen times heavier than water! And worth more than human life! This last isn’t in the book, of course, but I’m going to write it there!”

Kristina listened abstractedly; at the moment it was hard for her to concentrate on gold and gold washing. She was thinking of her boy inside in bed; she must go and see how he was.

“A wildcat almost scared the life out of Harald this morning, down at the lake. Why don’t you take Karl Oskar’s gun and shoot it!”

“Why should I kill a wildcat?” asked Robert, looking up from his History of Nature. “He has the same right to live as you or I.”

“But it’s a dangerous and beastly critter!”

“There are no beasts except white-skinned people.”

“Now you’re poking fun at me, Robert. I meant it seriously.”

“I’m not fooling. I have never seen any beasts except people. The wildcat only eats his fill, but people steal everything they see. They are worse than the wild beasts.”

“May God protect us if that is true!”

“It is true, Kristina. I should know.”

He had used a lot of English in his talk when he first returned, but after only a few days he spoke his native tongue as purely as before. His hearing, however, seemed to grow worse; when she spoke to him he always put his hand behind his right, healthy ear and turned it toward her.

Now that they were alone she must try to make Robert confide in her about the ailment he suffered from.

“There was blood on the pillow from your bad ear last night.”

“It’s been out of use for a long time. But it’s a good sign when it bleeds — then the ache stops.”

“They were horrible spots.”

“I’m sorry, Kristina, if I ruined your pillow slip.”

“How silly of you! I wasn’t thinking of the slip. But I do feel sorry for you if it aches in the night.”

And Kristina shuddered to think that when his ear bled it no longer hurt.

She told him that Karl Oskar and she were really worried about him. They were afraid he had picked up some dangerous sickness in the goldfields. Why didn’t he tell her what was the matter with him? He must try to find some remedy.

He replied in a low voice that it was very kind of her, but she mustn’t worry about him. As soon as the buzzing and the noise stopped in his ear he would be entirely well again. Sometimes, when the ear was quiet, he immediately felt better.

“There is nothing the matter with me, in any way.”

Robert sounded full of confidence that he would soon be well again. He was lying on his back in the grass, holding the History of Nature above his face. He turned back to the chapter “About Gold and Gold Coins”:

“Are you listening to me, Kristina? Did you hear that gold is nineteen times heavier than water?”

“I heard you.”

Now he lowered his voice as if he wanted to confide a great secret to her and was afraid someone might be listening.

“But it’s only dead weight. Do you understand? The weight of the yellow gold is dead. . dead. . dead. .!”

From the gable room Harald was calling his mother. The boy had heard her come, so she rose from the stoop and walked away from Robert. But she turned twice and looked at him where he lay in the grass, holding his old, torn book above his face.

His explanation of the chapter in The History of Nature had filled her with inexplicable anxiety and sadness.

XXI. THE FOURTH NIGHT — ROBERT’S EAR SPEAKS

You push your head so deep into the pillow tonight. Do you think you can shut me up in that way? Do you think you can choke me, get rid of me forever, by pushing me down into the pillow?

No, you should know better after all the years we have been together. You know it doesn’t help to press me into the pillow. You might soften my sounds a little, perhaps. But only very little. Yes, you have tried to silence me in every way. What all haven’t you figured out during the many nights we have been together! You’ve turned and twisted and tried various positions doing what you thought would help. Sometimes you’ve behaved like a fool — like the time you poured a spoonful of whiskey into me! I choked a little, but not for long. You wanted to get me drunk! Ha, ha, ha!

I heard what you told Kristina today: your ache eases when I bleed a little. I know it. Sometimes I feel sorry for you and show it that way. Kristina has changed the spotted slip and now you have a new, clean one to rest on.

But these blood spots of mine do not tell anything to Karl Oskar and Kristina about the things that happened to you on the California Trail. You can trust my silence. But sometimes I think you’re going to tell on yourself — at least when you are alone with Kristina. Both yesterday and today you almost told her — shouldn’t you be more careful? Your ailing ear isn’t so bad that it can’t hear when you’re about to spill over.

I don’t have much to tell about your separation from Arvid at the water hole, because you didn’t understand at the time that your parting was final. But I’ve all the sounds stored away. You’re familiar with my good memory. But much of this you’re not interested in any more. You lost something that time — you know best what it was. That’s why so much from those days is of no importance to you any longer. Then why should I keep repeating it?

But that time when you were lying on your back in the withered prairie grass I heard a well-known voice calling the mules. It was the mule owner. And with him came succor — water, which gave you back your life.

— 1—

“My poor boy! I take care of you! You get well. .!”

Mario Vallejos had gone out to look for the lost ones from his caravan — two animals and two muleteers. Since none of his provisions were missing, he did not believe the two boys had fled with the mules, and after two days of searching he came across Robert, far gone from exposure and lack of water and food. The Mexican questioned him and what he had assumed was confirmed. He never found his two lost mules.

Robert was well taken care of by his master, who assured him he would soon be well again. Within a few days he had recuperated sufficiently so that they could continue their journey. He still felt weak and was bothered by dizziness but now he need no longer walk; he rode on one of the good Mexican mules instead. The mule lent him its spindly legs and small, hardened hooves, which moved quickly through the whirling sand. His own feet were covered with blood blisters and worn to the bare flesh.

The caravan was smaller now — only two men and six animals. One man and two mules had been left behind along the road.

The caravan now covered a shorter distance each day than before, since six animals had to carry the burdens previously distributed on eight. The pack mules had thinned down during the trip from St. Louis. Their hindquarters grew more sinewy each day. Their owner claimed that on the California Trail mules became so skinny that two animals were required to throw a shadow.

Robert wondered what happened to people before they reached California. How many gold seekers would be needed to throw a single shadow?

For more than a year now Robert had been on his journey toward the Land of Gold, and as yet he was only at the beginning of the road. But in the grave Arvid had dug for himself, and where he remained, Robert too had left something of himself; when he resumed his journey he felt empty inside. Life had returned to his thirst-plagued body but he felt like a pod without a kernel. He rode the mule and watched his accompanying shadow on the ground. He still had enough life in him to supply a shadow, something visible that moved along with him. But could he catch it with his hands? Was there any substance to this shape that slid along on the ground beside the mule? What he saw was something dark and thin and empty. And this nebulous, vague something was from now on to be his comrade and companion on the California journey.

Vallejos, his good master, talked to him about the land they would come to at the end of the journey, where the sand was mingled with gold. Gold! Vallejos spoke of gold, he sang of gold, dreamed of gold. He saw the “Pillar of Gold” which showed them the way through the desert. Mario Vallejos lived in the faith of gold.

The little Mexican feared none of the things they might encounter on the two-thousand-mile journey: not dangers of the desert, poisoned water holes, prairie fires, wild beasts, or Indians. Only one name did he still mention with fear in his voice—The Yellow Jack. Who was he? What was it? Vallejos sometimes spoke his native Spanish and often used English expressions Robert did not understand, and among them was this one. This much Robert understood: that this Yellow Jack had killed a lot of people. He was the most dangerous encounter the gold seekers could expect on the California Trail. But was he a bandit, an Indian chief, a human or an animal, a hurricane or a prairie fire?

Vallejos tried with gestures and signs to explain to his muleteer. He held his hands to his head as if suffering torture, he contorted his face, felt his back as if hit by a blow from a whip, he shook his hands, opened his mouth, and stuck out his tongue much as if he wanted to spit it out: this was Yellow Jack! But Robert was unable to interpret the signs. Perhaps Yellow Jack was the name of some terrible weather condition they would meet in the desert regions further west? When Vallejos described this monster by trembling in his whole body, Robert thought he was trying to describe an earthquake in its upheaval.

Robert was now alone with his master and soon he could resume his old chores. He was employed by the Mexican and he stayed with him and followed him. He no longer cared where the journey would take them. He rode his mule during the day and rested his head on the saddle at night. And he listened in silence when his master talked of the California country and described the banks of the Sacramento gold river.

Sometimes it might happen that he stuck his hand into his pocket and felt the nickel watch. It was as though he sought in his pocket for the hand which for a thousand evenings had wound the watch. Now it had stopped; it remained stopped. But Arvid no longer needed to know when it was time to rise in the morning, when it was mealtime, or time to go to bed in the evening. As he had twisted his body and tumbled about in the grave his hands had dug, he had pulled out the watch and put it in the sand beside him. He had no more use for it; what use could he have for a contraption that showed time when there was no more time for him?

One winter evening after cutting wood all day long they had returned to their miserably cold shed and Arvid had started to cry. “I don’t care about gold any more! I give up riches! I don’t care if I’m rich or poor! I want to go back!”

That evening, as he cried so miserably in their shed, there had still been three months of time left for him. He was still to rise from his bed a hundred mornings, still take out the key and wind his watch on a hundred evenings.

Robert would never wind that watch again. He didn’t care any longer about the time needed on the road to California. He was not in need of anything to measure and point it out, it was lost to him permanently.

In a grave he never again would see, he had lost his dream of gold.

— 2—

Twenty days out from St. Louis a train of two men and six mules arrived in St. Joseph, one of the starting places for the train of the hundred thousand.

It was now the last week of April 1852. It was the beginning of the long-journey season; the plains were green, and the army of gold seekers congregating at St. Joseph was ready to take off for the West. During a few days the last preparations were made for a two-thousand-mile move, for a life of travel during the next four months. For the last time the vehicles were tested and tried out, the provision sacks inspected, guns and revolvers tested, and guides and lookouts who rode as a vanguard to the train were chosen with discrimination. In St. Joseph, Mario Vallejos had arranged to meet two friends from his own country who were to accompany him to California. He looked for them for several days among the hordes of people that filled the place but was unable to find them. He sat silent and sad in their tent until late at night. At last he said that his friends were reliable; there was no explanation for their failure to show up except that they no longer were alive. And he felt sure that no one except Yellow Jack had killed them.

They had raised their tent in a hickory grove in a small valley; round about them spread the immense camp of the California farers. It was a camp of noises, the abode of a thousand sounds, where commotion reigned, cries and complaints rising at all hours of the day. Here an enormous horde of humanity was in motion, here great herds of cattle had been rounded up, and the noises that all these living creatures emitted could burst one’s eardrums. The camp seemed to Robert like a fair in his home country, a thousand times enlarged, a fair that went on day and night — a giant fair that would last four months without interruption. Drunken men hollered, angry women yelled, children cried, horses neighed, oxen bawled, cows lowed, sheep bleated, mules brayed — not for half an hour did silence rule during the whole twenty-four hours of the day.

New arrivals came every day. One night Robert was awakened by a piercing scream outside the tent:

“Water! For God’s sake gimme some water! Water. .!”

He rose and went outside in the half dark, where he could see a shape crawling on hands and knees, begging for water. Two men came and picked him up, one by the shoulders and one by the legs, and carried him to a tent. The man had just arrived from the plains.

Robert had seen a repetition of his own rescue. But now his blistered feet were well on the way to healing and he could again walk. Life had been given back to him — if not the desire to live.

He was back at his job — he curried, fed, and watered Vallejos’ mules; he ate and drank and slept. Most of the time he kept to the tent, knowing little of what took place in the camp around him. He listened to the sounds around him day and night and guessed what was going on. He heard new songs from the gold seekers:

No matter whether rich or poor,

I’m happy as a clam;

I wish my friends could look

And see me as I am.

With woolen shirt and rubber boots

In sand up to my knees;

And lice as big as chili beans

A-fightin’ with the fleas.

It was the last refrain that caught Robert’s attention, the lice, big as chili beans. He himself had got lice in this camp; his shirt was creeping with the critters. They were round, fat, shiny lice that bit into his body like gadflies on cow udders. However many he picked from his shirt and skin it seemed just as many were left even though he deloused himself for hours each day. The Mexican was constantly rubbing and scratching his body but Robert never saw him pick away any lice.

Robert himself was now a victim of the song’s vermin; the shiny lice were not unlike gold grains. His mother used to say: if you got lice that bit into the skin you would soon get rich. The sign was considered sure. In that case he would reach the gold land and become a rich man.

One day as he was walking some short distance outside the camp he saw a group of men digging in the ground beneath some tall trees. He stopped to watch. Were they already digging for gold? Couldn’t they wait till they got there? Why were they digging? The men were in a great hurry and shoveled quantities of dirt and sand from holes in the ground. But they didn’t dig to pick up something; instead, something was to be put into those holes. Behind them lay a row of bundles, wrapped in blankets, six feet long. He easily recognized that measure: the height of a person. And from one blanket he saw a human foot protrude, with long, dirty black toenails.

He walked on. Now he knew what went on at the encampment in St. Joseph; here the men were not diggings for something; here a different labor in the earth took place.

On another occasion he stopped and listened to two men who were felling a hickory tree; the wood was used for repairs of the ox wagons. In their conversation they had used an English word that he had recently seen on a wooden board near a water hole: death. One of the men was leaning against his ax handle for a moment; death had taken twenty-seven people yesterday, and several hundred lay sick in their wagons and tents.

In the Train of the Hundred Thousand the men practiced to dig graves before they had opportunity to dig for gold.

Then one day Roberts master entered the tent, fear in his eyes, stuttering, “Yellow Jack has come! Yellow Jack is in St. Joseph!”

And Vallejos explained to his muleteer who the Feared One was, but he used so many incomprehensible words, in rapid Spanish; when he grew excited his mother tongue would spurt from his mouth. And now Robert understood that Yellow Jack was not a person, nor an animal, nor one of the Lord’s tempests or earthquakes: the feared one was an invisible murderer who had sneaked into the gold-seekers’ camp; it was because of him they already had been forced to dig while on the road.

At last the day of breaking camp dawned, and on one of the first days of May the gold army moved out of St. Joseph. Mario Vallejos was excited and happy that morning as he sat up on his mule. He kept singing, “The good time has come at last!” He was anxious to get away from Yellow Jack, he wanted to ride so fast that the pursuer would be unable to overtake him.

The road from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hangtown, California, was about two thousand miles. At an average speed of seventeen miles a day they would reach their destination in September.

Now the march was headed for Big Blue River. The animals were rested and the first day twenty miles were laid behind them. The second day they were down to eighteen. The same distance was announced the third and fourth day. But after one week the caravan moved barely fifteen miles a day. The animals were getting tired and a day of rest was decided upon. Because of the good speed of the first few days they still held to the average.

At the camp, each evening a few of the dead were buried. The men threw lots among them to decide who would dig the graves. It sometimes happened that a man who helped dig one evening was buried the next.

The dead animals — horses, oxen, and mules — were left along the wayside and no one counted them. Close on the track came flocks of red-furred animals with sharp noses and long tails. They were the only animals that grew fat on the California Trail.

After two weeks they reached the first great obstacle — Big Blue River. All the belongings and all living beings who could not swim were taken across the broad river on floats, which had been left behind by gold seekers who had crossed before them. The crossing delayed them two days, but on the west bank of the river the endless plains lay before them. This prairie was wider than any they had seen before, it was like eternity — had it no end?

Now they were crossing Nebraska, the land of the big buffalo herds, the great plains. As they moved along under the open sky with its burning sun, and rested under the clear stars of the prairie, their train grew ever smaller: their army diminished as it encountered this immense expanse; like a long worm it crept its way over the ground.

Robert was carried along without asking where, his life one of the thousands which made up the worm crawling along the ground.

While crossing the great plains they managed their seventeen miles almost every day. Here the road had no hindrances and was easy to traverse. The next big road sign would be the fork of the Platte, which was supposed to be twelve days from the last river crossing.

On the fifth day out the plain was broken by a mountain range. In the evening the California farers had reached Spring Creek, a recently established trading post, and here they made camp to rest for a day. Plenty of healthy drinking water was available here, and buildings of a sort had begun to go up. They chose a camping site near a stream with such glitteringly clear water that it shone even after dark, as if an unextinguishable light burned at its bottom. Robert stood for some time in the evening, looking at this stream. He had always had a liking for streams.

Next morning when Robert rose to attend to the mules, Vallejos remained in his bed. The master’s look struck fear into the muleteer. Vallejos held his head between his hands and complained loudly:

“The Yellow Jack! The Yellow Jack is here. .!”

After Robert had listened to him and watched his contortions he knew who Yellow Jack was.

Vallejos’ limbs trembled and shook in fever; he felt his back while he screamed, he grabbed his head in both his hands as if he wanted to tear it from his body because of the burning ache inside. And from his mouth streamed blood and foam — black and sticky like crushed blood. The vomiting went on until he almost choked; congealed blood stuck in his throat and interfered with his breathing.

Now at last Robert understood what his master had been trying to show him: arms and legs shaking with fever, the contortions of the body, pain in the back, the twistings of his head. He recognized the sickness that had attacked the Mexican: a lurking, treacherous, contagious disease. It had been after them in St. Joseph, it had followed them when they broke camp, it had all the time been in their train, swimming with them across the broad river, pursuing them across the prairie. It attacked people without warning, like a way-laying bandit; it threw itself over them, like a tearing wild beast; it lit immediately its consuming fire, and that fire did not go out until life was out. It was because of this disease that the men each evening drew lots for grave-digging.

And now Vallejos had been overtaken by this pursuer whom he had spoken of and feared from the very beginning, the pursuer he himself had fled from and who had taken the lives of his friends: Yellow Jack.

Yellow Jack was a fever. Mario Vallejos was on his way to California to seek yellow gold. Instead he had found yellow fever.

— 3—

Close to the Indian trading post at Spring Creek a big tent had been raised in which a great many people lay sick. It was a makeshift hospital. Here lay the sick left behind by earlier caravans. Most of these earlier people had already died, less than twenty were still alive. To this makeshift hospital the Mexican Vallejos was now brought, accompanied by his Swedish muleteer who was determined to remain with his sick master and take care of him.

In this wilderness emergency hospital the victims of yellow fever lay on beds of dry prairie grass, looked after by an old half-Indian woman, tall, with a red-brown face and white hair. The sick were not expected to get well; the nurse was there only to look after them during their remaining days. They couldn’t be left to die alone. Here lay those who were too weak to continue on the California Trail and too weak to go back.

Vallejos was often unconscious, although intermittently he would babble in his incomprehensible Spanish. Delirious people usually speak their mother tongue. His face had turned yellow as a chamois. It was easy to see whose stamp he bore.

Sometimes when his mind was clear, he recognized his muleteer and shouted out to him:

“Leave me! He’ll take you too! Get out! Hurry away! You’re young! You still have your life! Leave me! Save yourself while you still have time!”

But Robert remained beside his boss. He made a bed next to that of the sick one. He carried water from the clear stream and was always close when Vallejos wanted to quench his fever thirst. He wouldn’t leave his boss; he brought his master water as the master once had brought him water.

After a day’s rest at Spring Creek the gold caravan continued on its way. That morning Robert stood outside the hospital tent and watched the camp break up. All desire to go with the train had left him; it was his boss he followed; the other people did not concern him. He remained with Vallejos. The old nurse explained yellow fever to him: This disease was terribly contagious! If he cared the least bit for his life he must leave this place at once! She could not understand why a healthy person would come into this tent of pestilence. “The yellow fever will sweep you off your feet! Tell me your name, boy, so I can notify your people!”

He told her his name but said nothing about relatives in this country or in the homeland. He wasn’t afraid of contagion, he did not fear Yellow Jack. On this journey he had become acquainted with death only too well to have any fear of it. What use was there in worries about one’s life? Moreover, as long as the lice kept pestering him he knew he was all right. The vermin grew fat on his body; he was still well supplied with gold lice.

The old woman — she must have a name although he had never heard anyone call her anything but Missus — insisted on getting his address in good time so she could notify his relatives that he had died on the California Trail. But Robert thought he would in time himself return and tell them of the death he had experienced.

He told the old woman that he must remain and look after his sick boss and see to it that he got all the water he wanted.

On the sixth day after taking sick, Mario Vallejos died during a violent fit of vomiting which choked off his breath. He passed away, steadfast in his faith of the gold, aged thirty-two, mourned only by his muleteer.

That same day Robert Nilsson from Sweden became a rich man.

During the last day of his life the Mexican had been clear in his mind and had talked at length, coherently, to Robert. The deathly ill man was grateful that his young companion had stayed at his side and cared for him. He handed over to Robert a small pouch he had carried fastened next to his body. The contents of this pouch, the mules, the provisions, all he owned, he now gave to his devoted muleteer.

“Farewell, son!”

Only a couple of hours later the last seizure of vomiting had overtaken him. Yellow Jack had completed his work on one more human being.

Robert had not earlier been chosen as a grave digger. Now he alone dug a grave under some trees for his master and put his body in an empty packing box in which the nurse had kept smoked ham. She was with him when he buried Vallejos, and sang a psalm in an Indian language, Robert repeated a Swedish funeral psalm he remembered from Schoolmaster Rinaldo:

. . and me in earth you offer

a cold and narrow bed. .

Something had to be read at a grave; this short psalm fitted well because the coffin was narrow, for Vallejos was a small man. Here a ritual of Indian singing and Swedish reading was performed over a dead Mexican who would not have understood a word of it. But the Lord over life and death understands all languages equally well since he made the people who spoke them.

Only some days after the funeral did Robert think of looking at the contents of the small pouch with the letters M. V. sewn onto it. In it were gold and silver coins, in five- to fifty-dollar denominations, a total of $3,150.

The sign had proven true: if many lice congregated on a person, then he was slated soon to become rich.

All Vallejos’ provisions and equipment Robert gave to the nurse’s emergency hospital, and in return for the great gift, the old woman permitted him a corner of her own “bungalow” behind the hospital tent where he could sleep. She told him he could stay as long as he wanted. He took his mules to an Irishman who supplied the trading post with buffalo meat, and the man promised to slaughter the animals immediately; Robert had become attached to them and wanted to relieve them of further suffering on the California Trail. After this he had only the pouch left of Vallejos’ possessions, but in it were gold and silver—$3,150.

Robert had lost his last master, he had buried him with his own hands. He had been left behind on the California Trail, and now he was alone.

He was free and independent, he had no animals to look after, no chores to perform for another human being, no master over him. He was alone, he was rich, he was free, and he had his life. The nurse was a good woman who fried buffalo meat for him, offered him grapes and other fruit, and gave him pills and medicines against yellow fever. He was alive and all should have been well.

But his appetite for life had not returned.

Robert remained in Spring Creek and sank down into a bottomless pit of fatigue and listlessness. The days passed without his counting them or remembering their names. People spoke to him and he replied, but the words he used were meaningless. Nothing of what took place in his surroundings concerned him. Days and nights followed each other, washed over him, one much like the other, as similar as the billows on the sea. Everything came and went as it pleased, happened as it chanced. What could he do about it? Why should he do anything about it?

Nothing hurt him any more, nothing pleased him particularly. He could neither be happy nor sad. He did not care where he lived; he neither liked nor disliked it. His body was given what it required, and it was satisfied. He had food and drink and a bed to sleep in, and he ate and drank and slept and attended to his bodily needs. What was there beyond this? Perhaps there was something, but he was unable to do it.

But now and then a feeling came over him: there was something he was supposed to be looking for; he was neglecting it by staying here. This feeling began to frighten him; everything in his life was wrong, topsy-turvy. Why didn’t he do something about it? And why didn’t it bother him?

From the mountains came a stream that flowed through Spring Creek with the cleanest and clearest water he had ever seen. It was so transparent it was almost invisible; if it hadn’t been for its motion and purling sounds a casual observer might not have noticed it. The stream glittered with light even after dark; it was filled with life, a life of light. In the evening Robert stood at the edge of the creek and watched the moving stream. An ever moving light was running away and yet remained. He came to the same spot the next evening. The stream purled and glittered, it was there before him, and at the same time it was hurrying away to mingle and mix with a greater body of water.

The stream ran by clean and empty as a young person’s days. Robert Nilsson stood beside it and simply watched. He had no strength to do anything else. It was too late for him to retrieve his life.

The summer ran past him; the prairie was already red with the sun-scorched grass. He saw how those passing through Spring Creek rested for a day and a night, then moved on. There came buffalo hunters, fur traders, and settlers, landseekers, merchants, Indian agents, swindlers and cattle thieves, honest people, and escaped murderers. But on all these men he saw the same face. It was the face he had seen on every member of the hundred-thousand train to the West: the gold-seeker’s face.

What were they after, all these God-created creatures? They were on the same errand, all of them. All of them searched for the same thing, on direct routes, or indirect; they wanted to grab for themselves everything of value in this land — animals, the earth’s growing plants and trees, everything of value on the ground and below it. They straggled and struggled, they rode, they walked, they suffered hunger and thirst, they tortured themselves, they suffered a thousand plagues, they killed themselves and others. They were after riches. They lived in the faith of gold. They were heroic — they were the resurrected gospel martyrs, they were ready to die for their faith. Each day they gave their lives to spreading the gospel of riches on this earth. They believed all people in all lands should be their disciples.

Daily Robert saw one single face, the face of Man made in the image of the creator. This was barefaced Man, fighting for his one and only true religion, the one he confessed honestly in his heart.

And none of these men he saw pass through Spring Creek that summer knew that it was water alone Man could not be without.

During your stay in Spring Creek you thought you would never again have a master. You yourself had buried the last one, you alone had dug his grave and filled it with your own hands. You laid his body in a packing case and read a psalm over it. But you still had me. I am with you tonight, three years later.

Once you read in a medical home adviser: Ear diseases are often accompanied by so-called buzzing of various strengths and types. They may be experienced in daytime as well as at night, but they are especially strong at night when silence reigns. Then they can become a terrible plague. .

That fits me, doesn’t it?

You wanted to get rid of all masters and that was why you set out to dig gold. But you discovered on the Trail that gold was the most severe of all masters. Even more exacting than I. Long before you reached the gold land it demanded your life, so merciless is gold. Was that something to search for?

You gave to the gold what you were forced to give; it was too late to refuse. The disease now consuming you entered your body that summer, as you guessed. But some diseases are in no hurry as they ravage and destroy a body. Sometimes they take many years for their work. They lull a person into hope in the meantime. But they are not slow because of mercy when they take years to turn a living being into a shell.

You’re a shell, Robert. That much you have at last realized while turning and twisting at night, trying to escape me; you have squandered the creator’s gift. How could you have acted so foolishly? You think you have a good answer: you didn’t know any better; your intelligence didn’t allow you to know better. Who else could have told you? No one, except the creator himself. And He failed. He let you waste your life while still a youth. He had made you such that you could do no better, knew no better.

The creator gave you strength to dream an immoderate dream — but he did not give you the strength required by an immoderate dreamer. And what can a weak person do? What did you do?

It is clear to you that what has happened was inescapable. You fought your lot in life. Your life is fated, Robert! Only thus can it be explained.

You never thought you could get free, you didn’t have the strength. You were caught, enclosed in the cubicle of your fate. There is a truth about this, and you are familiar with it: Concerning imprisonment in the Fate that is common to all creatures: only in imagination do they break free: all remain in their cubicles and live out their interminable days, one after another. They make their abodes there for all the days of their lives, until the last day comes and the weight of the earth, of which they are a part, covers them.

You’ve been lying now for several hours without the peace of sleep. You have been lying so long on your back. You ought to turn on your side for a change — onto the left side — your evil side — your pursuer’s side. If you turn on your side and dig me as deep as you can into the pillow, perhaps you can silence me a little.

And I will be kind to you tonight and relieve the bursting ache in here. I’ll pour out a little blood, only a few drops. Now you’ll feel how it helps. There now — can you feel the warm fluid? It feels as if someone had squirted tepid water into your ear, doesn’t it? And now it drips red on the slip, the new, clean one that Kristina put on today. Nothing feels as wonderful as the end of pain.

Now you’ll soon sleep! Again tonight you’ll sleep on a spotted pillow!

I don’t begrudge you a deep, wonderfully purling waterdream!

XXII. THE UNGET-AT-ABLE

— 1—

On Friday morning Karl Oskar was up before daybreak, greased his oak-wheel cart, and made ready to drive to Stillwater. Already at sunrise it was evident the day would be very hot. It would be the first time he had undertaken a long drive with his young ox team. Animals were greatly plagued by the heat and the mosquitoes, and although his ox team by now was well broken in, he was afraid they might be unruly and hard to handle in this heat; that was why he wanted to get under way while the morning was still cool. He hoped to be back again with oxen and cart intact before sundown.

Last evening Kristina had gone through the two bundles of money, removing spots from the bills and ironing out those that were wrinkled. A few grease spots remained, but on the whole the bills now seemed clean and neat; they were at least as nice-looking as other American paper money they had had in the house.

Karl Oskar pushed the two bundles down in the sheepskin pouch Kristina had sewn for him when they left Sweden and which had served as a hiding-place for their Swedish money. In this pouch — worn as a belt under his clothing — he had, during the crossing from Sweden, secreted five hundred riksdaler, all he had owned after selling the farm and the cattle. Now it hid thirty times as much in American money, sufficient to buy ten farms as big as Korpamoen. This according to the value printed on the bills. Today he would ask the bank in Stillwater if the money was acceptable.

While he was yoking the oxen Algot Svensson, his companion for the journey, arrived. He was always punctual. Today Karl Oskar was to be a witness for his neighbor at the land office, concerning Svensson’s right to his claim in section 35 of Chisago Township.

Before Karl Oskar got into the cart he said to his wife that today he was setting out on the most important errand he had undertaken so far in America. And he had almost the same anxious expectation as on that day when he had gone to her father’s home in Duvemåla to ask for his daughter Kristina as bride: no one could tell in advance what the reply might be.

Then he stepped up into the cart and it started on its clumsy, thudding way down the road along the lakeshore. The sheepskin pouch was under Karl Oskar’s shirt; his riches were on the way to a better place of safekeeping, a right place of safekeeping.

— 2—

This Friday turned out to be the summer’s warmest day in the St. Croix Valley. The heat bothered Kristina as she sewed and she had to lie down and rest for a moment now and then. She had a burning headache and she saw black every time she tried to thread the needle. Her discomfort from her pregnancy increased with the hot weather; all smells became vile, nauseating her, and if she saw a blowfly light she wanted to vomit. A woman was only half a person during the first months of this condition; taste, smell, and appetite were completely awry.

Robert had found a cool place to rest under the sugar maples near the house. He was not going to visit the Indian today; it was too hot in the forest. She had also noticed how tired and short of breath he became after his walks. Kristina picked up her sewing and went outside to sit in the shade with her brother-in-law. The heat was not quite so oppressive here as inside the house. Robert was reading the latest issue of Hemlandet. He had just discovered an advertisement:

HELP WANTED

Youth for Hemlandet’s Printing Office.

Applicant should be able to read

Swedish; if he also can write, so much

better. If he has a good head, lack

of knowledge can gradually be

remedied. .

“Do you think I should apply for the job, Kristina?”

“You with your riches needn’t work any more!”

And she reminded him that the very first evening he had said that he had done all the work he intended to do and had had his last master.

His bad ear was turned toward her; probably he didn’t hear what she said; he was absorbed in his reading.

“Here is something for you, Kristina.”

He read aloud:

“Hemlandet has been considering the printing of a nice, neat Swedish A-B-C book. For this, however, several Swedish letters and decorative signs will be required, and the readers are asked for contributions of fifty cents each which can be sent to the printing office. We have also decided to print Luther’s Little Catechism, word for word according to the Symbolic Books, and without the improvements or worsenings which have been made to this little bible, in this country as well as elsewhere. This Catechism will be the first Swedish book printed in America.”

“That’s good news!” exclaimed Kristina.

“Yes, you said the other day Johan and Marta did not have any A-B-C book or catechism.”

“We need those books! I’ll tell Karl Oskar to send in money at once!”

She sat on the ground, the cloth she was sewing on on her knee. Robert was lying in the grass, reading. He had returned last Monday; today was Friday. He had been in their house four days. But she felt that during these four days as much had happened as during the four long years he had been gone.

If there was anything else of importance or interest, would he be kind enough to read it to her, she asked? He replied that there wasn’t much in the paper today except for a funny piece about a false Swedish priest — quite a long article.

Hemlandet warned against a self-styled minister who traveled about among the Swedish settlements in Illinois and Minnesota. He called himself Timoteus Brown, but it was a false, assumed name. He was not ordained, only a former student with a whiskey flask in his bag. But he preached, married couples, baptized children, and gave the Holy Sacrament. He had an unusual gift of speech and could entirely at will turn his listeners’ heads, and that was why many Swedes had been fooled and availed themselves of the services of the false priest. Timoteus Brown had such remarkable gifts that he could preach in any religion he chose; one teaching was as easy to him as another. If he came to a Lutheran settlement he preached the Lutheran teachings, but among the Methodists he was an accomplished Methodist preacher, and among the Baptists he preached the Baptist doctrine better than anyone they ever had heard. And he did call himself “the cleverest minister in America.”

Nor had Brown hesitated to falsify the Holy Sacrament: not one drop of wine had been added to the fluid in his cup; only water, into which fruit juice and vinegar had been mixed with syrup to make it sweet. In some settlements the participants had been seized with stomachache and diarrhea from his false sacramental wine. The self-made minister himself insisted that he gave the sacrament according to Christ’s ordinance which forbad alcoholic spirits. But this, the paper said, was a false interpretation, exaggerated temperance zeal. He not only hurt people’s bodies, but more important, their souls when he married trusting couples without being ordained. In the Swedish colonies, in Illinois and Minnesota, many otherwise honest and decent people now lived in sin and fornication, not knowing how deeply they had fallen in sin and iniquity.

Hemlandet urged the Swedish settlers to drive away Timoteus Brown, this blasphemer and derider. He was described as a wolf gifted with a sheep’s mild appearance which aided him in bewitching people.

Robert was interrupted in his reading several times by his persistent cough. Now that Kristina sat close, she looked at his face: it was caved-in, ravaged, wan. And his body was barely skin and bone; he had never appeared so worn-out as he did today. He must surely be suffering from a much more serious ailment than his bad ear.

She must try again:

“Have you never been to see a doctor, Robert?”

“Hadn’t thought of it. I’m only twenty-two. I can’t go to a doctor — I’m supposed to be healthy!”

“You have caught something dangerous. I don’t know — but it might lead to your death. .”

“Death. .?”

The word escaped him in a quick breath.

Robert pulled up his upper lip in a great smile, or sudden surprise, and exposed decayed teeth in the back of his mouth. He turned from the paper to his sister-in-law.

“Kristina — you don’t believe I’m afraid of death?”

“All people fear death!”

“Not I!”

“You too — now you only brag!”

“No, I mean it. Death cannot really do anything to me. It cannot touch me.”

“Stop! That’s blasphemy!”

Kristina’s body had straightened up with the last word, now she fumbled with the needle so that it pierced her thumb instead of the cloth.

“Do you mean you are above death? Above the Almighty?”

“All I said was, death cannot touch me.”

Robert threw down Hemlandet in the grass and rose to a sitting position. He leaned his elbows against his knees and bent his long, lean torso toward Kristina.

“No, not even death can hurt me or get at me any longer.”

“That’s terrible of you to talk like that! It’s arrogance! Conceit!”

Kristina stuck her thumb into her mouth and sucked a few trickling drops of blood. She sat and stared at Robert, horrified at his talk; was his mind affected? Even yesterday she had wondered if he wasn’t out of his head at times.

“Nothing touches me any more. Neither good nor evil affects me. Do you know why?”

“No, you must explain it, Robert!”

“Ill try. .”

The cough prevented him from going on. She sat in suspense, waiting for his explanation.

When Robert at last had finished coughing, it came slowly and simply:

“I have reconciled myself to my lot. That’s all.”

He had pulled up a few tall spears of grass and began chewing them. As he looked back on his life, he told Kristina, he understood everything that had happened to him. It was the way he was created that explained his life. If he had been an obedient and willing farm hand, he would never have tried to steal rest periods while he dug ditches, and then he would not have been given a hard box on the ear by his first master, and would have escaped his earache. And if he had had the temperament of an obedient and satisfied farm hand he would never have emigrated. And even if he had emigrated, he would have remained with his brother Karl Oskar and worked on his claim in Minnesota and been satisfied with that life. Then he could have lived his whole life in one place, in constant peace of mind.

But the way he was born prevented him; he couldn’t stay in Sweden, he couldn’t stay with his brother in America, he couldn’t stay in service. He himself drove peace and tranquillity from his mind, although without wishing to do so, since deep in his heart he wanted to live a peaceful life. But he couldn’t take a claim and be a settler; he might as well try to reach the moon, or walk across the water out there on the lake. He had been given those ideas about gold and riches and freedom, and he was forced to get out and pursue what was in his mind. This brought him into one bad situation after another. His misfortunes and sufferings were his own doing, as he himself had once caused the box on his ear. He was often accused of lying, but he never knew when he did lie, and if he did lie it was because he was forced to. All his hardships in life he himself had caused. Like yesterday — when he got into a fight with his brother — he alone had caused it. Everything that happened to him was because of the way he was born.

To him, as to everyone, a certain fate had been given, which he couldn’t escape however much he tried. At his creation it had taken charge of his body and soul. He had carried it through his whole life, in his head, in his mind, in his heart. He couldn’t escape it as long as life remained in his body — no more than a person could tear out his heart and remain alive.

It didn’t help to pray to God that he would re-create him and make another person of him. No living being was twice born into this world. He would remain, unchangeably, Axel Robert Nilsson with a sick, buzzing ear which spoke loudly to him in the silence of the nights.

Such was his fate. And there remained nothing for him to do except adjust himself to it. The most difficult and most bitter thing he had experienced was adjustment — adjustment to himself, adjustment to the person he was, from whom he could never escape, who forever remained unchangeable, who was the same until the end of life, who eternally was he. He had suffered for many years — intensely, patiently — but he had come through at last. He no longer fought his fate, he no longer was bitter about it. He had accepted his impotence. He had adjusted himself to this: that nothing could be done, and so found harmony with his lot in life. And after that — what more could happen to him? Because to his fate belonged also the end, death.

Robert knew he was someone very little who had thought himself to be someone very big. For a long time he had demanded the measureless, but at last had been forced to be satisfied with this person he had been created and accept the fate chosen for him. It had cost him a great deal — oh, what hadn’t it cost him to submit to the Lord of Life and Death! But there was no other comfort for him, or anyone for that matter, except this, to say to the one who reigns over creation: I cannot fight you! I might as well try to lift the earth on my shoulders and tear down the heavens above me! Why should I fight you, when I know in advance who will win? Do with me what you want! It suits me! Then I will have peace and be unget-at-able by death. By accepting it it no longer concerns me!

“Do you understand me, Kristina?” he ended. “I’m not being conceited. I’m not boasting. I’m full of humility instead. I am reconciled.”

He had spoken slowly and calmly, as if fearing to say too much or use the wrong word; as if, in this way he could tell her everything clearly and honestly.

Kristina had listened in silence, and when he finished she remained silent. It was Robert’s voice she had heard, but the words were the experience she herself had lived through and felt; they had sprung from her own heart, as it were. How many times hadn’t she asked herself: Is everything that has happened to me decided by God from the beginning? Did the creator decide on the emigrant’s lot for me? As Robert talked about himself, he was explaining her own eternal questioning and pondering and wondering. Now for the first time she knew something about him — now, when she recognized herself in him. One couldn’t know a person before one discovered him in oneself — and oneself in him.

“Robert. .” she stammered faintly. “Now I understand.”

It was during this talk, that she truly began to know him. And that conversation would remain with Kristina forever afterward.

XXIII. THE FIFTH NIGHT — ROBERT’S EAR SPEAKS

You had intended to sit up and wait for Karl Oskar this evening, he is returning from Stillwater. But he is delayed, you’re tired and it’s getting late. Well done of you to listen to Kristina and go to bed! You’ll see him in the morning.

I understand — you would have liked to speak out with your brother already tonight. It would have been right — after what happened yesterday morning.

Karl Oskar has looked so crushed ever since you opened your black pouch Monday night. Then, for once, he had nothing to say. Never before have you seen him so embarrassed. But he has always been suspicious of you and he doesn’t trust your gift. He’s afraid you’re fooling him with false useless money.

But today he’ll learn he hasn’t been cheated. And tomorrow he’ll shake your hand and say, Forgive me, Robert! Forgive my mistrust! From now on I’ll always trust you! We must be as good and intimate brothers should be!

When you and Karl Oskar have talked together these last days it has been one continuous cat-around-the-hot-milk business. From now on that will be over. All will be different between you as soon as he learns that you haven’t lied to him.

You had wanted Karl Oskar to offer you his hand this evening. But you must wait till tomorrow. And now you want to sleep. I know; you’ve only one wish left — to sleep. And this you do wish like hell. And your intense weariness closes your eyelids but you don’t go to sleep. You lie awake and wish and pray. You call on sleep, the only good thing you’ve left in life: come, come to me! But it doesn’t come. For with night and silence I come instead.

Perhaps you should sing an evening psalm, calling on Sleep; a waking person’s praise of Sleep. You, the dearest One I know! Sleep, you lovely Comforter! Where are you? Come, come and take me with you! To that place where no suffering is! Come and save me from my sleeplessness! Carry me off! You know the place where it is good to be! I have been there and I want to go again and stay there! Blessed Sleep! Take me in your arms! Hold me to your soft bosom! Where there is no more suffering!

But you know your prayer is in vain: I’ll keep sleep from your eyes a long time tonight also. Night and its silence — that’s when I reign! I yet have much to tell you, and you must stay awake and listen. I’ll tell you about the ghost town on the sandy plain where you stayed so long. How long was it. .?

It began with a voice you thought you recognized. .

— 1—

It happened in Spring Creek one day in September.

Robert was walking past the trading post where ox teams were resting and people always congregated. Several trains had just arrived from the prairie. He walked among the vehicles as an idle bystander when he heard a voice he thought he recognized. The speaker was just jumping off a big double-team wagon which was piled high with buffalo hides. A cloud of flies swarmed over the load. The hides stank like entrails at slaughter. Robert looked closer at the red-faced man jumping off. He knew in advance that this man had the gold-seeker’s face, like all men passing through Spring Creek. There was something in this face, something he recognized: puffed-up, rosy-red cheeks, flat nose, blood-streaked eyes under heavy, swollen lids. It was a gold-seeker’s face all right, but so ugly it was easily recognizable. And it was well-known to him — it belonged to a countryman.

The man with the load of hides wore a flaming red shirt and light yellow deerskin breeches with black fringes along the sides. But as Robert recognized his face he also remembered him in different dress: a light brown large-checkered coat with pants of the same big-patterned cloth, fitting tightly around his legs, a voluminous handkerchief dangling from his hip pocket, black patent leather shoes; he remembered the man standing on the deck of a sailing ship, leaning on the rail and spitting into the ocean while entertaining the other passengers with his stories. And one of the crowd around him was Robert.

The “American”! The American on the Charlotta!

Robert had recognized the voice he had heard tell so many stories about the New World during their crossing to America. And the face — he had seen thousands of strangers but this face was not like any other, this one he recognized.

He walked closer and asked in Swedish, “Aren’t you Fredrik Mattsson?”

The man in the red woolen shirt turned, and opened his mouth as if ready to swallow some of the fat blowflies that buzzed over his load of buffalo hides.

“God damn! A Swedish fellow!”

“You are Mattsson who crossed on the Charlotta, aren’t you?”

“That’s right! And I believe I met you before, boy?”

“On the ship. .”

“Oh yes, we traveled on the same ship. I remember you now. Well, well — what was your name. .?”

Robert told him, and Fredrik Mattsson shook his hand so hard that the finger joints snapped.

“Very glad to meet you again, Robert Nilsson. It’s not every day you meet a countryman in this territory!”

Fredrik Mattsson was from Asarum parish, in the province of Blekinge, Sweden, and he had been nicknamed the “American” on the Charlotta. At their landing in New York he had disappeared. None of the other passengers knew where he had gone. Robert had eagerly listened to his stories and often wondered what had become of him. Now they had unexpectedly met again, deep in America, all the way out in Nebraska Territory.

Mattsson said that since landing in America he had never run across any of his many companions on the ship. And he was glad at last to have found a young friend from those days at sea.

“That old tub Charlotta! She must have sunk by this time!”

“After the landing, where did you go, Mr. Mattsson?”

Robert felt he must call his older countryman mister.

“Where did I go? I’ll tell you, boy! But call me Fred. All my friends in America do. And I’ll call you Bob. Now we can talk Swedish together!”

And Fredrik Mattsson from Asarum leaned against the tall wheel of the ox wagon and continued in the language he called his mother tongue, although Robert noticed that a great number of the words he used were English, or a mixture of English and Swedish, so common among his countrymen in America.

“I took a ship in New York, a clipper ship to California. She was a beautiful ship, loaded with gold seekers. .”

“The Angelica?” said Robert.

“Oh, you noticed her too, boy!”

And Robert did indeed remember the sleek, copper-plated Angelica with her pennant fluttering in the wind: Ho! Ho! Ho! For California! Hadn’t he wished he could have boarded that ship where the men danced and sang and had a good time! They were on their way to dig gold and become free.

“I took the Angelica to Frisco,” explained Mattsson. “I stayed a year in the goldfields, but no luck for me. The best days in California are over. It’s hell to live out there. No sir! No diggin’s for me! I’ve left gold behind forever! Last year I was traveling about and happened to come here to Nebraska. Now I live in Grand City. I have a bar, and a hotel — Grand Hotel in Grand City. Now you know, Bob. And call me Fred!”

“I will, Fred!”

The hotel owner from Grand City had been out on a business trip and was now on his way home with a load of buffalo hides. He was in big business.

“What do you do around here, boy?”

Now it was Robert’s turn to explain. He and a friend from the Charlotta had also started out to dig gold in California. They had taken a job with a Mexican to look after his mules. But his friend had remained on the plains and the Mexican had died of yellow fever. Last spring Robert had lost both his friend and his boss. He had been left behind in Spring Creek, where he had stayed alone through the summer. His employer had left him what he owned; Robert had enough to live on.

“You are lucky! Did you make any money?”

“I have enough.”

“Good! Then you can live as a free gentleman in America!”

Fredrik Mattsson thought for a few moments. When he continued, his voice was even friendlier than before. He put his hand on Robert’s shoulder.

“I know what, my Swedish friend! You come with me to Grand City! You stay as my guest at the Grand Hotel!”

“Where is Grand City?”

“Fifty miles from here. Toward the east. You come with me! We Swedes should stick together! We’ll have a good time together!”

Robert could live wherever he wanted. He didn’t care where he went.

A few hours later the load of hides started out from Spring Creek with a new passenger. Robert was traveling back across the Nebraska plains. He had given up going west, he was now traveling east.

He had turned his back on the land of gold.

— 2—

They drove for two days across the prairie. On the afternoon of the third day they came to a deep valley whose bottom they followed, and at dusk they had arrived at Grand City.

The town had been founded a few years earlier by a group of Mormons. The Mormons had been chased out of Missouri, said Fred, and sought freedom in Nebraska. Grand City had flourished, but soon troubles had arisen between the Mormons and new settlers of other sects who had moved in. When the inhabitants began to shoot each other, the town had stopped growing. Last summer the Mormons had been chased out of Grand City too, and since then life had been calmer. Last winter a tornado had moved most of the houses far out on the prairie. Since then business hadn’t been very good in Grand City.

As they came closer Robert saw that the town had been built in a gravel pit; the walls of the pit surrounded Grand City on all sides. It was a place fortified by nature. The houses, all along one street, were of varying shapes and construction: some of stone, some shed-like, some covered with tent roofs, even shanties of branches and twigs, roofed with leaves and turf. And the street at the bottom of the pit had caved in in many places; in one such hole lay a pile of boards that once must have been a house.

Robert also noticed big caves in the gravel walls surrounding the town. Someone had been busy there — what kind of digging had taken place?

“The Mormons kept poking for their Bible,” explained Fred.

Their first prophet, Joseph Smith, had found the Book of Mormon, written on plates of gold, while he was digging in a sand pit in Vermont. An angel had shown him where to look for the truth concerning the last revelation. Smith had been a capable man with a good head; a pity that he had been lynched up in Illinois by people who were jealous of him. While the Mormons were in Grand City their local boss had received a revelation from an angel; the tablets Smith had found did not contain all the truth; several chapters of the Book of Mormon, indeed, the most important chapters, were buried in the sandhills hereabouts. And on this prophet’s instigation the Mormons had started to dig. They dug day and night, they poked through every hill near town. They sifted every grain of sand but had not found a single written word. It had been a false angel, a liar angel, who had fooled the local prophet.

A cloud of dust enveloped the wagon as they drove their lazy team along the one street of the town. Robert looked at the sand pit walls: the upper layers hung far out beyond the lower ones; at any time they might cave in. And the walls were pierced by holes which the first settlers had dug in their search for the eternal truth about life and death. The undermined walls could cave in and in a few moments bury the whole of Grand City.

One house in the center of the town had a sign painted on it in somewhat shaky letters — GRAND HOTEL. The house was built of stone with a rather flat roof of bark. It was so low that it resembled a cellar house. The door had a sign in chalk: If you want anything, walk in!

Fred Mattsson jumped down from the load; he welcomed his old friend and countryman, Bob Nilsson to the Grand Hotel in Grand City; he had all kinds of guest rooms for gentlemen — his was not only the biggest hotel in town, it was the only one.

The hotel had been closed while its owner was away on business. Now he opened the door with some caution; the upper hinge was loose and dangling, and in spite of his care it fell on his boot as he stepped across the threshold; he kicked it aside.

They walked through a narrow hall, dark as a cellar. The hall ended in a few stone steps which led up to a bare room. This was the Grand Hotel’s best guest room, and here the Swedish guest could stay. Inside was a real bed, nailed together of heavy boards, with a mattress and fairly clean sheet, pillow, and blanket. The only other furniture was a table and a chair at the window. The walls were decorated with buffalo horns; even this room indicated they were in buffalo country.

A room for a gentleman, said the host, a room for a man of means in America. Now Robert must rest while he went down and cooked dinner for them. They would have their dinner in the main dining room. Unfortunately, the Grand Hotel was without personnel at the moment. Before he left on his business journey he had been forced to let his chef go, his last employee. This man had been ordered never to get drunk until after dinner, but he had never obeyed. The host himself had always had to save the steaks from burning. And one day the cook had taken the wrong bottle and poured castor oil in the bean soup. The guests had all spent the night in the privy. In the morning they had all moved out, accusing him, the owner, of trying to poison them, and refusing to pay their bills. That was why he had kicked out his chef; that bean soup had cost him two hundred dollars.

About an hour later Robert came down to enjoy Fred’s promised dinner. The “main” dining room was a widening in the hall with an iron stove in a corner. It had a long table at which twenty guests could sit down to a meal. Fred was frying buffalo steaks on the stove and served them with a red, peppery sauce; he called it chili Colorado. The meat was good but the sharp sauce burned Robert’s tongue. The host had put both knife and fork at his plate; almost every day, said Fred, some guest arrived who asked for both these tools. After the buffalo steak he served pancakes which he called tortillas. He had learned to cook these in the California goldfields.

Fredrik Mattsson from Asarum poured whiskey from a fat bottle and handed his guest a large tumbler of the dark-brown fluid.

“Let’s drink a Swedish Skol! Good luck, boy!”

Robert was not accustomed to the strong liquor, which scratched like a scrubbing brush in his throat and burned in his stomach afterward. The hotel dining room had a closed-in and dank smell. Robert couldn’t help saying that he felt as if he were sitting in a cellar.

“Yes, Grand Hotel was built for a potato cellar!” said Fred proudly.

And the host told him the story of his hotel, an amazing and proud story. The house itself was a historical building; it was the oldest house in town, four years old. He intended to put a sign on the front of his house indicating its venerable age.

When Grand City had been founded, four years ago, the first inhabitants had needed a place to store their potatoes. This house had been built for potato storage. But as the town grew and attracted cattle thieves, ruffians, and murderers, it had become more important to have a safe place to put them rather than the potatoes. It was worse to have thieves on the loose than to eat spoiled potatoes. By and by they were hanged, of course, depending on time and opportunity, but it usually took a day or two before official execution could be performed, and in the meantime the criminals were kept in this jail. In this very spot where they now were sitting, many men had spent the last hours of their life.

Then had come a time in Grand City’s history when law and order had been set aside. There had not been enough men to attend to that business; no one could expect men to jail themselves and stay in prison. For a year or so the jail had been abandoned for lack of officials. The last prisoner had been strung up, or perhaps he had escaped, and no new criminals could be supplied.

Then came the church period of Grand City’s history. After the Mormons, a group of Seventh-Day Adventists had arrived. They needed a church and rented the empty jail. The potato cellar was turned into the lord’s temple. The pulpit stood here in the dining room; when Fred tore it down he had used the planks for a counter in his bar. Here in this old potato cellar the Seventh-Day Adventists had once made themselves ready to ascend into heaven — the Last Day, they had decided, would occur on New Year’s Eve 1850, and all members of the congregation had gathered in here. They had sold all their possessions, everyone was dressed in white muslin robes; they had done their earthly chores and were ready for the ascension. But the Last Day had been postponed indefinitely, and since the Seventh-Day Adventists already had given away everything they owned on earth without gaining admittance to heaven, some problems about money had arisen. The confusion increased when the pastor ran away with the wife of the church warden.

And the crafty Mormons, who preached their doctrine forcefully, took advantage of the other sect’s predicament: they drove them out of the church and used the building themselves.

After a time of great strife in Grand City’s church life a period of peace and order reigned. Even though the town at that time was without jail or potato cellar it had five church buildings, all Mormon.

The host inhaled deeply, spat to the left and then to the right, and poured more whiskey for his guest and for himself before he continued.

This peaceful period was nearing its end when he came to this town. He had arrived in time to attend a Mormon wedding here in the church. A rich and highly trusted member was marrying eight women at one time. It was an average Mormon wedding and he had participated in the festivities.

The eight brides had been lined up in a row outside on the street, decked in white clothing, their hair curled, all ready. In front of the brides sat the bridegroom, like a company commander on a fine horse, in tails and stovepipe hat. The congregation had raised a triumphal arch across the street, and back and forth under this arch men rode among the guests and fired salutes with rifles and revolvers until the whole town was enveloped in a cloud of powder smoke. When the ceremony was about to commence the brides walked under the arch to meet the groom. Each bride in turn walked up, the groom pulled her up beside him in the saddle and rode off to the house where the bridal chamber had been prepared. After a time the groom came riding back alone; now his first wife was no longer a maid but a Mormon wife. The marriage had been consummated. Then the groom picked up his next bride, rode away, and turned this maid into wife.

In four hours the groom had finished his ride — eight times back and forth. In four hours he had consummated his marriage with eight wives. And that Mormon was a small, weak-looking man, but he had been gifted with heavenly strength to perform his manly duty. He could almost be compared to Brigham Young himself.

But this wedding turned out to be the undoing of the Mormons. It caused bad blood among other men in town, who had long envied the Mormons their women. There was already a great lack of women in the West before this sect had come with their polygamy. One man could take ten wives while a hundred men couldn’t get a single woman. A small war broke out in Grand City. The Mormons used Colt revolvers and could fire five shots without reloading, but some of the other men had Sam Colts newest invention, which fired six shots. And with Colt’s six-shooters they drove the whole Mormon group out of town.

Now the churches stood empty and Fred had used the opportunity to take over the biggest building in town. He had opened a hotel and bar in the old Mormon temple, and the onetime potato cellar was now really in its glory.

Well, wasn’t that a proud history of this house? In three years it had been potato cellar, jail, church, and hotel! Could Robert name any famous building in the world that had had so glorious a past? And in so short a time! This house was an example to newcomers of progress here in the West. It took brains, of course, and some fighting, but survivors did have a future.

That was how Fred Mattsson had become the owner of the Grand Hotel in Grand City.

“I can thank Sam Colt’s six-shooter, of course,” he added. “Sam is the greatest living American. Do you know that he made his first revolver when he was fourteen! Think what the West would have been without him! It simply wouldn’t have had any future at all if men had had to stop and reload at every shot!”

Robert’s head spun from the whiskey he had drunk; suddenly he felt drowsy and listened only vaguely to Fred.

But then a tornado had hit Grand City last year, Fred went on. Three fourths of the houses in town had blown away — thirty, forty miles out on the prairie. And in many cases the inhabitants had sailed away with their houses. The town had again come to a standstill; indeed, it had gone through difficult times. But Grand Hotel remained and it was one house the West would boast about in the future.

Robert was yawning; the sturdy meal and the strong liquor had practically put him to sleep in his chair. His host urged him to go to bed and rest for a while. After all, he was a guest in the hotel. Fred himself would now open his bar for the evening. His return had been awaited impatiently in the town, and his old steady customers would begin to arrive any moment now. He had been closed for two weeks — tonight there would be a throng at his counter.

— 3—

Robert slept a few hours and awoke with a burning thirst. He was not accustomed to American whiskey; he had a taste of stale herring brine in his throat.

He walked down the black cellar hall, feeling his way along until he found a side door which opened as soon as he touched the door handle. He saw at once he had happened on to the bar. The room had a low counter made of rough lumber. In front of this, on a long bench, sat a dozen or so men with their hats on. In there, too, it smelled musty and sour, like an old cellar with sprouting, half-rotten potatoes; or perhaps it smelled from sour beer. The dirty floor had not been touched by broom or scrubbing brush in many a moon.

“Hi, Bob! Welcome to my saloon!”

The host of the Grand Hotel now wore a large white apron which turned him into a bartender. He stood behind the counter rinsing glasses in a bucket of water. The wall behind the counter had shelves with bottles and mugs, and the top shelf had a red painted sign: Fred’s Tavern.

It was strangely silent in the bar; the men sat motionless and did not offer to make room for the newcomer on the bench. Fred rolled up a chopping block and poured a glass of whiskey for Robert; then he started talking to him in Swedish.

The saloons Robert had seen before, or passed by, had always been noisy with the din of many voices and he wondered why it was so silent in here. He looked at the customers: they sat still and solemn, as if this house still were a church. What was the matter with them? Presently, as his eyes became accustomed to the dim light, he understood: the men were asleep; they were drowsing, or had passed out more or less; a few rested their heads on their arms on the counter and snored contentedly; some slept less heavily and winked and nodded now and then. Some stared glassy-eyed at the bottles on the shelves, as they might stare out across the plains when they had discovered something far away, some game that was entirely beyond their strength to reach.

Silence and drowsiness reigned in this saloon, because the men at the counter were already drunk. From time to time Fred’s annoyed look scanned his dormant guests. No one was drinking; the ablest customers confined their activity to a vague look at the liquor they ought to have been drinking.

“Those devils drowse off in here!”

The host spoke in his homeland dialect.

“Time to stir up my business again!”

Fred stooped under the counter and found a small hand spray which he filled from the wash bucket. Then he walked three times back and forth and sprayed the befogged heads of his customers.

“They need a shower once every hour.”

The row of slumbering, dazed guests came to life again; they wiped their eyes, began to talk and yell; they discovered their glasses were empty, or gone, and shouted to the bartender, shaking their fists and calling for new drinks.

The bartender put away his sprayer, its purpose accomplished, and attended to pouring whiskey instead. Business in Fred’s Tavern had resumed its normal speed.

After a while the owner again had time to speak to his new guest, his young countryman. He leaned on the counter that had been made from the torn-down pulpit.

“You mentioned a fellow who was with you, Arvid, did you say? And he kicked the bucket?”

“Yes. From thirst. He drank poisoned water, we couldn’t find anything else. .”

“I see. Last summer ten thousand people died from thirst on the California Trail.”

Robert said that he had never thought of it before, how impossible it was to get along without so simple a thing as water.

“In my hotel you needn’t go thirsty! With Fred you won’t miss a thing! You can have anything you wish to drink, my dear friend!”

“I like it here.”

“Good! A friend of mine runs a whorehouse across the street — would you like a woman tonight? A good knull would do you good!”

Robert had never been with a woman. He had only imagined how such a thing would take place. He had never had sufficient courage to try. Now he asked, from pure curiosity, how much it would cost at this house across the street.

“It’s Wednesday today,” said Fred. “You can have a knull at a special rate today.”

“Special rate? What’s that?” Fred had been using the American expression.

“I mean it costs less.”

“Oh — I thought it was a disease.”

“No, you needn’t worry about that! The whores are healthy as hell! But business is kind of slow in the middle of the week. You can get a piece of ass for half price. They have awfully nice girls — and Saturday it costs twice as much!”

Robert sat silent; perhaps he was contemplating whether or not to go. Fred understood fully; he might be too tired tonight. There was no hurry, he was to remain at the Grand Hotel, and the house across the street was open twenty-four hours a day, at least until the next tornado. The big storm last year had after all left the whorehouse standing; the good Lord had so far been as careful of the place as if he were a partner in the business.

The bartender poured whiskey for those customers still able to ask for refills; then he resumed. The gold seekers passing through Grand City on their way to California were the best customers at the whorehouse. They took advantage of this stop, they knew how few women there were in the goldfields. He too had known. There was only one woman to each hundred men, and she was well used. And the women in the goldfields were horribly expensive and demanded payment in pure gold, big nuggets. Never before in the history of the world had there been such an opportunity for women to get rich by lying on their backs. A woman in California could gather a fortune within three months, if she was decent and capable.

And the men out there, in their loneliness, grew so soft-hearted and weak they would often faint at the mere sight of a woman. Many gold diggers couldn’t stand being without and used their mules. These animals didn’t always smell so good so the men sprayed them with costly perfumes; after that they smelled like women. Men always wanted pleasant smells about the business, something grand — the gold diggers were soft that way. So some bought the finest silk and velvet they could find and spread it over the mules; they hung lace on the mule ears, embroidered linen and garlands around their necks, and often pieces of expensive jewelry. They decked the mules as if they were beautiful women before they mounted them. For everything must be beautiful, as it should be; the gold seekers were that way.

And Fred wanted to point this out: men were good and kind and fine deep inside, even when they were forced to use animals. In whatever circumstances men found themselves they longed for the beautiful.

Silence had again descended over Fred’s Tavern; only a soft snoring was heard. The customers were going to sleep again; one after another lost his voice and passed out. Occasionally a belching, a snore, or a clearing of the throat was heard, but spoken words had given out.

And the host explained to Robert all the advantages for his guests: Grand Hotel of Grand City offered all the things in the world a man could ask for. And in the house across the street a gentleman could satisfy his further desires.

It had grown stuffy and close in the bar and Robert felt sleepy. He rose and said he would go to bed.

Fred nodded. “Good night! Sleep tight! I must attend to my business. .”

He looked in annoyance at his customers and bent down for his spray can again to get life into his business.

— 4—

Robert stayed on with his compatriot at the Grand Hotel in Grand City. During the day he would wander about and look at the place. There were remains of many houses that once had stood along the street: foundation stones, heavy timbers, caved-in chimneys, an occasional iron stove — the heavy objects the tornado had been unable to carry out on the prairie when it had struck last year. Robert thought that if the big storm had hit the town on the night the Seventh-Day Adventists waited in their church for the Last Day, they might have thought they were being taken bodily to heaven on the hurricane.

Here were places where people had lived; the people themselves were dead or had moved away. Even the rats were dead — furry, flat, dried-up rat carcasses lay strewn on the old sites like lost mittens. This was a ghostly place; people and animals had lost their lives here — their ghosts might return at night. Who knew? The town in the sand pit was a ghost town. It suited Robert to live here.

But after dark he hardly dared move about in Grand City; it was too easy to fall into holes. And the gravel walls hung over the city as a constant threat, as if they could bury the town at any moment.

The ghost town had only one-tenth of its original population but there were still a few hundred inhabitants who might ask each morning: Will our town cave in and bury us all before evening?

The guests at the Grand Hotel were travelers who passed through Grand City and needed a place to rest for a night. But for days on end Robert was the only guest in the house. The saloon gave the owner his income. After a few weeks, Robert offered to pay for his lodging. He made the suggestion one day when only the two of them were eating in the main dining room. But Fredrik Mattsson threw up his hands: there was no hurry about that. Moreover, he wanted to treat an old friend from Sweden to lodging for some time. Countrymen must stick together. Robert insisted he wanted to pay for himself — he had plenty of money.

Fredrik Mattsson’s swollen, bloodshot eyes fluttered about a moment, he turned away as if suddenly embarrassed, he didn’t want to snoop into other people’s affairs, but would Robert feel hurt if he asked how much the Mexican had left him?

“Not at all, Fred. You are my friend — I’ll show you!”

He went to his room and fetched the small pouch of soft black leather with the letters M. V. embroidered on it. He had so far used only a little of the contents. He really ought to count the rest of it. He poured the gold and silver coins onto the table. His host eagerly helped him count the money. He divided the coins into piles according to their value; he knew American money, he conducted big business.

Robert still had almost three thousand dollars, two thousand of which was in gold.

Fred threw his hands up as if wanting to call on the high one in heaven.

“My dear boy! Have you entirely lost your mind! How are you using your money? Do you just hide it away?”

Robert said he used the money as he needed it. What was wrong about that?

“My poor fellow Swede! It’s criminal, that’s all! You can double your money, many times! Have you never met a sensible person in America before? Has no one advised you about money?”

And Fredrik Mattsson’s voice sounded truly sad when he heard how foolishly Robert had handled his fortune: to leave all that cash in a pouch! That was called dead money! And a businessman like himself could only feel sad when he saw how dead this money was. Money must be put into something to earn interest. Money must be kept alive, multiplied — a hundredfold, a thousandfold, like seeds in the ground. If he had put his money into a business when he got it he would have had ten times as much by now. He would have had thirty thousand instead of a mere three thousand. It was indeed a crime to handle money this way. It was not only a crime against himself, it was a crime against humanity! To keep all this money uninvested! For humanity, in order to survive, must keep business going.

“Bob,” said Fred, and patted Robert’s hand in deep compassion: “Bob, you do indeed need a good friend.”

And in his solitude, after Arvid’s death, Robert had often felt he did indeed need a friend.

Fred’s eyes could not leave the piles of gold and silver coins before him on the table. At last his face lit up.

“I got it! I know what to do, Bob! You and I should be partners!”

Robert looked puzzled; he didn’t understand. But Fred was jumping up and down in joy over his bright idea.

“Damn me! Why didn’t I think of it at once!”

“What do you mean? What should we do?”

“You put your capital into my hotel! You’ll multiply your money! You can retire as a rich man! You and I will be partners! In my hotel!”

“Would this money be enough for that. .?”

“It will help in the business, and I’ll pay good interest! You can’t handle your money yourself, Bob!”

Robert knew he couldn’t handle money, he had never had any to handle. This was the first money he had ever had. And he felt the coins could easily be stolen from the pouch; he had been thinking about finding a safer place.

Fred continued. He had in mind expanding his hotel business and could use some more capital — first of all they must find a staff of servants. Suppose Robert put some money in the hotel, say two thousand dollars — the rest he could keep for spending money — then he, Fred, would pay the highest interest ever paid in the New World, half the profits! They would share as brothers what they took in. The Grand Hotel was already a fine business — but would be still better with more capital to modernize it. And since they were from the same homeland he felt they were practically relatives. With the two of them partners they would have a family business, as it were.

Robert had never thought of his money working for other people and at the same time increasing for him. But as his friend had such a great understanding of business, he could see no harm in following his advice.

He said, “You take care of my money. If it isn’t too much trouble for you?”

He was grateful for Fred’s suggestion; his only worry was that the handling of the money would be too much of a nuisance to his friend.

“Hosannah!” exclaimed the host of the Grand Hotel. “From now on we’ll do big business! Boy! Will you be rich one day!”

Fredrik Mattsson took charge of the two thousand dollars from the black pouch. Thus Robert became a partner in the Grand Hotel in Grand City, the town’s largest and only hotel.

— 5—

The liveliest time of the week in Fred’s Tavern was Saturday evening between eight and nine. At that hour the members of the Whiskey Club met, the largest and most important club in town. They met to drink Kentucky Straight, and their bylaws stated they must meet for one hour, between eight and nine. During this hour they could, and must, drink all the whiskey they could down. The cost per member was a dollar and fifty cents. The one who consumed the greatest quantity during the evening hour need not pay the week’s membership fee. The rush in the bar during this hour was enormous; Fred couldn’t draw an even breath until the meeting was adjourned and the members had retired to the saloon floor, in more or less resting positions.

After the meeting of the Whiskey Club, Fred would devote Sunday to cleaning his saloon.

Even before Robert became a partner in the hotel business, he had helped Fred a little during the Saturday rush. He washed glasses, helped to serve, and kept track of drinks consumed. During the hour of the club meeting the consumption of liquor was as great as during the rest of the week. After Robert had become a partner he felt it his duty to assist the host whenever he could: he helped with the cooking, peeled potatoes, cut firewood, ran errands, swept up, and washed dishes; mostly he washed dishes. But Fred did not ask his partner to work.

“You shouldn’t work as dishwasher here, Bob! It’s below your station!”

But Robert said it wasn’t too much if he helped with the dishes and did what he could. Fred mustn’t do all the work by himself; he wanted to do his share. And since he was a partner in the business he felt a certain responsibility about the running of the hotel.

Fred said he would look for help — a big staff of people, he said. But for a few months ahead he was so involved in big business he didn’t have the time to look for servants.

For days it would be quiet about the place, with only an occasional guest, or no guest at all. Then Fred had spare time in which to tell Robert about his experiences in California and Robert also had time to walk about and explore Grand City. He would stand for long periods and look into the holes which had been dug in the sandhills around town where people had searched for eternal truth; they had dug for an answer to the Riddle of Life. Here tablets were said to have been hidden, containing words of ultimate truth, the last revelation. And people had dug and dug, for many long hours; it must have taken a terribly long time to dig all these holes. But they had found nothing, received no information. All their labor had been in vain: they found nothing but emptiness, all had been an illusion. They had been tricked by a lying angel.

On business errands for Fred, Robert had visited a number of the houses in town but as yet he had not been to the house across the street. He had seen the sign on the door in letters too large to be missed: Welcome, Gentlemen! Come Right In! And in the evening after dark a yellow lantern was hung at the door. He had asked Fred about the inmates, whom he had never seen, and he was told that they did not go out in daylight; they were mainly sleeping and resting then. But they were available all night through. And in the evening, and late into the night, varying noises came from that house.

Inside the women waited. They were ready night and day. All men were equally welcome, everyone who came was given what he desired. The price was two or three dollars in the middle of the week, double on Saturdays and Sundays.

There was still something Robert had not experienced in his life, and it was available to him in that house. He had wondered greatly how it would be, how it would feel. And he must find out. Indeed, he wanted to know, he must know.

But he had heard that if you visited a whorehouse you got sick. You caught venereal diseases. The poison crept into the marrow of one’s bones, one rotted inside. Sores and boils broke out, one’s limbs were eaten up and fell off. And the poison multiplied from generation to generation. A whore’s body was full of poison, and her life lasted barely four years.

Could this be the truth? The truth about something one would never know until one found out. So it was with the gold, and it was the same with the house across the street. In there the women gave something great to the visiting men — they let the men penetrate into their own bodies. A greater gift could hardly be offered a man. And it cost only three dollars. For this price the man could do what he wanted with the woman. Why did she sell her secret parts at so cheap a price? And why did the man value it so low?

Only one house in town had on its door the sign Welcome! And this very house he always passed by. It held a promise for him, something new and unknown. It was a house with a kind word on its door, a house that offered something generously.

Two evenings in succession, after he had washed up and had nothing more to do in the hotel, he walked across the street and stood for a moment in the yellow light of its pale lantern. Then he walked back.

He had been on the California Trail, he had experienced a great deal — yet he was afraid, he was a coward. He wanted something and it was within easy reach, and he dared not take it. The following evening, to bolster his courage, he drank a tall glass of Kentucky Straight: this would make him bolder. Then he crossed the street for the third evening.

Come Right In!

This evening the door stood ajar; another sign that a caller was welcome. He found himself in a large, dimly lit room; only a few small candles in wooden sconces high up on the wall spread a light that hardly reached the floor. A group of women huddled at a table in the far end of the room, with beer mugs and whiskey glasses in front of them. These were the dishes that he washed every day; often he got tired from standing on his feet for hours. He could barely see the women’s faces in the dim light, he couldn’t make out if they were beautiful or ugly. But he could see the color of their clothing, a pleasure to his eyes. And it didn’t smell of dank cellar in here; a sweet odor came to his nose, the odor of refined women.

He had stopped at the door.

“Hello there! Come on in!”

One of the women called out to him. Her voice sounded kind, and clear as a bell.

“Come on in!”

Women’s voices encouraged him, yet he stayed where he was. His whiskey courage was beginning to fail him, he had crossed the threshold of the house, but what ought he to do now? He felt deeply embarrassed, and the consciousness of his inexperience embarrassed him further.

One of the women rose from the table and came toward him. She was tall, almost as tall as he when she stood beside him. She had on a flowing robe which fluttered gently like a sail in a light wind. She walked softly, soundlessly. Her shoulders were bare, and he could see the furrow between her breasts. A pair of big black eyes were resting on him: he was among friends, he must join them, wouldn’t he come with her?

But he remained standing at the door as if his legs were paralyzed. The women at the table began to laugh, hard, rasping laughs, like a saw in dry wood.

With some effort he turned to leave. But the tall woman had got a steady grip on his arm and held him inside.

“Don’t be so bitterly shy!”

She turned to the others and said something he didn’t understand, and then they laughed even harder and more derisively.

He had almost decided to leave; these women made fun of him, laughed at him. But he must stay, he must show them he wasn’t afraid of women. And the one at his arm assured him that all she wanted with him was something very nice and that nothing in this house would hurt him. If he just followed her, they would undoubtedly get along and be good friends.

“Come along, my little sweet potato. .!”

She had a purring, caressing voice that pleased his ear. It was like the soft down of a pillow. The voice had power over him. She put her arm across his back and guided him, silently. They crossed to the other end of the large room, where she pulled aside a hanging; behind it stood a low, broad bed. Then she pulled the hanging in place behind them; it fell down over his shoulders and back like a cape.

They were separated from the others in the house. Here behind the hanging he was alone with the woman and the bed.

Her robe was green; the cloth rustled against his own clothing. He had barely seen her face and as yet he had not said a word to her. She alone did the talking. She lit a candle, then she bent down and poked in the bed. She would make it soft and good for him, as soft a bed as he had ever felt before. He would be wonderfully pleased, she had never cheated a man of anything, each one had left her satisfied and well pleased.

And again she called him her little sweet potato.

She smelled sweet, terribly sweet. Her black eyes glittered in the flickering light, but her cheeks were gray-white, like rye flour. He turned away his eyes, he dared not look her in the face. He was tempted, but now that they were alone he was seized with fright.

He did not know how a man acted with a woman in bed.

He stood rigidly, his limbs clumsy. His arms limp, he remained motionless at the bedside. With one quick, accustomed movement the woman turned down her robe, leaving herself exposed to the waist. And then she asked in her husky voice: wouldn’t he like to have a peek? Didn’t she have beautiful breasts? All men liked them. She wanted a dollar extra for the breasts; they ought to be worth it out here in the West. There were no breasts like hers in all of Nebraska, nay, not in all the West!

He looked at her breasts; they hung limp and flat and dangled so low they almost touched her stomach. They looked like an udder between the hind legs of a cow.

And he swallowed with an effort; he felt nauseated. What did he want with that woman? He wouldn’t want to mix himself with her. . He was in a whorehouse and she was a whore. A whore’s body was filled with poison and her life lasted only four years. This one here — how much poison did she carry in her body? How long a time had she left to live. .? Why had he come in here? Had it been because he had no desire to live any longer. .? Suddenly he wanted to live. .

His fear made cold perspiration break out on his body. But the woman sat down on the bed and pulled him down beside her. All right? An extra dollar for the breasts? The finest breasts in the West. White and pure like the rose and the lily. He could have the whole business for three dollars — if he gave the money to her now they would be ready in a jiffy. But why didn’t he talk? Why didn’t he say a single word?

Her hands found their way under his clothing. They were at home on a man’s body: with sure, experienced motions the hands opened his pants and felt toward his groin.

Now at last he spoke. He forgot himself and spoke Swedish to her: She must let him alone. He didn’t want anything of her. He had only come out of curiosity — he was staying at the hotel across the street. He would be glad to give her the three dollars. But he didn’t want to do anything with her. He wanted to leave at once. .

But she of course did not understand him and her hands felt his body and took hold of his testicles. Now she was talking in a caressing, silver-clear voice that tinkled like a bell; she laughed heartily as one hand held on to the scrotum.

What a dear sweet potato! She would squeeze the honey out of it!

He heard himself talking in Swedish and corrected himself in stuttering English. But the lure of the unknown experience and his fear kept him paralyzed and he let her go on.

She burst out laughing again.

“What should I do with this kid?”

She tightened her hold on his testicles until it hurt him. The pain brought him back to himself and at once he recovered his ability to move, he pushed her aside and jumped up, pulling the hanging apart so violently that it fell to the floor. He ran through the room where the other whores were still sitting at the table, reached the door, and got out into the street. He heard the women laugh behind him.

Outside the whorehouse he tumbled over in a hole in the street, in spite of the lantern light, and hurt his right knee. Limping badly he reached the hotel door, moving as fast as his injured knee permitted. He felt his way through the dark cellar hall, found his room, and threw himself on his back on the bed, his limbs trembling. His knee ached and his groin hurt. The derisive laughter of the women had followed him across the street; they were poking fun at his innocence. Now they must be talking about him, the sweet potato who wanted to but didn’t dare. They were laughing at him, making fun of him: what to do with such a fool?

But the sweet potato had run away, they had not squeezed the honey from his pouch.

He lay on his bed, trembling. His testicles hurt from the woman’s grasp. Now he knew why the prices were so cheap over there. What they offered was false. Their gift was false. It was right that their wares cost two dollars only — with an extra dollar for the finest breasts in the West. They weren’t worth any more. He had had the experience now; the glory over there was only something he had imagined. Nothing to long for. He had been made a fool of in that house and it had served him right.

He had wondered how it was to mix with a woman. He had learned tonight. He didn’t want to know any more.

— 6—

Robert stayed in the sand-pit ghost town for over two years.

Each day he felt that the pierced gravel walls might cave in and bury the town and its people. It seemed to him a miracle that they still stood. And he asked himself if he wasn’t staying in Grand City only to see its burial. Perhaps he secretly longed for the big cave-in to take place and end life for all of them.

Or a new tornado might come and carry off the remaining houses — hurl the Grand Hotel and the whorehouse far out on the endless prairie. To be buried as a crushed worm or wafted as a feather through the air seemed much the same to him.

After his experiences on the California Trail, Robert felt that death was the only sure thing in this world, the only thing that really happened, and the only thing that could change anything for him. And he believed himself separated from death only by a transparent film, thin and sensitive as the retina of the eye. He could see through it clearly, and he wondered constantly why it didn’t burst. He lived a life of pretense — the happenings of life did not concern him.

A winter passed, and a summer and a second winter, but the big cave-in-burial did not take place in Grand City. Nor was there another tornado. The houses were neither buried nor blown out on the prairie; they still stood, and the people in them remained, among them the two Swedes who ran the Grand Hotel.

Fredrik Mattsson lived his life in great earnest, in great hurry. He was involved in big business, bigger than before, whatever it happened to be now — his partner never asked. Robert was hotel owner and servant in one person and did the heaviest chores. Fred intended to hire necessary personnel — he had already decided how many people they needed — but unfortunately he never had the time to see to it. His days were entirely taken up by other, more urgent activities. And since his partner had brought in new capital, the hotel was to be enlarged and improved. In the beginning he discussed his plans with Robert.

One evening he asked, “Bob, can you hang paper?”

At first Robert did not understand what he meant.

Well, in the morning Fred would begin the great improvement: they would paper the hotel walls. Could Robert do this? Fred had come across a big pile of light-blue wallpaper rolls, very cheap. For several weeks Robert boiled glue, measured and cut and hung paper over the naked walls of the old potato cellar. The work amused him, because he could see results. He changed the color of the naked hotel walls from dark gray to light blue. He felt he was making the days brighter for the strangers who would stay in the rooms.

But the hanging of the light-blue paper — at fifty cents a roll — was the only improvement undertaken at the Grand Hotel.

— 7—

It was during Robert’s third winter in the ghost town that his illness began. It started as a persistent fatigue which did not disappear with rest, a hollow, empty cough, and sometimes tearing pain in his stomach. He lost his appetite, couldn’t keep down the food he swallowed; he lost weight, grew wan. Already before this he had grown thinner, and the fat gold lice had long ago deserted his body; now not the smallest nits could find nourishment there. He stayed in bed for a while and felt a little better. For short periods he felt almost well. But the illness came back, and then his teeth began to fall out.

When he looked in a mirror he didn’t recognize himself.

Fred often would say to him: “Your face is pale as hell, Bob!”

Because his partner looked so yellow Fred wondered if Robert hadn’t perchance caught the yellow fever while he looked after Vallejos. Perhaps it had entered his body and not broken out until now? Robert didn’t think so, but then he knew nothing about disease. He had never had any ailment except his bad ear.

By spring he had recuperated enough to be up and about but he felt far from well; the oppressive fatigue remained in his body, and he was almost unable to do anything. He no longer could assist Fred in running the hotel. And he had grown tired of the ghost town and wanted to get away from it as soon as he felt strong enough.

He had told Fred that his older brother had taken up a claim in Minnesota, and now Robert hinted that perhaps it would be best for him to return to his brother.

Fred replied enthusiastically. Since Robert didn’t feel well he ought to be where he could get care and rest. He himself could not look after his friend and countryman in the manner he would wish. But Robert’s relatives would surely do so and help him regain his health and strength.

“Bob, you needn’t be a burden to your brother. I will of course return the money you put into my hotel! I’ll not only pay back the capital — I’ll pay interest as well, the highest interest in North America.”

Fredrik Mattsson from Asarum would, in every detail, keep the promise he had given his countryman. And Robert in turn assured him that he had always trusted his friend in their mutual business. He had never heard of one Swede cheating another in America.

“Of course not! I’ve increased our money! I know how to handle money in America, Bob. I know how to pay out the capital and still have it!”

From his vest pocket he fished up a five-cent coin and held it before Robert’s eyes.

“See this nickel? With this one single coin I paid for my food a whole winter in Chicago!”

“You couldn’t!” exclaimed Robert. “Unless you were a magician or something. .”

Fred explained that it had nothing to do with tricks or miracles; it was pure business ability. That winter in Chicago he had had no cash except this coin. He had lived with a woman friend, free of charge, and he had eaten all his meals at a saloon on Clark Street where every customer who bought anything for at least five cents could eat a free meal. Each morning he had gone to this saloon and bought a five-cent cigar. Then he had eaten his breakfast. But he did not smoke his cigar — when he emerged onto the street he sold it to anyone he happened to meet for the same price he himself had paid. In that way he got back his five cents. At dinnertime he went back to the saloon, bought a fresh cigar, ate the dinner he was entitled to, and then went outside and sold his cigar for five cents. In that way he retrieved his nickel so he could buy a new cigar in the morning and have his breakfast, and so on.

He had lived in this way the whole winter through buying and selling two cigars a day and eating two solid meals. And when he left Chicago in the spring he still had his nickel, even though it had paid for his food for a whole winter.

Fred threw the coin into the air and caught it on the downfall.

“You see, I know how to handle capital! I pay out and still have it! I’ve done the same with your money, Bob. I know the tricks. Life is easy in America if you know the tricks.”

Up to the very last moment of Robert’s stay, the host of the Grand Hotel was helpful and generous to his friend and partner. He arranged for his trip home: an ox train would soon be due in Grand City on its way east to St. Louis, and from St. Louis Robert could take the paddle steamer as soon as the northern Mississippi was open. Robert remembered the route; it would be his third journey on the broad river.

“You must get yourself some decent clothes, Bob,” insisted Fred. “You must return as a gentleman!”

A few hundred dollars in silver were still left in Roberts black pouch — enough for his trip home, a suit of clothes, and a new rucksack. Now anyone could see he was returning from the goldfields, said Fred.

Thus one day in April 1855, the younger partner in the Grand Hotel, Grand City, was ready to leave the business and the town. The ox train for St. Louis had arrived. The two friends stood at the counter in Fred’s Tavern, and the one who would stay behind solemnly opened a bottle of Kentucky Straight. With controlled emotion Fred said they must drink the painful Skol of farewell. For the last time they would use the beloved Swedish word of greeting to each other. From then on the word Skol would never more be heard in this room.

And now at their parting the moment had come for him to repay Robert’s loan as he had promised.

“My dear friend, after two years your capital has doubled. In this way you are getting 100 per cent interest. I owe you four thousand dollars!”

Fredrik Mattsson put two heavy bundles of bills on the counter in front of his friend; he had of course changed Robert’s gold into bills. This had to be done before money could circulate and grow, and he was repaying him in bills.

He looked at his countryman, as if to see his reaction.

“Have you ever seen or heard of wildcats out here?”

“Wildcats? Do you mean those wild animals. .?”

“No. I mean free money in America. What you see before you on the counter is four thousand dollars in wildcat money. You get your capital back in sound, free money.”

For the first time Robert saw wildcat money and he liked the name; to him it had something to do with freedom and liberty; the bills had probably been given that name because they in some way echoed the freedom of the wildcats in the forest.

“Here you are, Bob. One hundred per cent interest!”

Robert was overcome by the great generosity his friend displayed at their parting. Was it right for him to accept these big bundles of money, four thousand dollars? He felt like a miser, a usurper. No, he couldn’t accept all this money — he hadn’t earned it. And he said if he accepted it he would ever after feel he had skinned a countryman and friend.

“No, Fred, you’re too generous to me!”

But Fred forced him to take it, he himself pushed the bundles into the black leather pouch. He knew how Robert felt, but after all, it was only his own money that had doubled in two years by constant, careful handling. He paid back in wildcats — sound, free money that would double again if handled wisely. They were as good as gold in the right hands. Up in Minnesota, where there were few banks, these bills might be worth even more than out here, probably more than gold.

Robert gave in. He now possessed four thousand dollars of this money that had been named after the free forest cats who had no masters, and who roamed at liberty wherever they liked. Instead of the heavy, exacting gold, he had now liberty’s light and sound money in his bag. And wasn’t this the kind of money he had always been looking for?

His partner, this competent businessman, had doubled his fortune. And that very moment Robert decided how he would use this great sum of money.

He thanked his countryman with all his heart, thanked him long and well, not only for his great help in increasing his money, but also for all the stories about the gold land he had listened to in the Grand Hotel when undisturbed by guests. What he had learned he would not forget.

So the two friends emptied their farewell Skol to the last drop; for the last time the Swedish toast was used in Fred’s Tavern.

Later, in the street outside the hotel, Fredrik Mattsson from Asarum, Sweden, waved a cheerful goodbye to Robert Nilsson from the same country, as he left the Grand Hotel in Grand City on the ox wagon, the wildcats in his bag.

You’re listening, but you haven’t heard Karl Oskar return; you don’t hear well — it’s I who ruined your hearing.

It’s been a long night for you — I’ve had much to tell, have tried not to forget anything of importance.

But now my story nears its end.

It was during your last winter in the ghost town that I came back to you. Since then I’ve left you only for short intervals. I’ve buzzed and throbbed and banged and hammered so intensely that you have been forced to listen to me. And you can say what you wish, but you can thank me for the fact that you began to ponder your lot in life. I’ve kept you awake at night and given you time to think in peace when all is silent.

And at last you have returned and can play the gold seeker who struck it rich! The sound, free money in your pouch hadn’t been touched when you returned. You had decided not to spend a single dollar of it, for you wanted to give all your riches to Karl Oskar and Kristina.

Thus your trip has not been in vain, my dear gold seeker. Your money will help your brother and sister-in-law. Who could deserve the money more? Who could use it better? Who could need it more? Your brother is still young, but he has poked so hard in the earth here that he already limps — even though he won’t admit it! When he has cleared one field he begins with another, and another, and so on. He loves it. But however big his fields he will never be satisfied. Yet he too, in the end, must be satisfied with a handful of earth — as much as the mouth of a dead man can hold.

And Kristina is not nearly as strong as your brother.

She is only thirty, yet soon she will become bent and broken on this claim if she doesn’t get help. She has five brats, and will have more, she has her big household to care for, all the livestock — constant chores inside and outside. She is like a ship at sail: never entirely still, always driven by some little gust of wind. You see how worn out she is in the evenings. You can be pleased that your money will help a little to ease her burden.

You’ve returned with riches to the home of Karl Oskar and Kristina. You’ve kept the promise you made them when you left four years ago. But it cost you mightily. You returned a whole life older. And your return was not what you had imagined when you left; you expected to return with your life unspent. But now you’ve learned what life is and what death is. You’ve experienced them both, and these two ought to be the title of the story that now draws to its close.

Dear Robert! You’ve been lying awake for long hours tonight. We won’t part, you and I. Don’t think so for a moment! You yet have one master left! But now I shall release a few great drops of comfort, a few drops to ease your pain, so that you will have a few hours’ rest. This much credit you must give your sick, buzzing ear: it has taught you to value sleep as the greatest gift the Creator has to offer. When fatigue and despair rob a person of life’s strength, it is restored with sleep.

Farewell now for the moment. Sleep well, gold seeker — you who never saw California!

XXIV. WILDCAT RICHES

— 1—

Karl Oskar had expected to return from Stillwater before nightfall on Friday, but at bedtime he was not yet back. Kristina put the children to bed while she herself stayed up and kept a fire going to keep supper warm for her husband.

As yet she wasn’t worried. Karl Oskar had been late on several occasions when returning from Stillwater or Taylors Falls. On the wretched, recently cleared forest roads so much could happen to delay a ramshackle ox cart, and their oxen were young and barely trained. Then it was so hot during the day with swarms of that summer plague, the mosquitoes. No one could get a moment’s peace in the forest because of these pests. She felt sorry for Karl Oskar, who must drive the team such a long way in this heat, when even well-trained animals sometimes bolted and took off because of the stinging critters.

A young ox might easily bolt in this weather, and then the driver might get hurt also. It comforted her that Karl Oskar wasn’t alone on this trip. Their neighbor, Algot Svensson, was a capable and reliable man.

Robert had gone to bed at his usual time. There was no need for him to stay up and wait for his brother. He was weak and sickly and needed his rest more than anyone else in the house.

A couple of long hours passed as Kristina waited. On the hearth stood the pot containing the corn porridge she had cooked for supper, which was beginning to smell burned. She must prepare something else for Karl Oskar, something she could make ready quickly. She found some eggs and poured water into a pot to boil them; she also cut a few thick slices of pork. Then she waited again.

It was close inside, so she went out and sat down on the oak bench near the kitchen door where it was cooler. The crickets squeaked and chirped in bushes and grass all around the house. She had become accustomed to this sound of the nights whistle pipes, but tonight she wished the screech-hoppers would keep quiet; their noise distracted her and prevented her from hearing the rumble of the ox cart down the road.

It was almost midnight before Kristina heard the sound she had been waiting for. She went back into the kitchen and blew fire into the dying embers; the food would be ready as soon as Karl Oskar had unyoked the oxen and stabled them. She heard no voices; their neighbor must have left below the meadow and taken a short cut to his home.

After a few moments she heard the familiar footsteps outside the door. Only a few minutes more and the eggs would be boiled and the pork fried. Karl Oskar came in.

She greeted him with the words that many times before had met him when he returned:

“You’re late. .”

He flung his hat unto its accustomed nail on the wall, drew in his breath, and said that on the way home they had hit a stump in the road, turned over the cart, and broken the axle. Algot Svensson had gone to the new homestead at Hay Lake and borrowed tools so they could cut a tree and put in a new axle. This had delayed them several hours. His cart wasn’t good enough for long trips.

She was just lifting the boiling pot off the fire and she turned around quickly; his voice sounded strange. He spoke with an effort, in short, stuttering words as she had never before heard him talk. What was the matter with him? The broken axle couldn’t have affected him that seriously.

He walked past her into the big room before she could see his face, and now she remembered his most important errand today. But she had not intended to ask him anything before he had eaten; hungry men needed food first of all.

Karl Oskar usually went directly to the table and sat down to eat when he came home hungry. Wonderingly, she went into the big room after him. He had lit a candle; his face was stern, his features frozen.

“What is it, Karl Oskar. .?”

His face was spotted, marked by his dirty fingers wiping off perspiration. He had driven his team a long way on a hot day and he had turned over, but he was not hurt. Why, then, wasn’t everything all right?

Kristina noticed that he held something in his hands. With a sudden, angry thrust he threw it away — flung it all the way into the fireplace corner toward the old spittoon she had just cleaned. It was a bundle of paper which fluttered in the air as it flew past her; around and inside the spittoon a heap of green bills lay strewn.

“We can throw those on the dunghill!”

“The money. .?”

“Wildcat money!”

“Paper money. .?”

“Useless! Money for wildcats!”

“Aren’t they real. .?”

“This money isn’t worth a shit! ‘Good for nothing’ they said at the bank!”

Karl Oskar sat down on a chair, heavily.

“ ‘These bills ain’t worth a plugged nickel!’ the man at the bank said!”

He tried to repeat what the man had said, the English words of the banker that still rang in his ears.

Today, he told her, when he had gone to the bank at Stillwater, one clerk after another had come to inspect the money. At last they had called out the head man of the bank and he had inspected the bills at length. It was he who had said: Wildcat money! Good for nothing!

The Indiana State Bank of Bloomfield, which had issued the money, had long ago gone broke. That was probably why its name hadn’t been on the list in the Swedish newspaper. Bills on that bank were no longer in circulation in this part of the country, the banker had said, only far out in the wild West. And he had added, that even there it must be Swedish immigrants and other newcomers who were cheated by that kind of money.

He had said he was sorry for Karl Oskar, and the clerks had said the same, but they couldn’t accept his money. They had advised him never to take bills unless he knew about the bank that issued them. And he had stood there like a fool when they handed the money back to him. He suspected the American bankers had had a good laugh behind his back, laughing at a trusting, ignorant Swedish settler.

He was seldom with business people and he had never heard of wildcat money; it was money issued by banks that lacked securities and were unable to redeem it.

Kristina was glued to the spot staring at the fireplace corner, which was covered with the bills. Only last night she had ironed out these bills and removed the spots from them.

She tried to understand; how could the bills be false? Anyone in Sweden making false money was arrested by the sheriff and put into prison. She asked: Were such swindlers allowed to be on the loose in America? Had the banks themselves the right to cheat people with useless bills?

Karl Oskar replied that as long as there was no order in currency anyone could start a bank and print bills. There was full freedom in this country. And wildcat money was a suitable name; the bankers who had printed these bills were of the same ilk as their namesake; they were robbers, as treacherous as the wild beasts lurking in the bushes, endangering their children.

Kristina sank down on a chair, her head filled with a throbbing confusion. Dazed and bewildered she tried to understand. Last Monday evening a fortune had come into their home. This was Friday — and here it was back in the house again. But now the money lay strewn like refuse in the spittoon in the corner.

It was a false fortune, wildcat riches.

She had forgotten the frying pan — an odor of burned pork came through the door from the kitchen. It had entirely gone out of her mind that she had been preparing supper for Karl Oskar.

But he smelled it.

“You’re burning the pork!”

He rushed to the kitchen and pulled the pan off the fire, then returned to her in the big room. He didn’t care enough about food to eat; he wasn’t hungry tonight. He started walking back and forth across the floor, he pounded his fists against his chest; it was as if he wanted to punish himself for his foolishness.

“I had made up my mind I wouldn’t let him fool me any more! I had my doubts all the time! But he won — he made a fool of me!”

“Do you think Robert meant to cheat you?”

“See for yourself! He tried! Look in the corner! His hellish lying! He’s unable to say a single word that’s true! Where do you think he has his gold? It’s inside his head — where no one can get to it!”

“I can’t believe Robert had some evil intent in mind when he gave us the money,” said Kristina firmly.

“You still think well of him?” exclaimed Karl Oskar in a hardening voice. “A liar can just as easily cheat! Don’t you know Robert by now?”

Kristina had just begun to know Robert. She had never thought of him as being evil or deceitful, and after her talk with him today under the sugar maples she knew better than before that he was not a bad person who wished to cheat them with false money. Even though he did lie he was not a cheater. He was not one who would want to skin anyone. On the contrary, he himself was trusting and easily cheated. She wondered if it wasn’t possible that Robert himself had been cheated by those bankers who had printed the bills.

“He must know they’re useless!” said Karl Oskar. “He must have tried to use the same kind of money himself! He must have found out the bills were useless and then decided they were good enough for us!”

“No! I don’t believe that of Robert!”

“He felt ashamed of returning empty-handed, of course!”

Karl Oskar looked toward the gable room.

“I’m going to call him — then you can hear what he has to say for himself!”

“It’s the middle of the night!” She took him by the arm. “He’s weak and ailing — leave him alone till tomorrow morning.”

“Well, as you say. .”

“You need to calm down too. .”

“But you can be sure I’ll have a talk with him in the morning!”

“Don’t do anything rash,” Kristina pleaded. “Robert might have an explanation for his wildcat money.”

“I’m sure he has! He can always dream up some lie. That’s easy for him!”

Karl Oskar walked back and forth, flailing his long arms; the movement of his body gave him some outlet for his anger. But Kristina sat crushed and silent until the corners of her mouth began to twitch.

“Is there anything one can trust here in America. .?”

“We mustn’t take this too hard, Kristina. .” He lowered his voice, changing his tone completely. Looking at his wife he could judge it was now time to talk differently.

“No — no more crying about this! We aren’t richer than before, but neither are we poorer. We haven’t lost anything! Not a single nickel! Nothing has changed for us.”

He could also have said that in one way he almost felt satisfied. He had been right when he refused to believe in easy riches in America. For five years he had struggled and been harassed by his lack of cash — and the first time he had gone to a bank to put in some cash he had been told it was worthless. It was as though justice today had been meted out between the settler who improved his lot through honest work and the good-for-nothing speculator, or whatever his name, who tried to get rich without work.

Kristina heard the words; as rich or as poor as before — no change. . But for her something had changed.

She had never for a moment doubted but that their fortune was real, and she had already speculated on what the big bills would bring them. During those days and nights since Robert’s return she had thought of how their life on the claim would change. Stimulated by the thought of riches she had already begun to live this new life. She had filled their naked rooms with new furniture, with new clothing for all of them, of better cut and fit than she could manage by her own sewing. She had traveled to visit her friend Ulrika in Stillwater on a new spring wagon pulled by horses; she had already engaged a maid to help in her chores — she had indeed found aid for her overwhelming fatigue. She had bought thousands of things for the house and her dear ones during this wonderful June week when for four days she was rich.

The time of wealth had lasted from Monday to Friday. And now? Through the open door came the everlasting complaint of the crickets squeaking like an ungreased wheel, that turned at dizzying speed out there in the grass.

This familiar sound of the summer night seemed at this moment a sound of derision: Monday night — but now it’s Friday! Where are your riches now, Kristina? In the spittoon? Have you so much money in this house that you spit on it? For four days, Kristina, you were rich, but it was not yours, it belonged to the wildcats — perhaps they are enjoying it now, tearing it to pieces in their lairs and holes! Tearing to pieces all the things you had counted on. For a wildcat is much stronger and smarter than you. You’re only a poor woman! Trusting Kristina! So sorry for you! But you have known all along that this wilderness is full of evil, lurking creatures.

Yes, for Kristina something had changed. It was true, all they had gained out here during five years remained. They had not lost anything. Yet she felt as if this night she had suddenly become terribly poor.

— 2—

Saturday morning Robert entered the kitchen as Kristina was busy starting the fire. His hair was ruffled and stood straight up, his cheeks were gray in the early morning light. He went over to the water bucket and took down the scoop from its nail on the wall. Just as he had finished drinking, Karl Oskar came in from his chores in the stable. He took his brother by the arm.

“Come, I want to show you something.”

They went into the big room, Kristina behind them. Now it would come — she had been lying awake during the night, anxiously worrying about the morning meeting of the two brothers.

Karl Oskar pointed to the fireplace corner with the bills spread over the spittoon; they lay where he had flung them last night on his return.

“Here! You can have your spending money back! It might be useful when you go to the privy!”

He spoke loudly, anger vibrating in his voice, but Robert did not seem to understand what he was driving at. He put his hand behind his healthy ear and turned it toward his brother to hear better.

“Keep your rubbish! Pick up the shit! I can get along without your useless money!”

Karl Oskar stood straight and strong and stern as he faced Robert. Now they had resumed the old order: Karl Oskar was again the big brother scolding his little brother.

But Kristina could not see that Robert showed anything but puzzled surprise.

“I don’t understand, Karl Oskar. .?”

He recognized his bills in the corner, all over the spittoon. Why were they there? Who had thrown them there? Wasn’t his brother going to put them in the bank at Stillwater yesterday?

“Are you crazy, Karl Oskar? Why do you throw away all that money?”

“Shithouse money! Not worth a plugged nickel! All of it isn’t worth one Swedish penny!”

“Not worth. .? No! You’re crazy. . Karl Oskar. . Impossible. .”

Robert insisted on his innocence, both in words and gestures he denied knowing what it was all about. His eyes, his open mouth — all insisted that he was honestly innocent:

“It isn’t true! I don’t believe a word of what you say!” “You still deny? You still persist in your lying, you. . you damned cheater!”

Karl Oskar seldom grew angry, but when anger overtook him it came fast and furiously. His hands shook, he closed and opened his fists, he rubbed one fist against the open palm of the other hand. But even his bodily motions were no longer sufficient outlet for him. His fury at Robert burst out violently as he shouted with all his strength, “You’re a hell of a liar! Why did I ever let you come with me to America! There isn’t a decent thought in your heart! Here you’ve poured lies on us all week long! But now at last it’s finished! Finished! Do you hear!”

Kristina stepped between the two brothers.

“Stop shouting, Karl Oskar! You and your brother can at least talk to each other like decent people!”

Several times Robert had tried to say something but each time he had been interrupted by coughing. At last, in a weak, hoarse voice, he managed, “I always thought the money was good. I remember, though, they call it wildcat money in English; that means free, sound money. And I told you the first evening. .”

“I knew it!” interrupted Karl Oskar. “I knew you knew it all along!”

He turned to Kristina.

“There, you hear? He knew the money was no good! Wildcat money! He did it purposely! He wanted to fool us. .”

But at this moment the little brother did not listen to the big brother’s accusations; he heard another voice that had spoken long ago: Have you heard of wildcats? They’re just as good as other bills, if they’re handled right. The wildcats are as good as gold — up there in Minnesota. .

Could it be that one Swede had cheated another Swede in America. .?

“Calm down now!” Kristina pleaded with Karl Oskar.

“He wants to get rid of his useless money with us!”

“I–I didn’t want to cheat anyone. . please, listen, Karl Oskar. .”

“Shut your damn trap!”

Karl Oskar was rubbing his right fist ever harder against the palm of his left hand; his features had hardened, his eyes had grown so small they looked as if they had receded into his head.

“You’re a hell of a brother! All my life I have to go and feel ashamed of you — my own brother! Ashamed. . ashamed!”

“But listen to me. . I didn’t think. . I didn’t know. .”

“Shut up, I said! If you don’t shut up, you damn liar, I’m going to shut your trap for you!”

It happened in a second. Karl Oskar’s right fist was raised against his brother. He hit him on the mouth.

Robert stumbled backward from the impact, against the wall; he almost fell, but the wall supported him.

“Have you become a wild beast yourself?” Kristina had grabbed hold of Karl Oskar’s right arm with both her hands; anger flamed up in her also and gave her strength. “Have you lost your mind? Watch yourself!”

“I’ll shut his trap for him. .!”

“Are you hitting your own brother? Sick and ailing as he is! Get hold of yourself, man!”

Karl Oskar tore himself free of her and stalked back to the corner.

“Attack an invalid!” Kristina’s lips were white with anger.

Leaning against the wall, Robert managed to stand upright, but his legs still shook under him. Just as his brother’s blow hit him he had been ready with his explanation: You must realize that I have been cheated first! I had never meant to cheat you, brother! I would never be low enough to cheat a brother!

But instead of his own voice all he heard now was the ear mocking him in a painful throbbing: What did you bring home? Useless money! How about your health and your life? No riches and no life! What is left for you?

From the kitchen the children had been listening to the commotion, and the two smallest boys were crying with fright. Kristina quickly closed the door. Karl Oskar remained in his corner, staring silently at the floor. He had not answered Kristina’s rebuke. His senses had returned, he stood with his head bent.

“Attacking a brother! Acting like a lunatic!”

Kristina approached Robert.

“Did he hurt you?”

“Not seriously. . It’s nothing. .”

His hand moved to his sore upper lip. His brother’s fist could not knock out teeth which he had lost far out West, in buffalo country.

His fingers moved slowly across his lips.

“Its nothing at all! I’m not even bleeding! The liar hasn’t even blood to give!”

“I want to talk with you calmly, Robert,” said Kristina. “Won’t you tell me the truth now. .”

“Dear Kristina — I didn’t want to fool you, I wasn’t trying to cheat anyone. .”

He turned to his older brother.

“I am not lying. . I didn’t know. . I had never tried to use the money. . I had saved it for you and Kristina. . I wanted to leave everything I owned to you and her. . And I expected you to come back from Stillwater and offer me your hand. .”

He stopped. He continued to himself: You did offer me your hand, brother. But it was a fist, hard, and struck my face. It hit instead of thanked. Such is our fate, brother. Our lot in life.

Karl Oskar had acted in a fit of anger. But now he had had time to control himself and knew that he had gone too far, that he had committed an outrage against his brother. He had given free rein to his anger, and in so doing he had also given his brother the upper hand.

“Forgive me, Robert,” he stammered.

“You had a right to hit me. It was my fault. I lived so long with that wildcat. . I was blind to him. .”

“I blew up,” said Karl Oskar. “Will you forgive me?” He had raised his head.

“I forgive you, of course. You’re already forgiven! You’re my only brother. . I should have asked you to forgive me. . But it’s too late now. . everything is too late. .”

Robert sounded submissive, as if he had earned the blow, as if it were a well-deserved punishment. His legs felt steadier now, and he walked slowly away toward the gable room.

Karl Oskar remained in his corner; the blow he had given his brother seemed to have dazed him instead.

Kristina was silent and reproached him no longer. When she heard him apologize to his brother she felt a strong compassion for her husband; anyone could make a mistake.

Robert had gone to his room. They stood and waited, silent, confused after the flare-up. He came out again, and now he had put on his boots, coat, and hat. He moved quickly and resolutely.

“Where are you going?” asked Kristina, surprised.

He did not reply to her — he turned to Karl Oskar.

“I’m off again. I don’t want you to feel ashamed of your brother. Goodbye! Forgive me the embarrassment I’ve caused you.”

“Take it easy, Robert! Wait a minute!” Kristina had grabbed hold of the back of his coat. “You can’t go off again! You aren’t well! You need care. .!”

“Goodbye, Kristina. You’ve always been kind to me. .”

He walked toward the door, passing the fireplace corner where the green-black bills lay scattered — wildcat money. As they caught his eye he stopped, as if a vision had appeared to him, revealing all, explaining all. He exclaimed, “As good as gold! No! As false as gold! Bills or gold, all money is equally false! ‘As good as gold!’ Ha, ha! As rotten, as deceitful, root of all evil! Dead weight! That’s what gold is! Now I can laugh at it all. . Ha, ha, ha!”

And as Robert hurried out the door he began to laugh, a high, piercing laugh, echoing through the house after him.

His laughter caught his brother and sister-in-law unawares; it frightened them as much as a sudden attack on their home with shot and shell. They were completely perplexed. And they made no attempt to stop him.

They stood and looked through the window after the fugitive, who was already some distance from the house. He walked along the edge of the field, down the slope, toward the lake; he crossed the narrow creek and continued westward.

He was headed for the forest. Soon he would be swallowed up by the pines and the thickets.

“Hurry after him!” Kristina urged her husband. “Hurry as fast as you can — don’t let him get away!”

Karl Oskar replied that he knew his brother. Better to leave him alone when he took off. Robert had always run away. He had fled many times in his life, but he had always come back. He was sure to return this time too.

Robert’s tall, narrow body disappeared among the pines, whose trunks were gilded by the early morning sun. He walked with hurried steps until he vanished from their sight.

XXV. A STREAM THAT RUNS TOWARD GREATER WATERS

— 1—

Robert walked without any definite course, around thickets, avoiding holes and swamps, choosing the easiest path. He detoured, walking sideways, between tree trunks, around boulders and hills, across glades and clearings. He walked without knowing where he was going, cut through the forest without a goal.

It was a sizzling hot day. The bark of the forest pines exuded a scorched odor. Tinder-dry branches cracked underfoot. No one had ever cut or removed fallen and dead trees from this wild forest: they stood where their roots held them, rotting down aboveground. Their dry boles had darkened in the bark and stood there covered with gray peelings; the dead trees appeared to be covered with dust and ashes, buried standing up after their death.

In forest openings he waded through tall, coarse grass which crackled against his knees. And wherever he walked, mosquitoes in great clouds kept him company. One thick swarm circled his head and followed him faithfully in all his turns and detours, stinging him angrily, whizzing, buzzing their eternal hum. They were like wild beasts thirsting for his blood.

When his legs grew tired, he sat down on the ground on a soft spot. But he took only short rests; soon he rose again and walked on; the pursuer inside his head forced him to keep moving on. He must stay on the move, must get away. He must keep walking for as long as he found ground under his feet.

His master kept him awake when he wanted to sleep, awakened him if he nodded, got him to his feet when he sat down to rest. His ear ached terribly. This morning again there had been a big red spot on the pillow.

He wandered about in the forest as the day passed. A dry branch knocked off his hat; he left it behind. The swarm of buzzing mosquitoes followed him on his wandering. He walked with a singing wreath of mosquitoes in his hair, he carried a crown of bloodsucking insects on his forehead. He wandered through the forest crowned like a king, crowned by a cloud of stinging, plaguing mosquitoes, and in the center of the cloud was the aching ear.

In the afternoon the skies grew overcast; with the sun hidden the air cooled off, and toward evening it began to rain. Soft drops wet his skin, they fell more heavily, and at last drove away the mosquito wreath around his head, and its monotonous song died away. It was a relief to be rid of this crown of bloodthirsty insects.

With dusk the rain increased. The drops no longer caressed his skin, they were sharp, whip-like. Wet grass and leaves soaked his skin, his pants clung to his legs, water splashed in his boots. For a while he looked for shelter. Then he crept into a thicket of mountain ash. He tore leaves from the lush foliage and spread them on the ground. He would make a bed; he covered himself with a branch and stretched out on the leaves. He lay hidden by the foliage, and the thicket was hidden by darkness.

Night fell with urgency over the forest. Here there were animals, and his good ear registered the night sounds of living creatures, sneaking, creeping, hissing, wings fluttering. A few times he heard persistent calls, perhaps Indians, perhaps birds. But his left ear heard only the usual sound, accompanied by pain.

He picked up a few wet leaves and tried to press them into his ear. They felt soft and cool, seemed to relieve the ache for a moment. He went to sleep but woke up immediately. His pursuer had awakened him. He pushed fresh leaves into his ear. Then he went to sleep again.

His night in the thicket passed in a continuous sleeping and wakening, and during both he heard his pursuer’s voice: I’m with you wherever you go! I’m inside your head and you can’t get away from me! You can run away from other masters but not from me!

At daybreak a clear summer morning dawned over the wild forest. The clouds opened their portals for heaven’s sun, which shone into even the densest thickets. He rose from his bed of leaves, a few of them revealed red spots where his head had been against them. He was struck by the old saying that leaves spotted red when a bird coughed. When he tried to move, he felt as if he had heavy weights on his limbs. He trembled and shuddered; this warm morning he felt cold inside.

He walked on, slower now, his steps unsteady, unsure. The oppressive heat returned, and the swarm of mosquitoes with it. Again he became a king with a mosquito crown; but the bloodsucking creatures ruled over him.

He felt thirsty and began to look for water. His stomach was empty but he felt no hunger.

His ear hummed and throbbed and drove him on. He must get away, he must flee to some place where he would be unreachable. Only the unreachable one could enjoy peace and rest. He did not recognize this part of the forest, did not know what time of day it was. In his pocket he carried Arvid’s watch, but it had stopped three years ago and had not been wound since.

Snails in great numbers had come out after last nights rain, enlivening the ground with their beautiful houses — blue, yellow, red, and brown — striped in all colors. But the rain had already been sucked up by the earth, the holes and creeks were empty. He must quench his thirst, he kept looking. In a clearing he found some wild strawberries and picked and ate them. They tasted to him of summer at home in Sweden, when children removed their stockings and shoes and ran barefoot, but they did not relieve his thirst.

Suddenly he realized where he was; above him rose the green brow of the Indian, the sand-cliff king, crowned with a stunted growth of greenery. The dethroned ruler of the forest looked out over his lost kingdom. His face was petrified in sorrow, his eyes so deep they appeared bottomless. But proudly the Indian turned his brown-yellow forehead to the east and called to the intruders who swarmed over the valley like bloodthirsty beasts: Fill this deep valley with gold! We do not accept your gold for the graves of our fathers!

Gold! A great mocking laughter filled his ear, it echoed through the forest, it echoed through the whole world. A farm hand had started out for California to dig gold. He peeled potatoes, dug cellar-holes, cut wood, fed mules, washed dishes. And in between he dreamed a dream that had nothing to do with the yellow gold, and that was the true dream, the dream of running water. But now he was confused by words he recollected, scenes he had witnessed, songs he had partly heard: Oh the good time has come at last — the best time in California is over — they’re digging like hell for gold — Corn and pudding and tapioca pie — Hi and ho and off we go! — and a heart torn from a carcass of ribs, and a decaying horse-leg kicking futilely against the heavens with a silvery shoe. .

For some time he followed a winding deer path, until he came to a bog with a narrow water hole in the center. But this was stagnant water and he dared not drink it. In that hole lay fevers and ills and the poison of lurking death. One careless swallow of that water, and death would enter his body. Stagnant waters spoiled quickly and no one could trust them.

Drinking water must be running water. The dream-water must be in motion, pouring forth, purling and swirling in freedom; it must flow free as the river that ran to the sea.

We will be free, we will be free,

As the wind of the earth and the waves of the sea.

He walked around the bog without attempting to drink, his feet sinking deep in the mud. He left clear tracks behind him. Indians never left any tracks when they passed through the forest. An Indian’s foot moved lightly and quickly as a wing above the earth. Now he was back at the place where his boot tracks indicated he had been earlier.

He thought now and then that he had run away again. As soon as no one was looking he ran away to the woods and hid. This he had done ever since he was a small child. But this time no one had hung a bell around his neck. This time no one would find him. He would remain unreachable.

He saw a great body of water shining blue among the pines: he was back at Ki-Chi-Saga. Many people had lately come to this lake, cutting the trees, timbering their houses. But in this particular spot the shoreline still lay wild and untouched as far as he could see. He walked slowly along the shore, looked down into the water which clearly reflected the skies above him. He could see the reeds growing upside down, stretching their heads toward an open sky which undulated at the bottom. He could see two skies, two heavens, the one above him and the one below in the water, and between them lay the earth on which he himself wandered about, lost.

Striking fins made circling ripples among the boulders; near the shore the lake bubbled with fish. If he had a fishing pole he would immediately have a bite. And if he could make a fire and if he had a pan. . For a moment he thought about the taste of good, fried fish; but he felt no real hunger.

On a flat stone in the sand lay a fish, washed up by the waves; it had a big head with two horns, a long narrow tail. Its whiskers told him it was a catfish. But its skin was white, perhaps it had been lying here dead, in loneliness, drying for a long time in the sun. He picked up the fish by the gills and held it to his nose; it smelled disgusting, making him want to vomit. It had already spoiled. With a jerk he threw the fish away, far out into the lake.

His feeling of hunger entirely disappeared as soon as he smelled the fish. But his burning thirst remained. His tongue felt dry and thick and squeezed. His ear throbbed and ached. He walked along under the tall pines near the shore, it was cool in their shade; under them the water lay black as tar. In several places he found fish skeletons, gnawed clean by animals; and in the sand were the round tracks of fox paws.

Weariness came over him, dulling his senses. The pursuer hammered and buzzed, hurting. It felt as if something had swelled up in there and wanted to get out; it knocked and thundered and pounded on the closed door: Open! Open! I want to get free!

But he moved on, wandering about in circles, in wide arches. No bell around his neck tinkled and disclosed his path as he searched for a place where he would be Un-get-at-able.

— 2—

It was late afternoon but the sun was still above the tree crowns when he reached a small stream that wound its way among the thickets. The stream had shrunk in the summer heat, and clean-washed boulders rose from its bottom, but the water purling around them was crystal-clear, and the thick bushes and trees had helped to keep it cool.

He threw himself headlong on the ground and dipped his face in the stream. The water ran into his wide-open mouth — he swallowed, he panted, he drank. It gurgled in his throat. He drank for a long time. When he had quenched his thirst he sat down to rest near the stream, water still dripping from his chin. The foliage formed a thick mantle over this brook. Close to him an elder bush spread its branches over the water.

He gave in to his weariness and sank down. He remained still as the ground itself, as he watched the running stream. His mind cleared.

Once before he had sat here. He had seen this narrow stream swell with the spring rains: it was that day on which he had first set out in the world, on his way to his first job as farm hand. But he did not wish to have any masters, and to escape from service he had thrown his coat in the water and pretended he had drowned in the brook. That had been his first attempt to become free and un-get-at-able.

Now he was back. He recognized the place, it was well known to him. Before his eyes he saw every detail: the smooth, shiny stones at the bottom, the lush vegetation on the banks, and the fresh, purling water with its bubbles glittering like water-lily pads. Everything he saw was the same. He had been here before; beside this little stream — so free in its course — he had rested during the last hour before he became a servant.

He had come back to the mill brook.

He took off his boots and socks and dangled his bare feet in the stream; he had always done this here when he was a young boy. The water purled and bubbled between his burning toes. It cooled his legs mercifully. It felt so good.

This water never stayed in the same place. It never had time to grow stagnant and rotten. The foam-pearls whirled on their way and he followed them with his eyes. The brook threw itself over obstacles, twisted hurriedly past bushes and roots, cut a course with its own strength. It was headed for the sea and when it reached the great body of water its way lay clear across the world. Then this little stream would mingle with the great billows that carried the ships on their broad shoulders, lifting them up toward the heavens, and lowering them again into the ocean’s deep valleys. On the ships grew masts, the tall pines that held the sails. With great white wings the ships flew across the ocean to the New World. The farm hands who had felled and cleaned the masts were not allowed to go with the ships on their journey; they must stay behind in their dark rooms, peering out through dirty windows, chained to their service and their masters.

But two farm hands had accompanied the tall pines from their homeland across the great sea. And one of them had returned from his long journey.

He sat dangling his bare feet in the cool water as he had done so many times before in this brook. He had strayed far before he reached home. He had roamed widely, he had been in the train of the hundred thousand, led by the Pillar of Gold, and he had almost perished in that evil place of sand and stone and thirst. He had lived years in a ghost town, full of rat cadavers and desolate sites where people once had had homes. He had not thought he would ever return again, he had not imagined he could return. But at last he had found his way home. He recognized everything. Here he had rested the day he set out into the world. Now he had come home.

He needn’t walk any farther, and that was good, as tired as he was. He hadn’t rested well for a long time. But here he could rest — he was at home.

What time of day was it? He had no watch — except the one that had stopped three years ago. He would have liked to know what time it was when he returned.

He lifted his feet from the water and stretched out full length on the ground beneath the wide elder tree. It was good to be home, to rest here at the brook and watch through the foliage how it hurried on its way. And here he could go to sleep and dream again the water-dream, the good dream.

— 3—

Once he woke up and lay and listened, greatly surprised. His ear was silent, it didn’t buzz any more. His left ear did not ache, did not buzz, did not throb. It gave no sound at all.

He lay quite still and listened intently, but could hear nothing. The world had grown completely silent. Then his left ear must be well. He felt no pain. And he felt released and refreshed and deeply satisfied. His torturing companion had disappeared. His pursuer had at last deserted his head and left him in peace. He was rid of his last master. He needn’t run away any more. He was unreachable, un-get-at-able, he was free.

He noticed it was evening, the day was over. He could just lie here and go to sleep again. Now that his ear was silent perhaps he could sleep the whole night through. He no longer had a master who would call him at a certain hour. And a drowsiness that was good and irresistible soon closed his eyes, pulled his lids shut.

All was silent in the world. His ear did not awaken him.

Close by the gold seeker’s still body the stream in its course hurried on its way to mingle with greater waters.

— 4—

A search party found his tracks near the bog, and from there on they followed them to the edge of the brook where he lay under the foliage. They thought he must have been dead for two days when they found him.

Karl Oskar Nilsson made the coffin for his brother. He was buried one evening on the out-jutting point at Lake Ki-Chi-Saga, where the Swedish settlement had chosen and consecrated their cemetery. Karl Oskar put an oak cross on the grave, and carved in the wood his brother’s name, with the usual dates, and a line from a psalm he remembered:

Here Rests

AXEL ROBERT NILSSON

Born in Ljuder, Sweden, 1833

Died in Minnesota, North America, 1855

Let me have a Pleasing Rest

His was the first grave to be dug in the cemetery on the point. Robert Nilsson was the first of the Swedes in the St. Croix Valley to be buried under the silver maples.