truded his chapped raw knuckles. He halted
to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly.

A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an abandoned stable. A
man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal along the railroad.

She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these independent
citizens, who had been taught that they belonged to a democracy, would
resent her trying to play Lady Bountiful.

She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village industries--the
railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator,
oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery
with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone
hut labeled "Danger--Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard,
where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as
he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small
planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of
circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie Flour and Milling
Company, Lyman Cass president. Its windows were blanketed with
flour-dust, but it was the most stirring spot in town. Workmen were
wheeling barrels of flour into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of
wheat in a bobsled argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the
mill boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race.

The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug houses. She
wished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to the
caste of professional-man's-wife.

She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack,
at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plush
cap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident,
his foxy mustache was picaresque. He stood erect, his hands in his
side-pockets, his pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six,
perhaps.

"How do, Mrs. Kennicott," he drawled.

She recalled him--the town handyman, who had repaired their furnace at
the beginning of winter.

"Oh, how do you do," she fluttered.

"My name 's Bjornstam. 'The Red Swede' they call me. Remember? Always
thought I'd kind of like to say howdy to you again."

"Ye--yes----I've been exploring the outskirts of town."

"Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheran
minister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder,
we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than