o quarrel with me and come between me and Olaf,
but I don't give her the chance. I suppose you'll be bringing a wife
home some day."

"I don't know. I've never thought much about it."

"Well, perhaps it's best as it is," suggested Mrs. Ericson hopefully.
"You'd never be contented tied down to the land. There was roving blood
in your father's family, and it's come out in you. I expect your own
way of life suits you best." Mrs. Ericson had dropped into a blandly
agreeable tone which Nils well remembered. It seemed to amuse him a
good deal and his white teeth flashed behind his pipe. His mother's
strategies had always diverted him, even when he was a boy--they were so
flimsy and patent, so illy proportioned to her vigor and force. "They've
been waiting to see which way I'd jump," he reflected. He felt that Mrs.
Ericson was pondering his case deeply as she sat clicking her needles.

"I don't suppose you've ever got used to steady work," she went on
presently. "Men ain't apt to if they roam around too long. It's a pity
you didn't come back the year after the World's Fair. Your father picked
up a good bit of land cheap then, in the hard times, and I expect maybe
he'd have give you a farm, it's too bad you put off comin' back so long,
for I always thought he meant to do something by you."

Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe. "I'd have missed a lot
if I had come back then. But I'm sorry I didn't get back to see father."

"Well, I suppose we have to miss things at one end or the other. Perhaps
you are as well satisfied with your own doings, now, as you'd have been
with a farm," said Mrs. Ericson reassuringly.

"Land's a good thing to have," Nils commented, as he lit another match
and sheltered it with his hand.

His mother looked sharply at his face until the match burned out. "Only
when you stay on it!" she hastened to say.

Eric came round the house by the path just then, and Nils rose, with a
yawn. "Mother, if you don't mind, Eric and I will take a little tramp
before bedtime. It will make me sleep."

"Very well; only don't stay long. I'll sit up and wait for you. I like
to lock up myself."

Nils put his hand on Eric's shoulder, and the two tramped down the hill
and across the sand creek into the dusty highroad beyond. Neither spoke.
They swung along at an even gait, Nils puffing at his pipe. There was no
moon, and the white road and the wide fields lay faint in the starlight.
Over everything was dark