slender woman--barely visible against the dark hillside--wearing an
old-fashioned derby hat and a long riding-skirt. She sat lightly in
the saddle, with her chin high, and seemed to be looking into the
distance. As she passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air
and shied. She struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an angry
exclamation, "_Blazne!_" in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let
him out into a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high
land, where they moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the
band of faint color that lingered in the west. This horse and rider,
with their free, rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things to
be seen on the face of the flat country. They seemed, in the last
sad light of evening, not to be there accidentally, but as an
inevitable detail of the landscape.

Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving speck
against the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed the
hill. When he reached the gate the front of the house was dark, but
a light was shining from the side windows. The pigs were squealing
in the hog corral, and Nils could see a tall boy, who carried two
big wooden buckets, moving about among them. Half way between the
barn and the house, the windmill wheezed lazily. Following the path
that ran around to the back porch, Nils stopped to look through the
screen door into the lamp-lit kitchen. The kitchen was the largest
room in the house; Nils remembered that his older brothers used to
give dances there when he was a boy. Beside the stove stood a little
girl with two light yellow braids and a broad, flushed face, peering
anxiously into a frying-pan. In the dining-room beyond, a large,
broad-shouldered woman was moving about the table. She walked with
an active, springy step. Her face was heavy and florid, almost
without wrinkles, and her hair was black at seventy. Nils felt proud
of her as he watched her deliberate activity; never a momentary
hesitation, or a movement that did not tell. He waited until she
came out into the kitchen and, brushing the child aside, took her
place at the stove. Then he tapped on the screen door and entered.

"It's nobody but Nils, Mother. I expect you weren't looking for me."

Mrs. Ericson turned away from the stove and stood staring at him.
"Bring the lamp, Hilda, and let me look."

Nils laughed and unslung his valise. "What's the matter, Mother?
Don't you know me?"

Mrs. Ericson put down the l