h forehead, large nostrils, and
pale-blue eyes, set far apart. Olaf's features were rudimentary: the
thing one noticed was the face itself, wide and flat and pale,
devoid of any expression, betraying his fifty years as little as it
betrayed anything else, and powerful by reason of its very
stolidness. When Olaf shook hands with Nils he looked at him from
under his light eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could ever say
what that pale look might mean. The one thing he had always felt in
Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding stickiness of wet
loam against the plow. He had always found Olaf the most difficult
of his brothers.

"How do you do, Nils? Expect to stay with us long?"

"Oh, I may stay forever," Nils answered gaily. "I like this country
better than I used to."

"There's been some work put into it since you left," Olaf remarked.

"Exactly. I think it's about ready to live in now--and I'm about
ready to settle down." Nils saw his brother lower his big head.
("Exactly like a bull," he thought.) "Mother's been persuading me to
slow down now, and go in for farming," he went on lightly.

Olaf made a deep sound in his throat. "Farming ain't learned in a
day," he brought out, still looking at the ground.

"Oh, I know! But I pick things up quickly." Nils had not meant to
antagonize his brother, and he did not know now why he was doing it.
"Of course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to make a big success,
as you fellows have done. But then, I'm not ambitious. I won't want
much. A little land, and some cattle, maybe."

Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down. He wanted to ask
Nils what he had been doing all these years, that he didn't have a
business somewhere he couldn't afford to leave; why he hadn't more
pride than to come back with only a little sole-leather trunk to
show for himself, and to present himself as the only failure in the
family. He did not ask one of these questions, but he made them all
felt distinctly.

"Humph!" Nils thought. "No wonder the man never talks, when he can
butt his ideas into you like that without ever saying a word. I
suppose he uses that kind of smokeless powder on his wife all the
time. But I guess she has her innings." He chuckled, and Olaf looked
up. "Never mind me, Olaf. I laugh without knowing why, like little
Eric. He's another cheerful dog."

"Eric," said Olaf slowly, "is a spoiled kid. He's just let his
mother's best cow go dry because he don't milk