CHAPTER XXII

DRIVEN AWAY

Andy stood up hurriedly.

‘Get together everything we have and put it in the knapsack! Hurry as if there were a fire!’ he panted, still gasping for breath.

‘What in the world, boy!’ said Maglena. Her eyes darkened with fear and her lips trembled. But quickly and carefully she packed into the knapsack everything that she had taken out to make it homelike under the tree.

‘Do we have to go away from here, anyway?’ she whispered, and looked about her terrified.

‘Yes, right away,’ said Andy, in a hoarse, muffled voice. Swiftly he bound fast the robes, knapsack, and wood for his carving on the sled. Silently, with clenched teeth, he took the rope over his shoulder again and set out through the right door.

Maglena followed, pushing the sled. She could not look back into the fine cozy cottage where she had felt that at last she had a home, the first since they had left the little gray house. Golden Horn followed, of course, close at their heels, like a dog.

‘Take the cat, Magnus,’ said Andy curtly. ‘They expect to get her, too, as well as us.’

A heavy, bitter spirit weighed him down. It was hard walking, since the sun had softened the crust and the snow was like water, so Andy sought banks, knolls, and gutters, where the earth was practically bare, and where too the sled left almost no tracks.

‘It is the man from the Wicked Farm, you know, that is after us,’ he said at length when they had gone so far that not a glimpse could be seen of the tall, thick-branched fir where they had lived.

Maglena had known the whole time that they were fleeing from these people. She shuddered so that she shook when she thought of the night in the shed in the moonlight when they heard Golden Horn’s awful bleating, and saw her lying there as if dead.

Not until they had come so far that they had another village in sight did the fugitives dare rest. They had no longer the strength to plod through the soft, uneven snow slush.

Magnus was so tired he cried. He had dropped the cat long ago. With tail straight in the air, and mewing, she followed the children as long as possible, but when she came upon the hole of a field mouse under a stump, she stopped. They knew she was so hungry she had to stop. How would they dare to go to the village for food themselves?

‘We’ll have to drink milk awhile,’ said Maglena. ‘I have two or three pieces of bread in the knapsack. Before we go to people----’

‘If we could only get down to the river and across to the other side where you see that big village, we’d be away from this direction,’ brooded Andy.

‘There is water on the ice in the river, but I suppose we can find some place to get over on good ice,’ said Maglena eagerly.

‘Poor Golden Horn,’ said she and petted the goat. ‘It’s hard for you out here in the wilderness. But before we go over the river we’ll find some little birch grove or little willows so you can get something to eat.’

Golden Horn did not complain. She did not like the villages either. So she tripped lightly before them up a winding path that led from the edge of the village to the river. Andy guided the sled. Here on the shady bank there was still sound ice.

Magnus sat on the sled contentedly, and Maglena ran behind so fast that her shoes flew like drumsticks.

Planks had been thrown out on the ice and now floated in the slush over the black ice near the shore. But Andy stopped. They had come to a pretty grove of juniper bushes and Golden Horn must have her dinner.

It was well protected and hidden here under the steep bank. Here Andy could tell them about the dangers he had helped them escape.

Now they heard how he had run and jumped between the tree-trunks happy in the thought of coming home to the ‘cottage’ with food. He had gone far past the clearing, but guided himself by the sun so that he had gone away from where the Wicked Farm was.

He had been much pleased when he had heard voices. There were some woodcutters talking loudly between the trees. They were having fun over something, Andy heard as he hurried toward them.

But then he heard, ‘I’ll teach them that and more too. The boy that tripped me up will get all he can stand.’ It was the Finnish farmhand from the Wicked Farm speaking.

The other had laughed at the youngsters who had dared oppose grown folk. Andy had scarcely had time to crouch down behind a pile of branches and brush, from which he could see the men, before the cross-eyed Finn turned directly toward where he had crept down.

‘They’re somewhere in these woods,’ he laughed evilly. ‘It isn’t hard to see that because there is blood from the goat a couple of places on the road, where the tracks of the sled went in on the clearing where the crust still bore this morning.’

‘In this weather they can’t get far with a heavy sled and a goat that must still have trouble walking,’ the other man had answered, he too with an evil laugh.

‘The goat got as much as he could stand, I guess,’ grinned the Finn.

And then both of them had laughed so hard that the little birds had become frightened and flown away.

‘Knife, the gray dog at the farm, is just as ill-natured and bad-tempered as the people there,’ grinned the Finn again. ‘He’ll hunt out those youngsters all right, and bite their legs before they have time to open their mouths.’

‘And you lay there and listened?’ whispered Maglena, eyes wide with terror. She stood and held down a branch of swelling buds for Golden Horn.

‘I couldn’t move. The Finn stood there and stared right at the brush-pile where I was as if he suspected something. I didn’t dare breathe even because I thought he saw me when I hid there.’

‘Boy, that you didn’t die of fright!’

‘You don’t die like that,’ thought Magnus. He still sat on the sled with his legs drawn up, so exhausted that he was scarcely able to follow Andy’s story of the dangers they had escaped. ‘If I didn’t die when the cat came on the ice with fire in her eyes and her tail like smoke so that I thought it was ghosts, then no one else will die either.’

With this assurance, Magnus sank back into apathy.

‘Yes, I was scared,’ admitted Andy. ‘I wondered what would happen to you and Golden Horn, and what would become of me if the men that stood there grinning so wickedly had seen me.

‘“They can’t be far away,” said the Finn, and took a couple of steps toward my brush-pile. “Maybe they’re hiding here, ’cause I thought I just saw something move behind this brush.”

‘He picked up a stone and threw it into the pile so that it nearly took my head off.’

‘And you didn’t scream or move?’ Maglena’s voice was thick with fright.

‘No, ’cause that would have been the end of both you and me and Golden Horn. But the Finn climbed on a couple steps more.’

‘Boy, I can’t bear to hear it!’

‘But then, you know, there came a whole lot of little lemmings[14] along the ground, black and gold and those that look like a long rag carpet, that flew around his feet. He stepped on them to kill them and jumped high in the air, he was so mad, and then he looked away from me.’

[14] Lemmings are a sort of Arctic wandering mice.

‘That’s queer. They came as if sent. We haven’t seen any mountain lemmings yet, since we have been in the woods,’ mused Maglena. ‘Mother sent them, that’s what I believe. But then you ran?’

‘No-o. I couldn’t. The Finn went back to the other man, and now he said that I had _stolen_ the watch and the robe from grandfather.’

‘_You stole--took without leave!_’

Maglena let go the branch. Her eyes burned black with indignation.

‘Ye-e-s, he said that.’

Andy’s face was sad and miserable. ‘It hurt me like something sharp, you see.’

‘Well, then I am ashamed to go out where there are people. “Stole,” just like Jan Ers Karl that stole from a store-keeper and was put in jail in town.’

Maglena’s lips began to tremble, the tears came in a rush.

‘Girl, you ought to know that I wouldn’t do that!’

‘But it is awful that any one has even said so. Mother would have died if she’d heard it.’

‘I guess mother can see what is right where she is now, so I don’t worry about that. I’m more worried about grandfather, at the Wicked Farm.’

‘Why?’

‘Yes, you know, Maglena, that the Finn said that when Brita came in to grandfather in the morning to make a fire, he had had a stroke.’

‘So he could not tell them that he had _given_ you the watch and robe.’

‘The poor thing had had a stroke and couldn’t move out of his bed,’ repeated Andy patiently. ‘Father and mother and the little boys had come rushing down to the grandfather. They had seen that the watch and robe were gone. Grandfather had been able to say that I had got them from him. The men aped what he said. They stuttered like grandfather. “The b-b-boy h-has the w-watch and the r-robe. G-Grels sh-sh-shan’t h-have them.”’

‘Grandfather was a nice man, and good. But I suppose they were mad at him?’

‘They were that. The mother had shaken him and said he _must_ take out the watch, and Grels had been so mad he had cried and said all sorts of things to grandfather.’

‘Oh, and there he was alone. No one to turn to,’ said Maglena with the tenderest sympathy in her voice.

‘Yes, he found Some One to turn to, because, you see, he died last night.’

‘Then he is just as well off as mother,’ said Maglena, relieved.

‘But Grels wants the watch and the mistress the robe.’

‘And the Finn wants to beat you,’ continued Maglena, who looked up the bank shudderingly. ‘But we ought to get away from here.’

‘They weren’t going to start to hunt us until this afternoon after they came home with the wood. But then Grels and the other children were going to be along. And Knife was going to track us.’

‘Boy, we must get over the river right away. The dog will lose the scent when we go over the water and drag the planks after us.’

They worked hurriedly over the sled. Maglena suddenly stopped her work of binding fast the knapsack.

She seized Andy’s arm.

‘Boy! Do you hear? Now they are after us, anyway, both the Firm and the children and Knife. Listen, they are almost here! They’ll come down the bank--now they are behind that cliff----’

Andy stood as stiff as a statue. He, too, heard plainly angry yelps that came rapidly nearer through the bushes that bordered the bank. Behind a steep wall that shot out from the bank urgent cries were heard in boys’ and men’s voices.

Now the branches just beside them rustled and cracked. Maglena and Magnus, who had just dragged himself up, threw themselves forward screaming, on the sled.

Andy held Golden Horn behind him by one horn.

He stood still with a bitter, utterly discouraged expression on his face.

The children--Golden Horn--Again he remembered that it was he himself who had led them into this danger, this wickedness that now threatened.