"Good-bye, Gertrude!" he said in a choking voice. "And remember what I tell you. You will never join the h.e.l.lgumists!"

"What do you intend to do, Ingmar?" asked the girl, for she was beginning to feel uneasy.

"Good-bye, Gertrude, and think of what I have said!" Ingmar shouted back, for by that time he was halfway down the gravel walk.

Then he went on his way. "If I were only as wise as my father!" he mused. "But what can I do? I'm about to lose all that is dearest to me, and I see no way of preventing it." There was one thing, however, of which Ingmar was certain: if all this misery was to be forced upon him, h.e.l.lgum should not escape with his skin.

He went down to Strong Ingmar's but in the hope of meeting the preacher. When he got to the door, he caught the sound of loud and angry voices. There seemed to be a number of visitors inside, so he turned back at once. As he walked away he heard a man say in angry tones: "We are three brothers who have come a long way to call you to account, John h.e.l.lgum, for what has befallen our younger brother. Two years ago he went over to America, where he joined your community. The other day we received a letter telling us that he had gone out of his mind, brooding over your teaching."

Then Ingmar hurried away. Apparently there were others besides himself who had cause for complaint against h.e.l.lgum, and they were all of them equally helpless.

He went down to the sawmill, which had already been set going by Strong Ingmar. Above the buzzing noise of the saws and the roar of the rapids he heard a shriek; but he paid no special heed to it.

He had no thought for anything save his strong hatred of h.e.l.lgum.

He was going over in his mind all that this man had robbed him of: Gertrude and Karin, his home and his business.

Again he seemed to hear a cry. It occurred to him that possibly a quarrel had arisen between h.e.l.lgum and the strangers. "There would be no harm done if they were to beat the life out of him," he thought.

Then he heard a loud shout for help. Ingmar dropped his work and went rushing up the hill. The nearer he approached the hut the plainer he heard h.e.l.lgum's cries of distress, and when he finally reached the cabin it seemed as if the very earth around it shook from the scuffling and struggling inside.

He cautiously opened the door and tiptoed in. Over against the wall stood h.e.l.lgum defending himself with an axe. The three strangers-- all of them big, powerful men--were attacking him with clubs.

They carried no guns, so it was evident that they had come simply to give h.e.l.lgum a sound thrashing. But because he had put up a good fight, they were so enraged that they went at him with intent to kill. They hardly noticed Ingmar; they regarded him as nothing but a lank gawk of a boy who had just happened in.

For a moment Ingmar stood quietly looking on. To him it was like a dream, wherein the thing one desires most suddenly appears without one's knowing whence or how it came about. Now and again h.e.l.lgum cried for help.

"Surely you can't think I'm such a fool as to help you!" Ingmar said in his mind.

Suddenly one of the men dealt h.e.l.lgum a terrific blow on the head that made him let go his hold on the axe and fall to the floor.

Then the others threw down their clubs, drew their knives, and cast themselves upon him. Instantly a thought flashed across Ingmar's mind. There was an old saying about the folk of his family, to the effect that every one of them was destined at some time or other during his lifetime to commit a dastardly and wrong deed. Was it his turn now, he wondered?

All at once one of the a.s.sailants felt himself in the grip of a pair of strong arms that lifted him off his feet and threw him bodily out of the house; the second one had hardly time to think of rising before the same thing happened to him; and the third, who had managed to scramble to his feet, got a blow that sent him headlong after the others.

After Ingmar had thrown them all out, he went and stood in the doorway. "Don't you want to come back?" he challenged laughingly.

He would not have minded their attacking him; testing his strength was good sport.

The three brothers seemed quite ready to renew the fight, when one of them shouted that they had better take to their heels he had seen a figure coming along the path behind the elms. They were furiously disappointed at not having finished h.e.l.lgum, and, as they turned to go, one of them ran back, pounced upon Ingmar, and stabbed him in the neck.

"That's for meddling with our affair!" he shouted.

Ingmar sank down, and the man ran off, with a taunting laugh.

A few minutes later Karin came along and found Ingmar sitting on the doorstep with a wound in his neck, and inside she discovered h.e.l.lgum, who by that time had got to his feet again and was now leaning against the wall, axe in hand and his face covered with blood. Karin had not seen the fleeing men; she supposed that Ingmar was the one who had attacked h.e.l.lgum and wounded him. She was so horrified that her knees shook. "No, no!" she thought, "it can't be possible that any one in our family is a murderer." Then she recalled the story of her mother. "That accounts for it," she muttered, and hurried past Ingmar over to h.e.l.lgum.

"Ingmar first!" cried h.e.l.lgum.

"The murderer should not be helped before his victim," said Karin.

"Ingmar first! Ingmar first!" h.e.l.lgum kept shouting. He was so excited that he raised his axe against her. "He has fought the would-be murderers and saved my life!" he said.

When Karin finally understood, and turned to help Ingmar, he was gone. She saw him stagger across the yard, and ran after him, calling, "Ingmar! Ingmar!"

Ingmar went on without even turning his head. But she soon caught up with him. Placing her hand on his arm, she said:

"Stop, Ingmar, and let me bind up your wound!"

He shook off her hand and went ahead like a blind man, following neither road nor bypath. The blood from his open wound trickled down underneath his clothes into one of his shoes. With every step that he made, blood was pressed out of the shoe, leaving a red track on the ground.

Karin followed him, wringing her hands. "Stop, Ingmar, stop!"

she implored. "Where are you going? Stop, I say!"

Ingmar wandered on, straight into the wood, where there was no one to succor him. Karin kept her eyes fixed on his shoe, which was oozing blood. Every second the footprints were becoming redder and redder.

"He's going into the forest to lie down and bleed to death!"

thought Karin. "G.o.d bless you, Ingmar, for helping h.e.l.lgum!" she said gently. "It took a man's courage to do that, and a man's strength, too!"

Ingmar tramped straight ahead, paying no heed whatever to his sister. Then Karin ran past him and planted herself in his way. He stepped aside without so much as glancing at her. "Go and help h.e.l.lgum!" he muttered.

"Let me explain, Ingmar! Halvor and I were very sorry for what we said to you this morning, and I was just on' my way to h.e.l.lgum to let him know that, whichever way it turned out, you were to keep the sawmill."

"Now you can give it to h.e.l.lgum," was Ingmar's answer. He walked on, stumbling over stones and tree stumps.

Karin kept close behind, trying her best to conciliate him. "Can't you forgive me for my mistake of a moment in thinking you had fought with h.e.l.lgum? I could hardly have thought differently."

"You were very ready to believe your own brother a murderer,"

Ingmar retorted, without giving her a look. He still walked on.

When the gra.s.s blades he had trampled down came up again, blood dripped from them. It was only after Karin had noticed the peculiar way in which Ingmar had spoken h.e.l.lgum's name, that she began to realize how he hated the preacher. At the same time she saw what a big thing he had done.

"Every one will be singing your praises for what you did to-day, Ingmar; it will be known far and wide," she said. "You don't want to die and miss all the honours, do you?"

Ingmar laughed scornfully. Then he turned toward her a face that was pale and haggard. "Why don't you go home, Karin?" he said. "I know well enough whom you would prefer to help." His steps became more and more uncertain, and now, where he had walked, there was a continuous streak of blood on the ground.

Karin was about beside herself at the sight of all this blood. The great love which she had always felt or Ingmar kindled with new ardour. Now she was proud of her brother, and thought him a stout branch of the good old family tree.

"Oh, Ingmar!" she cried, "you'll have to answer before G.o.d and your fellowmen if you go on spilling your life's blood in this way. You know, if there is anything I can do to make you want to live, you have only to speak."

Ingmar halted, and put his arm around the stem of a tree to hold himself up. Then, with a cynical laugh, he said: "Perhaps you'll send h.e.l.lgum back to America?"

Karin stood looking down at the pool of blood that was forming around Ingmar's left foot, pondering over the thing her brother wanted her to do. Could it be that he expected her to leave the beautiful Garden of Paradise where she had lived all winter, and go back to the wretched world of sin she had come out of?

Ingmar turned round squarely; his face was waxen, the skin across his temples was tightly drawn, and his nose was like that of a dead person; but his under lip protruded with a determination that he had never before shown, and the set look about the mouth was sharply defined. It was not likely that he would modify his demand.

"I don't think that h.e.l.lgum and I can live in the same parish," he said, "but it's plain enough that I must make way for him."

"No," cried Karin quickly, "if you will only let me care for you, so that your life may be spared to us, I promise you that I will see that h.e.l.lgum goes away. G.o.d will surely find us another shepherd," thought Karin, "but for the time being it seems best to let Ingmar have his way."

After she had staunched the wound, she helped Ingmar home and put him to bed. He was not badly wounded. All he needed was to rest quietly for a few days. He lay abed in a room upstairs, and Karin tended him and watched over him like a baby.

The first day Ingmar was delirious, and lived over all that had happened to him in the morning. Karin soon discovered that h.e.l.lgum and the sawmill were not the only things that had caused him anxiety. By evening his mind was clear and tranquil; then Karin said to him: "There is some one who wishes to speak to you."

Ingmar replied that he felt too tired to talk to any one.