“Child?” groans Brede, under the weight.  Oh, ’tis a strange procession; but Axel lets himself be carried all the way till he’s set down at his own door.

Brede puffs and blows, mightily out of breath.

“Ay, or how—­was it ever born, after all?” asks Oline.

Axel cuts in quickly with a word to Brede:  “I don’t know how I’d ever have got home this night but for you.”  And he does not forget Oline:  “And you, Oline, that was the first to find me.  I’ve to thank you both for it all.”

That was how Axel was saved....

* * * * *

The next few days Oline would talk of nothing but the great event; Axel was hard put to it to keep her within bounds.  Oline can point out the very spot where she was standing in the room when an angel of the Lord called her out to the door to hear a cry for help—­Axel goes back to his work in the woods, and when he has felled enough, begins carting it up to the sawmill at Sellanraa.

Good, regular winter work, as long as it lasts; carting up rough timber and bringing back sawn planks.  The great thing is to hurry and get through with it before the new year, when the frost sets in in earnest, and the saw cannot work.  Things are going on nicely, everything as well as could be wished.  If Sivert happens to come up from the village with an empty sledge, he stops and takes a stick of timber on the way, to help his neighbour.  And the pair of them talk over things together, and each is glad of a talk with the other.

“What’s the news down village?” asks Axel.

“Why, nothing much,” says Sivert.  “There’s a new man coming to take up land, so they say.”

A new man—­nothing in that; ’twas only Sivert’s way of putting it.  New men came now every year or so, to take up land; there were five new holdings now below Breidablik.  Higher up, things went more slowly, for all that the soil was richer that way.  The one who had ventured farthest was Isak, when he settled down at Sellanraa; he was the boldest and the wisest of them all.  Later, Axel Stroem had come—­and now there was a new man besides.  The new man was to have a big patch of arable land and forest down below Maaneland—­there was land enough.

“Heard what sort of a man it is?” asked Axel.

“Nay,” said Sivert.  “But he’s bringing up houses all ready made, to fix up in no time.”

“Ho!  A rich man, then?”

“Ay, seems like.  And a wife and three children with him; and horse and cattle.”

“Why, then, ’twill be a rich man enough.  Any more about him?”

“No.  He’s three-and-thirty.”

“And what’s his name?”

“Aron, they say.  Calls his place Storborg.”

“Storborg?  H’m.  ’Tis no little place, then.” [Footnote:  “Stor” = great]

“He’s come up from the coast.  Had a fishery there, so they say.”

“H’m—­fishery.  Wonder if he knows much about farming?” says Axel.  “That all you heard?  Nothing more?”