All that afternoon was one hurrying spell; Sivert had never seen such a furious piece of work; he was not accustomed to see things done at that pace.  They hardly gave themselves time to eat.  But the water was flowing already!  Here and there they had to dig deeper, a culvert had to be raised or lowered, but it flowed.  The three men were at it till late that night, touching up their work, and keenly on the look out for any fault.  But when the water began to trickle out over the driest spots, there was joy and delight at Sellanraa.  “I forgot to bring my watch,” said Geissler.  “What’s the time, I wonder?  Ay, she’ll be green by this time tomorrow!” said he.

Sivert got up in the middle of the night to see how things were going, and found his father out already on the same errand.  Oh, but it was a thrilling time—­a day of great events!

But next day, Geissler stayed in bed till nearly noon, worn out now that the fit had passed.  He did not trouble to go up and look at the boat on the lake; and but for what he had said the day before, he would never have bothered to look at the sawmill.  Even the irrigation works interested him less than at first—­and when he saw that neither field nor meadow had turned green in the course of the night, he lost heart, never thinking of how the water flowed, and flowed all the time, and spread out farther and farther over the ground.  He backed down a little, and said now:  “It may take time—­you won’t see any change perhaps before tomorrow again.  But it’ll be all right, never fear.”

Later in the day Brede Olsen came lounging in; he had brought some samples of rock he wanted Geissler to see.  “And something out of the common, this time, to my mind,” said Brede.

Geissler would not look at the things.  “That the way you manage a farm,” he asked scornfully, “pottering about up in the hills looking for a fortune?”

Brede apparently did not fancy being taken to task now by his former chief; he answered sharply, without any form of respect, treating the ex-Lensmand as an equal:  “If you think I care what you say ...”

“You’ve no more sense than you had before,” said Geissler.  “Fooling away your time.”

“What about yourself?” said Brede.  “What about you, I’d like to know?  You’ve got a mine of your own up here, and what have you done with it?  Huh!  Lies there doing nothing.  Ay, you’re the sort to have a mine, aren’t you?  He he!”

“Get out of this,” said Geissler.  And Brede did not stay long, but shouldered his load of samples and went down to his own menage, without saying good-bye.

Geissler sat down and began to look over some papers with a thoughtful air.  He seemed to have caught a touch of the fever himself, and wanted now to look over that business of the copper mine, the contract, the analyses.  It was fine ore, almost pure copper; he must do something with it, and not let everything slide.