“You hare, Yake?” he said, in his quiet and unmoved way.  “I’m glad.  Your house bane burn up in fire?”

I told him the startling news, and as the story of poor Rowena slowly made its way into his mind, I was startled and astonished at its effect on him; for he has always been to me a man who would be calm in a tornado, and who would meet shipwreck or earthquake without a tremor.  I have seen him standing in his place in the ranks with his comrades falling all about loading and firing his musket, with no more change in his expression than a cold light of battle in his mild buttermilk eyes.  I have seen him wipe from his face the blood of a fellow-soldier spattered on him by a fragment of shell, as if it had been a splash of water from a puddle.  But now, he trembled.  He turned pale.  He raged up and down the little room with his hands doubled into fists and beating the air.  He bit down upon his Norwegian words with clenched teeth.  I was afraid to talk to him at last.  Finally, he turned to me and said: 

“Ay know de man!  So it vas in de ol’ country!  Rich fallar bane t’inking poor girl notting but like fresh fruit for him to eat; a cup of vine for him to drink; an’ he drink it!  He eat de fruit.  But dis bane different country.  Ay keel dis damned Gowdy!  You hare, Yake?  Ay keel him!”

Of course I told him that this would never do, and talked the way we all do when it is our duty to keep a friend from ruining himself.  He sat down while I was talking, and as far as I could see heard never a word of what I said.  Finally I talked myself out, and still he sat there as silent as a statue.

“Ay—­tank—­Ay—­take—­a—­valk,” he said at last, in the jerky way of the Norwegian; and he went out into the night.

I lay back expecting that he would come in pretty soon, when I had more of which I had thought to talk to him about; but I went to sleep, and having been a good deal broken of my rest, I slept late.  He was still absent when I woke up.  When I got to my place, the widow told me that he had been there and had a long talk with Rowena, and had hitched up his team and driven away.

Rowena was asleep when I looked in, and I went out to plow.  If Magnus had gone to kill Buck Gowdy, there was nothing I could do to prevent it.  As a matter of fact, I approved of his impulse.  I had felt it myself, though not with any such wrathful bitterness.  I had known for a long time that Magnus had a tenderness toward Rowena; but he was such a gentle fellow, and seemed to be so slow in approaching her, with his fooling with Surajah’s inventions and the like, that I set down his feeling as a sort of sheepish drawing toward her which never would amount to anything.  But now I saw that his rage against Gowdy was of the kind that overpowered him, stolid as he had always seemed.  It rose above mine in proportion to the passion he must have felt for her, when she was a girl that a man could take for a wife.  I pitied him; and I did not envy Buck Gowdy, if it chanced that they should come together while Magnus’s white-hot anger was burning; but I rather hoped they would meet.  I did not believe that in any just court Magnus would be punished if he supplied the lack in the law.