She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate host than the Red Swede.

He had but one room:  bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs—­one constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank—­and a row of books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on “The Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle.”

There was but one picture—­a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed village in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens with golden hair.

Bjornstam did not fuss over her.  He suggested, “Might throw open your coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove.”  He tossed his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair, and droned on: 

“Yeh, I’m probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by doing odd jobs, and that’s more ’n these polite cusses like the clerks in the banks do.  When I’m rude to some slob, it may be partly because I don’t know better (and God knows I’m not no authority on trick forks and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it’s because I mean something.  I’m about the only man in Johnson County that remembers the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being supposed to have the right to ’life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’

“I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street.  He looks at me like he wants me to remember he’s a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars, and he says, ‘Uh, Bjornquist——­’

“‘Bjornstam’s my name, Ezra,’ I says.  He knows my name, all rightee.

“‘Well, whatever your name is,’ he says, ’I understand you have a gasoline saw.  I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple for me,’ he says.

“‘So you like my looks, eh?’ I says, kind of innocent.

“’What difference does that make?  Want you to saw that wood before Saturday,’ he says, real sharp.  Common workman going and getting fresh with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down fur coat!

“‘Here’s the difference it makes,’ I says, just to devil him.  ’How do you know I like your looks?’ Maybe he didn’t look sore!  ‘Nope,’ I says, thinking it all over, ’I don’t like your application for a loan.  Take it to another bank, only there ain’t any,’ I says, and I walks off on him.

“Sure.  Probably I was surly—­and foolish.  But I figured there had to be one man in town independent enough to sass the banker!”

He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a proletarian philosophy.