The room became too sultry for him, and he took his cloak to go out into the storm and let his mood blow away. Attracted against his will by the light of a lantern in the provision store, he steered his steps thither. As the fishing with drifting nets had been remunerative, the store had a lively patronage, and hidden by darkness he could come close to the talking fishermen without being seen.
"And so the assistant swiped the girl from him," said old Oman; "and so she got a real man instead of that one...."
"Yes, he is not as a human being should be," threw in the unmarried Vestman, "for to-day he wrote as good as hundreds of letters for the mail. And what he is boiling in there and is busy with, no mortal can tell, but I think, what I think! And we must have our eyes open, for such ones as lock themselves in and boil, we know them."
"Oh, the devil!" the married Vestman followed with. "Let him brew his drop himself; it cannot turn out worse with him than old Soderlund, who mashed out on the rocks and lost his still! This here I think we won't meddle with."
"Yes, if it is only that," replied Oman, "then let him go on with it, but see I never can forget that he would have taken the net from me that time, and if I catch him by the fin, I don't let him slip until I have him in the cauf...."
"Yes, a wicked man is he who has no God!" ended the colporteur. "That is sure!"
Without having the slightest trace of an illusion in regard to their thankfulness, the commissioner could not help feeling an uneasiness at being surrounded in the desert by downright enemies and the most dangerous of the dangerous, who believed that they saw in him an idiot or a criminal. They believed that he was distilling gin to save twenty cents on a gallon! They suspected him of mixing poisons for them. If any misfortunes happened here, he would be blamed for it. And if they used their unlawful nets, he would not dare to seize them without himself dreading a more or less scandalous charge, or something worse than that—their revenge.
It was a dangerous company, dangerous to life as stupidity. And although he knew that at any moment he would he could gain all of them for his friends, if he treated them to a gallon of gin and stayed with them himself and helped drink it, he never thought to do this for one moment. Their enmity kept him free; their friendship would have dragged him down into their filth. Their hate could only act as an annunciator for his power, but their affections would have neutralized it, even if their spirits never could enter into contact with his. And the very danger had its pleasure, because it kept his spirit awake and elastic, gave him something to counteract, for exercise. Besides the danger out here among these savages was not less than that in the upper circles, which he had lately left, and where the power to do real harm was greater. Had not the surgeon on board the corvette regarded him as sick, when he spoke of the necessity of finding a method to utilize the enormous quantity of nitrous oxide, which was wasted in the manufacture of commercial sulphuric acid, while at the same time the expensive saltpeter is imported from Chile to compensate for the soil's losses of nitrogen. Or when he projected something about utilizing the smoke from the chimneys for technical purposes, had not this friend advised him to take a sojourn at a watering place and reside among human beings.
Rather stay in absolute solitude and pass for an idiot among redskins than be condemned to a civil death by equals with authority and decision without appeal.
After he had wandered a moment in the darkness, he returned to his cottage and lighted the candles and lamps in his two rooms and opened the doors onto the porch, whereby he lessened the impression of being locked in.