"Fine! Fine! Fine!" cried Gerda joyously when she heard of it. "Pack your bundle, Erik, for you are going with us, too."
While their clothes, and all the little keepsakes of the trip, were being hurried into the satchels, Gerda's tongue flew fast with excitement, and her feet flew to keep it company.
"What do you suppose Karen will say, when she sees us bringing her brother over the rocks?" she ran to ask Birger in one room, and then ran to ask her father in another.
At nine o'clock the injured man was moved into the train, the children took their last look at the mining town, and then began their return over the most northerly railroad in the world, back through the swamps and forests, across the Polcirkel, and out of Lapland.
Luleå was reached at last and Josef Klasson was transported from the train to the steamer, "Just as if he were a load of iron ore from the mines," Birger declared.
"Not quite so bad as that," said his father, and took the twins to see the great hydraulic lift that takes up a car loaded with ore, as easily as a mother lifts her baby, and dumps the whole load into the hold of a vessel.
The children were so full of interest in all the new life around them that Josef Klasson almost forgot his pain in telling them about his winter in the lumber camp, and the long dark night, when for over a month there was not even a glimpse of the sun, and no light except that of the moon and the frosty stars.
It seemed but a very short time before Gerda was crying, "I can see the
Sea-gull Light, and Karen is out on the rocks."
Then came all the excitement of landing. The twins told Karen about finding her brother, and the reindeer, and the midnight sun, and the logs in the river, all in one breath; while Lieutenant Ekman explained Josef's accident to the lighthouse keeper and his wife, who had both hurried down to the wharf to find out the meaning of the return of the government boat.
Then, after Josef had been welcomed with loving sorrow because of his injury, and they had carried him up to the house and made him comfortable, Gerda told about her desire to take Karen home with her.