BOOK III
Chapter I
Once more a deep valley, with sun-steeped farms on the hillsides between the river and the mountain-range behind.
One day about midsummer it was old Raastad himself that came down to meet the train, driving a spring-cart, with a waggon following behind. Was he expecting visitors? the people at the station asked him. “Maybe I am,” said old Raastad, stroking his heavy beard, and he limped about looking to his horses. Was it the folk who had taken the Court-house? “Ay, it’s likely them,” said the old man.
The train came in, and a pale man, with grey hair and beard, and blue spectacles, stepped out, and he had a wife and three children with him. “Paul Raastad?” inquired the stranger. “Ay, that’s me,” said the old man. The stranger looked up at the great mountains to the north, rising dizzily into the sky. “The air ought to be good here,” said he. “Ay, the air’s good enough, by all accounts,” said Raastad, and began loading up the carts.
They drove off up the hill road. The man and his wife sat in the spring-cart, the woman with a child in her lap, but a boy and a girl were seated on the load in the baggage-waggon behind Raastad. “Can we see the farm from here?” asked the woman, turning her head. “There,” said the old man, pointing. And looking, they saw a big farmstead high up on a sunny hill-slope, close under the crest, and near by a long low house with a steep slate roof, the sort of place where the district officers used to live in old days. “Is that the house we are to live in?” she asked again. “Ay, that’s it, right enough,” said old Raastad, and chirruped to his horses.
The woman looked long at the farm and sighed. So this was to be their new home. They were to live here, far from all their friends. And would it give him back his health, after all the doctors’ medicines had failed?
A Lapland dog met them at the gate and barked at them; a couple of pigs came down the road, stopped and studied the new arrivals with profound attention, then wheeled suddenly and galloped off among the houses.
The farmer’s wife herself was waiting outside the Court-house, a tall wrinkled woman with a black cap on her head. “Welcome,” she said, offering a rough and bony hand.