He was chucked into an empty cow-house, and the door was shut behind him.
There he stood and had nothing to look at but an old billy-goat through a crack in the door, who had odd, yellow eyes, and was very much like the old fellow, and a sunbeam through a little hole, which sunbeam crept higher and higher up the blank stable wall till late in the evening, when it went out altogether.
But towards night a voice outside said softly, "Swain! swain!" and in the moonlight he saw a shadow cross the little hole.
"Hist! hist! the old man is sleeping at the other side of the wall," it sounded.
He knew by the voice that it was she, the golden-red one, who had behaved so prettily and been so bashful the moment he had come upon the scene.
"Thou need'st but say that thou dost know that serpent-eye has had a lover before, or they wouldn't be in such a hurry to get her off their hands with a dowry. Thou must know that the homestead westwards in the Blue Mountains is mine. And answer the old man that it was me, Brandi, that thou didst run after all the time. Hist! hist! here comes the old man," she whispered, and whisked away.
But a shadow again fell across the little hole in the moonlight, and the duck-necked one stuck her head in and peeped at him.
"Swain, swain, art thou awake?"
"That serpent-eye will make thee the laughingstock of the neighbourhood. She's spiteful, and she stings. But the homestead westward in the Blue Mountains is mine, and when I play there the gates beneath the high mountains fly open, and through them lies the road to the nameless powers of nature. Do but say that 'twas me, Randi, thou wert running after, because she plays so prettily on the Langelijk.--"Hist, hist! the old man is stirring about by the wall!"--she beckoned to him and was gone.
A little afterwards nearly every bit of the hole was darkened, and he recognised the Black one by her voice.