"Oh, I'm just marking myself," he replied, laughing gloomily. "When this scratch grows out--"
He stopped.
"What then?"
"Oh, I'll be away from here then," he said.
But I had the impression that he meant to say something different, so I probed further.
"Let me look. Well, it's not a deep scratch; you won't be here long then, will you?"
"Nails grow slowly," he muttered.
Then he strolled away whistling, and I set about chopping wood.
A little later Solem returned across the farmyard with a cackling hen under his arm. He went to the kitchen window and called:
"This the kind of hen you want me to kill?"