Once somebody asked him to go to a doctor, but then Gaupa guffawed in mocking merriment.
Alas, there was small comfort in Lynx Hut now. No Bjönn came to place his head on his knees while he was stitching shoes, no Bjönn met him with tail waving in the open door when he had been out and came home, no Bjönn shared his bed under the sheepskin covering in the night. When he woke up at night he caught himself listening for the dog’s breath, for Bjönn used to breathe so heavily, so humanly. Gaupa remembered so well.
When he was seventy years old he was converted. After that time the poor old soul would often sit in one of the foremost desks in the schoolhouse, piously listening to what Hans Uppermeadow, the “high priest,” had to announce. He would sit there in his simple blue-striped celluloid collar without a tie. That was the only Sunday best he possessed, and no one knew when last it was washed.
Somehow revivalism did not quite submerge him, for he could not help thinking of other things while the preacher up there threatened his audience with hell and sulphur. It might, for instance, occur to him that the moustache of that fellow was the very spit of the other’s whiskers, and in a bound Gaupa’s thoughts were far from the schoolroom and its close atmosphere. No, he could not get the real hang of the revivalist business, and before he entered upon his seventy-second year he gave it up and became a worldling once more.
Only he ceased to swear, and when religious people were with him he might be heard to talk of how quietly time passed down here. Sometimes he would even sigh audibly.
Poor old Gaupa! He was in earnest right enough. He was no Pharisee. Yet his conscience was never quite easy; he was not regularly “saved,” and when his heart started beating out of time he would feel as timid as a hare!
One day he was at Rust helping with some wood-cutting. He went to feed the horses in the evening, and remained in the stable so long that Halstein began to wonder and went in.
There lay Gaupa senseless after a blow from the young black mare. There was a hole in his skull, and Halstein saw the brain matter pulsating.
It was a strange thing, but Gaupa recovered. He was in bed at Rust for a long time, but as soon as he could walk to his own hut he demanded it, and after six months he was very much as before.
One day about Easter time the sheriff, who lived some two miles to the south, saw Gaupa hatless coming across his yard with a long knife in his hand. He wondered a little, and in a moment the maid came rushing into his office and begged him to go out into the kitchen, for Gaupa must have lost his wits.