"Now I wonder if my cleverness in bringing this fellow here has happened to overshoot the mark! Leif is eager to get renown; suppose he takes it into his head to make this voyage himself?"
Alwin sank his voice to a whisper: "The idea came to me as soon as he called Grettir to him. But it was not your doing. Now the saying is proved true that 'things that are fated take place.' Do you remember the prophecy,—that when I stand on that ground I shall stand there by the side of Leif Ericsson?"
CHAPTER XX
ALWIN'S BANE
Much goes worse than is expected.
Ha'vama'l
The light of the short day had faded, but the wind had not gone down with the sun. Powdery snow choked the air in a blinding storm. One could not distinguish a house, though it were within a foot of his eyes.
"If I do not come to the gate before long," Alwin observed to the shaggy little Norwegian pony along whose neck he was bending, "I shall believe that the fences have been snowed under."
He had been sent out to find another of Biorn's sailors who chanced to be visiting in the neighborhood, to invite him to come to Brattahlid and tell what else he might know concerning his chiefs voyage,—a subject in which Leif had become strangely interested. Alwin had accomplished his errand, and was returning half-frozen and with a ravenous appetite that made him doubly impatient over their slow progress.
"If we do not get there before long," he repeated to the pony, with a dig into his flanks, "I shall get afraid that the drifts have covered the houses also, and that we are already riding over the roofs without knowing it."