“Where have you stuck your knapsack, Smålander?” asked the general.
“I have no knapsack, but I can feed myself for five days on nothing.”
Lena pressed forward between him and the general’s dark-brown horse.
“He, Johannes here, is no serving-boy, but we have a place of our own up in the woods.”
“As to the marriage I should like to see the certificate in black and white,” answered Mons Bock, and the hot color rose and fell on her forehead as he spoke.
Then Lena held out in her two hands the torn-off coat-tail and let him see that it fitted to the leather coat.
“I call that a parson’s certificate on real sheepskin,” he broke out. “The recruit money may therefore be yours, my good young lady, but the boy has clean perjured himself. And now, ye worthy yeomen of Småland, forward in Jesus’ name! Drums we have none, but we can still in our poverty stamp with wooden shoes the old Swedish march that it makes me warm at heart to hear.”
Staves and wooden shoes banged and clattered on rocks and ledges. Even the riders had wooden shoes tied fast to their feet, so that they tried in vain to use their stirrups.
When the last farmers had vanished across the heath, Lena went on to the mill. She dared not relate that Johannes had gone along to the war, but only told of how she had met him in the woods, exhibiting the coat-tail, which was carefully inspected and turned over.
“That’s the right coat-tail, sure enough,” said Kerstin Bure, “and though I don’t like to see women in my service, you may as well stay with me till Johannes comes. I really need a pair of strong arms, for I am well on in years and all my men have been bitten with madness and have run off with Stenbock. There is hardly an able-bodied man left in the parish, except the sexton, the idiot!”