"Wait a minute!" she said, when Jan was at the door. "If you're going out into the woods to-night, then I want to go with you."
She feared Jan would raise objections, but he didn't; he remained at the door till she was ready. Though apparently anxious to be off, he seemed more controlled and rational than he had been all day.
And what a night to venture out into! The cold came against them like a rain of piercing and cutting glass-splinters. Their skins smarted and they felt as if their noses were being torn from their faces; their fingertips ached and their toes were as if they had been cut off; they hardly knew they had any toes.
Jan uttered no word of complaint, neither did Katrina; they just tramped on and on. Jan turned in on the winter-road across the heights, the one they had traversed with Glory Goldie one Christmas morning when she was so little she had to be carried.
There was a clear sky and in the west gleamed a pale crescent moon, so that the night was far from pitch dark. Still it was difficult to keep to the road because everything was so white with snow; time after time they wandered too close to the edge and sank deep into a drift. Nevertheless, they managed to make their way clear to the huge stone that had once been hurled by a giant at Svartsjö church. Jan had already got past it when Katrina, who was a little way behind him, gave a shriek.
"Jan!" she cried out. And Jan had not heard her sound so frightened since the day Lars threatened to take their home away from them. "Can't you see there's some one sitting here?"
Jan turned and went back to Katrina. And now the two of them came near taking to their heels; for, sure enough, propped against the stone and almost covered with rim frost sat a giant troll, with a bristly beard and a beak-like nose!
The troll, or whatever it was, sat quite motionless. It had become so paralyzed from the cold that it had not been able to get back to its cave, or wherever else it kept itself nowadays.
"Think that there really are such creatures after all!" said Katrina. "I should never have believed it, for all I've heard so much about them."
Jan was the first to recover his senses and to see what it was they had come upon.