“It was Herman,” she panted. “He bit Peter until the blood ran. I only went out on the roof to see who was crying.”
In this way both Peter and Hedvig escaped a hair pulling and that was exactly what they had hoped for.
But Herman got a double dose and went home with bitterness in his heart.
Not until the other children were in their beds was Tord missed. It was not at all unusual for him to be lost like that. They looked for him in the usual places: the empty dog kennel, the wood shed, the hollow oak by the stable. But without success. At last Hedvig remembered that he had been with them on the roof and there they found him huddled up on the cold tiles, leaning against the box with the wonderful mosquito larvæ, and wet with dew. He was sleeping with his dirty little thumb in his mouth.
Soon everything was silent in the big house. And one of the frosty “iron” nights of June fell with its devastation upon the neglected garden and fields of Selambshof.
III
THE DANCE OF THE CROW INDIANS
It was a fine warm summer afternoon, when the mosquito swarms hovered like high pillars of smoke in the avenue of Selambshof.
But in the garden on the north side of the house Oskar Selamb was sitting in his usual seat. He was sitting just where the mosses of the walls hung most heavily over the grey stone base and where the damp shade beneath the old elm tree seemed full of evil memories. His big straw hat was pushed far back on his head and his purple trembling hands were clasped round the handle of his walking stick. His beard grew like a weed round his weak half open mouth, and he stared in front of him with a lifeless, taciturn gloom that had little human left in it.
A friend of former days would scarcely have recognized him.