"But if he should manage to, after all?"
Half smiling she looked at him with her dark eyes. "Then he'll get left," she said, "in the evening, when he wants to dance with his master's daughter." Then Hauke had nodded to her with spirit.
Now the young men who still hoped to be taken into the game stood shivering and stamping outside the parish inn and looked up at the top of the stone church tower which stood beside the tavern. The pastor's pigeons which during the summer found their food on the fields of the village were just returning from the farmyards and barns of the peasants, where they had pecked their grain, and were disappearing into their nests underneath the shingles of the tower. In the west, over the sea, there was a glowing sunset.
"We'll have good weather to-morrow," said one of the young fellows, and began to wander up and down excitedly; "but cold--cold." Another man, when he saw no more pigeons flying, walked into the house and stood listening beside the door of the room in which a lively babble was now sounding. The second man of the dikemaster, too, had stepped up beside him. "Listen, Hauke," he said to the latter; "now they are making all this noise about you." And clearly one could hear from inside Ole Peters's grating voice: "Underlings and boys don't belong here!"
"Come," whispered the other man and tried to pull Hauke by his sleeve to the door of the room, "here you can learn how high they value you."
But Hauke tore himself away and went to the front of the house again: "They haven't barred us out so that we should hear," he called back.
Before the house stood the third of the applicants. "I'm afraid there's a hitch in this business for me," he called to Hauke; "I'm barely eighteen years old; if they only won't ask for my birth certificate! Your head man, Hauke, will get you out of your fix, all right!"
"Yes, out!" growled Hauke and kicked a stone across the road; "but not in!"
The noise in the room was growing louder; then gradually there was calm. Those outside could again hear the gentle northeast wind that broke against the point of the church steeple. The man who listened joined them. "Whom did they take in there?" asked the eighteen-year-old one.
"Him!" said the other, and pointed to Hauke; "Ole Peters wanted to make him out as a boy; but the others shouted against it.--'And his father has cattle and land,' said Jess Hansen.--'Yes, land,' cried Ole Peters, 'land that one can cart away on thirteen wheelbarrows!' Last came Ole Hensen: 'Keep still!' he cried; 'I'll make things clear: tell me, who is the first man in the village?'--Then all kept mum and seemed to be thinking. Then a voice said: 'I should say it was the dikemaster!'--'And who is the dikemaster?' cried Ole Hensen again; 'but now think twice!'--Then somebody began to laugh quietly, and then someone else too, and so on till there was nothing but loud laughter in the room.--'Well, then call him,' said Ole Hensen; 'you don't want to keep the dikemaster out in the cold!'--I believe they're still laughing; but Ole Peters's voice could not be heard any more!" Thus the young fellow ended his account.