II
The next morning Nils woke with the first flood of light that came with dawn. The white-plastered walls of his room reflected the glare that shone through the thin window shades, and he found it impossible to sleep. He dressed hurriedly and slipped down the hall and up the back stairs to the half-story room which he used to share with his little brother. Eric, in a skimpy nightshirt, was sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes, his pale yellow hair standing up in tufts all over his head. When he saw Nils, he murmured something confusedly and hustled his long legs into his trousers. “I didn't expect you'd be up so early, Nils,” he said, as his head emerged from his blue shirt.
“Oh, you thought I was a dude, did you?” Nils gave him a playful tap which bent the tall boy up like a clasp knife. “See here: I must teach you to box.” Nils thrust his hands into his pockets and walked about. “You haven't changed things much up here. Got most of my old traps, haven't you?”
He took down a bent, withered piece of sapling that hung over the dresser. “If this isn't the stick Lou Sandberg killed himself with!”
The boy looked up from his shoe-lacing.
“Yes; you never used to let me play with that. Just how did he do it, Nils? You were with father when he found Lou, weren't you?”
“Yes. Father was going off to preach somewhere, and, as we drove along, Lou's place looked sort of forlorn, and we thought we'd stop and cheer him up. When we found him father said he'd been dead a couple days. He'd tied a piece of binding twine round his neck, made a noose in each end, fixed the nooses over the ends of a bent stick, and let the stick spring straight; strangled himself.”
“What made him kill himself such a silly way?”
The simplicity of the boy's question set Nils laughing. He clapped little Eric on the shoulder. “What made him such a silly as to kill himself at all, I should say!”
“Oh, well! But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and died on him, didn't they?”