The Road Leads On | Page 3

council chamber and went far to impress his fellow townsmen with this meeting-place straight out of wonderland....
A daughter was born to them and the mother was overjoyed. The father had taken the trouble to order some fireworks from Trondhjem but declined to set them off. The following year they had another daughter, a blessed new creation which again brought joy to the mother, though the father, viewing the situation with a practical eye, failed to share her elation. Again no fireworks were set off. But at length, when the father was over forty and the mother was barely half his age, they had a son who pleased them both, a ten-pound baby with much hair on his head and real strength in his grip, a robust little chap. That evening the father got out a certain sky-rocket he had hidden away and tried to touch it off. Nothing happened, however. He struggled with live coals and direct flame, but the thing refused to go off. Oh well, all that meant was that the powder had gone mouldy with the years.
The boy was christened Gordon Tidemand, a name which the mother with all her book-learning--she was the sexton's daughter, bear in mind--had run across some place or other. As a name that was quite all right, there was nothing worth arguing about there, and the lad did not die; on the contrary, he throve, ate and drank like any healthy child, but in time he developed brown eyes. No one was able to understand it--brown eyes! And that was quite all right, too; his blue-eyed parents regarded the situation as an interesting freak of nature and mentioned it quite openly to others: "Will you simply look at what brown eyes he has!" they said. They did nothing to conceal the fact of those sparkling brown little eyes.
But then one day the father was assailed by frightful misgivings.
Had it been back in the days of his hot-blooded youth, Theodore paa Bua would surely have held his wife responsible for those brown eyes. But as things now were with him, taken up every minute of his day with that enormous business of his and all his other affairs, to say nothing of his repeated exasperation over being the father of all those little girls--an endless procession of girls--he again made the best of the situation and used sound common sense. On one or two occasions he had thumped the table at his wife, and he had gone so far as to squint searchingly into her face each time she called for help from the warehouse to slaughter a calf or smoke some salmon, but further than that he had never gone. Nor had he even for a moment considered dismissing that handsome devil of a Gypsy lad who worked for him down at the warehouse and who was such an able hand with the salmon net.
A practical, superior sort of chap, that Theodore paa Bua, even though he was hardly the man for such an attitude, hardly one of those whose tombstone's are forever cluttered up with fulsome inscriptions. No, he was simply an honest fellow with a slightly twisted sense of ethics. His fireworks had failed to go off; not a single rocket had he been able to despatch with a blazing thrust at the stars. But what of it? In truth, the stars are well beyond the reach of mortal man! And was it, after all, worth while to get rid of the Gypsy and thus only lose a good servant? Who could trap the salmon as cleverly as he? Who would bring in an unexpectedly large profit in fish at the expense of getting his hands all covered with blisters from handling jellyfish, as he? Who would turn out at all hours of the day or night to meet the steamers and ferry ashore all those piles of freight for the store, as he? Furthermore, didn't that Gypsy lad, Otto, come of good people in their own way, too? He belonged to the great family of Alexanders who were from Hungary and who were known all through Nordland, wherever they went with that houseboat of theirs.
Moreover, how could Theodore tell? What proof did he have? None save a pair of shining brown eyes and a certain suspicious way his wife had had about her ever since that Gypsy had come to Segelfoss. It was something, was it not, that a new light had kindled in her eyes, that she tiptoed up and downstairs, that she had taken to singing rather frequently of late, and that she was wearing a little gold medallion on a black velvet ribbon about her neck, that little child of nature! Further, if the truth be told, there had once been a desperate embrace involving a