silence and his lowering brows. Perhaps, too, they knew that he
was mad, mad from the eternal treachery of the plains, which every
spring stretch green and rustle with the promises of Eden, showing
long grassy lagoons full of clear water and cattle whose hoofs are
stained with wild roses. Before autumn the lagoons are dried up,
and the ground is burnt dry and hard until it blisters and cracks
open.

So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that
settled about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told
awful stories of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank.

They said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses
just before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten
planks of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a
fiery young stallion. His foot was caught fast in the floor, and
the nervous horse began kicking frantically. When Canute felt the
blood trickling down into his eyes from a scalp wound in his head,
he roused himself from his kingly indifference, and with the quiet
stoical courage of a drunken man leaned forward and wound his arms
about the horse's hind legs and held them against his breast with
crushing embrace. All through the darkness and cold of the night
he lay there, matching strength against strength. When little Jim
Peterson went over the next morning at four o'clock to go with him
to the Blue to cut wood, he found him so, and the horse was on its
fore knees, trembling and whinnying with fear. This is the story
the Norwegians tell of him, and if it is true it is no wonder that
they feared and hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.

One spring there moved to the next "eighty" a family that made