think you were going to get ahead of your mother, did you?"

He threw his hat on the piano. "Oh, I do sometimes. You see,
I'm ahead of her now. I'm supposed to be in Anders' wheat-field.
But, as we were leaving, Mother ran her car into a soft place
beside the road and sank up to the hubs. While they were going for
the horses to pull her out, I cut away behind the stacks and
escaped." Nils chuckled. Clara's dull eyes lit up as she looked
at him admiringly.

"You've got them guessing already. 1 don't know what your
mother said to Olaf over the telephone, but be came back looking as
if he'd seen a ghost, and he didn't go to bed until a dreadful
hour--ten o'clock, I should think. He sat out on the porch in the
dark like a graven image. It had been one of his talkative days,
too." They both laughed, easily and lightly, like people who have
laughed a great deal together; but they remained standing.

"Anders and Otto and Peter looked as if they had seen ghosts,
too, over in the threshing field. What's the matter with them
all?"

Clara gave him a quick, searching look. "Well, for one thing,
they've always been afraid you have the other will."

Nils looked interested. "The other will?"

"Yes. A later one. They knew your father made another, but
they never knew what he did with it. They almost tore the old
house to pieces looking for it. They always suspected that he