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Clara frowned pensively. "Olaf has to do something that looks like the square thing, now that he’s a public man!" She glanced drolly at Nils. "But he makes a good commission out of it. On Sundays they all get together here and figure. He lets Peter and Anders put in big bills for the keep of the two boys, and he pays them out of the estate. They are always having what they call accountings. Olaf gets something out of it, too. I don’t know just how they do it, but it’s entirely a family matter, as they say. And when the Ericsons say that—" Clara lifted her eyebrows.

Just then the angry honk-honkof an approaching motor sounded from down the road. Their eyes met and they began to laugh. They laughed as children do when they can not contain themselves, and can not explain the cause of their mirth to grown people, but share it perfectly together. When Clara Vavrika sat down at the piano after he was gone, she felt that she had laughed away a dozen years. She practised as if the house were burning over her head.

When Nils greeted his mother and climbed into the front seat of the motor beside her, Mrs. Ericson looked grim, but she made no comment upon his truancy until she had turned her car and was retracing her revolutions along the road that ran by Olaf’s big pasture. Then she remarked dryly:

"If I were you I wouldn’t see too much of Olaf’s wife while you are here. She’s the kind of woman who can’t see much of men without getting herself talked about. She was a good deal talked about before he married her. "

"Hasn’t Olaf tamed her?" Nils asked indifferently.

Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders. "Olaf don’t seem to have much luck, when it comes to wives. The first one was meek enough, but she was always ailing. And this one has her own way. He says if he quarreled with her she’d go back to her father, and then he’d lose the Bohemian vote. There are a great many Bohunks in this district. But when you find a man under his wife’s thumb you can always be sure there’s a soft spot in him somewhere. "

Nils thought of his own father, and smiled. "She brought him a good deal of money, didn’t she, besides the Bohemian vote?"

Mrs. Ericson sniffed. "Well, she has a fair half section in her own name, but I can’t see as that does Olaf much good. She will have a good deal of property some day, if old Vavrika don’t marry again. But I don’t consider a saloonkeeper’s money as good as other people’s money. "

Nils laughed outright. "Come, Mother, don’t let your prejudices carry you that far. Money’s money. Old Vavrika’s a mighty decent sort of saloonkeeper. Nothing rowdy about him. "

Mrs. Ericson spoke up angrily: "Oh, I know you always stood up for them! But hanging around there when you were a boy never did you any good, Nils, nor any of the other boys who went there. There weren’t so many after her when she married Olaf, let me tell you. She knew enough to grab her chance. "

Nils settled back in his seat. "Of course I liked to go there, Mother, and you were always cross about it. You never took the trouble to find out that it was the one jolly house in this country for a boy to go to. All the rest of you were working yourselves to death, and the houses were mostly a mess, full of babies and washing and flies. Oh, it was all right—I understand that; but you are young only once, and I happened to be young then. Now, Vavrika’s was always jolly. He played the violin, and I used to take my flute, and Clara played the piano, and Johanna used to sing Bohemian songs. She always had a big supper for us—herrings and pickles and poppy-seed bread, and lots of cake and preserves. Old Joe had been in the army in the old country, and he could tell lots of good stories. I can see him cutting bread, at the head of the table, now. I don’t know what I’d have done when I was a kid if it hadn’t been for the Vavrikas, really. "