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Page 53
After the service there was great emotional excitement. Many
persons rushed up to the speaker and thanked him, with tears
streaming down their faces. They told him that his words had
awakened them to a true faith in God. But all this time Karin sat
unmoved. When Dagson had finished speaking, she raised her heavy
eyelids and looked up at him, as if reproaching him for not having
given her anything. Just then some one outside cried in a voice
loud enough to be heard by the entire congregation:
"Woe, woe, woe to those who give stones for bread! Woe, woe, woe to
those who give stones for bread!"
Whereupon everybody rushed out, curious to see who it was that had
spoken those words, and Karin was left sitting there in her
helplessness. Presently members of her own household came back, and
told her that the person who had cried out like that was a tall,
dark stranger. He and a pretty, fair-haired woman had been seen
coming down the road, in a cart, during the service. They had
stopped to listen, and just as they were about to drive on, the man
had risen up and spoken. Some folks thought they knew the woman.
They said she was one of Strong Ingmar's daughters--one of those
who had gone to America and married there. The man was evidently
her husband. Of course it is not so easy to recognize a person whom
one has known as a young girl in the ordinary peasant costume, when
she comes back a grown woman dressed up in city clothes.
Karin and the stranger were evidently of the same mind regarding
Dagson. Karin never went to the mission house again. But later in
the summer, when a Baptist layman came to the parish, baptizing and
exhorting, she went to hear him, and when the Salvation Army began
to hold meetings in the village, she also attended one of these.
The parish was in the throes of a great religious upheaval. At all
the meetings there were awakenings and conversions. The people
seemed to find what they had been seeking. Yet among all those whom
Karin had heard preach, not one could give her any consolation.
***
A blacksmith named Birger Larsson had a smithy close by the
highroad. His shop was small and dark, with a low door, and an
aperture in place of a window. Birger Larsson made common knives,
mended locks, put tires on wheels and on sled runners. When there
was nothing else to be done, he forged nails.
One evening, in the summer, there was a rush of work at the smithy.
At one anvil stood Birger Larsson flattening the heads of nails;
his eldest son was at another anvil forging iron rods and cutting
off pins. A second son was blowing the bellows, a third carried
coal to the forge, turned the iron, and, when at white heat,
brought it to the smiths. The fourth son, who was not more than
seven years old, gathered up the finished nails and threw them into
a trough filled with water, afterward bunching and tying them.
While they were all hard at work a stranger came up and stationed
himself in the doorway. He was a tall, swarthy-looking man, and he
had to bend almost double to look in. Birger Larsson glanced up
from his work to see what the man wanted.
"I hope you don't mind my looking in, although I have no special
errand here," said the stranger. "I was a blacksmith myself in my
younger days, and can never pass by a smithy without first stopping
to glance in at the work."
Birger Larsson noticed that the man had large, sinewy hands--regular
blacksmith's hands. He at once began to question him as to who he
was and whence he came. The man answered pleasantly, but without
disclosing his identity. Birger thought him clever and likable,
and after showing him around the shop, he went outside with him
and began to brag about his sons. He had seen hard times, he said,
before the boys were big enough to help with the work; but now
that all of them were able to lend a hand, everything went well.
"In a few years I expect to be a rich man," he declared.
The stranger smiled a little at that and said he was pleased to
hear that Birger's sons were so helpful to him. Placing his heavy
hand on Birger's shoulder, and looking him square in the eyes, he
said: "Since you have had such good aid from your sons in a
material way, I suppose you also let them help you in the things
that pertain to the spirit?" Birger stared stupidly. "I see that
this is a new thought to you," the stranger added. "Ponder it till
we meet again." Then he went on his way smiling, and Birger
Larsson, scratching his head, returned to his work. But the
stranger's query haunted his mind for several days. "I wonder what
made him say that?" he mused. "There must be something back of it
all that I don't understand."
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