Olav nodded, but seemed not to see the expectant look on the boy’s face. And much as Eirik strove to please his father and serve him—well, sometimes Olav did remember to thank him. And at other times he appeared quite unaware of it when Eirik gave him such help as he could; he accepted it without looking at the boy or giving him so much as a nod.

Then Eirik’s anger flared up. He turned over in his mind something he would do simply to vex his father—then maybe he would remember to chastise him at any rate. But when it came to the point he did not dare—for that would end all chance of his going on the voyage to England.

In the week after Whitsunday, Olav Audunsson sailed up to Oslo, and ten days later the Richardsons’ little hoy lay alongside the quay at Hestviken. The freight that Olav was to take was soon loaded, though he had charged himself with some trifles for Baard Paalsson of Skikkjustad; skins and pig-iron. Apart from this, Olav had not been able to get hold of any goods in the country round at this unfavourable time of year. The very next day Olav’s boats towed the hoy out of the creek; they came out into the fiord and hoisted sail. It was a bright, calm morning of early summer.

Eirik had been on board, helping to stow the cargo and talking to the men. There was not a strip of plank or boarding, not a block or a rope’s end, that he had not pried into and handled.

Toward evening the boy sat on the lookout rock gazing after the little craft, which was now sinking out of view far away to the south. He went down to the quay, cast off his own boat, and rowed away under the Bull.

Some way up the headland there was a green ledge, and in the middle of it lay some great rocks. On the biggest of these grew three firs; Eirik called it the King. One could crawl in between these rocks; underneath the King there was a little hollow like a cave, and here he had a hiding-place.

On this side of the Bull there was only one place where one could land from a boat and climb up by a cleft in the rock. Otherwise one had to row round to the north side, or else up to the head of the creek. And toward the water this ledge ended in a sheer drop. Eirik had thought many a time that if a man were surrounded by his enemies up on that ledge, he could leap out, swim a long way under water, and save himself, before the others found the path down to their boat.

But this evening he was so sad and heavy of heart that there was no solace in the thought of these things. He crept into his cave and took out his possessions, but felt none of the old thrill and joy of ownership when he sat with them in his lap. He had not had them out more than once before this year—and then he had overhauled his treasures with the same intense delight as of yore.

There were two wooden boxes, turned on the lathe. The little one he had used for collecting rosin in summer, but now it held nothing but some scraps of little birds’ eggs that he had kept because they were redder than most. In the other box he had the bones of a strange fish. It had been caught in the nets one day, several years ago; neither his father nor the boatmen had seen the like of it before, and so Olav ordered them to throw it into the sea—it looked likely to be poisonous. But Eirik saw that it had fallen between the piles of the old pier; when the men had left the waterside he rowed out and fished it up. There was no knowing whether it was dangerous to keep its bones, or whether there might be some hidden virtue in them; therefore he had always counted them very valuable. Until now—and now even he thought they were only trash.

He also had a leather bag full of smooth and barbed flints. Under an overhanging crag above the mouth of the stream in Kverndal he found plenty of these in the gravel, but he only kept the finest, those that looked like arrow-heads. His father said they were arrow-heads—the Lapps had used such things in heathen times, long before the Norsemen came and settled Norway. But Eirik thought there might well be something queer about them—perhaps they were thunderbolts. He had also found a bone fishhook up there one time—a fine hook, with barbs and an eye for the line. He had thought of using it some day, when the fish would not bite; then the others would marvel at him, pulling up fish by the heap when no one else had any. But now he had lost that hook.

For all that, his dearest possession was the horse.