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Updated: June 23, 2025
He had done this once, but he was wiser now or at all events more careful. When occasionally he felt a longing for the road and wanted to spend a day on it in company with Klavs, he asked politely for the loan of it, and he was allowed to have it. Then he and the horse were like sweethearts who seldom saw each other. He was no wiser than before.
Lars Peter could not get used to seeing the horse work for others, and it cut him to the heart that it should have to work so hard. It angered him, too, to be idle himself, in spite of the inn-keeper's promises and there were many other things besides. One day he declared that Klavs should come home, and he would begin to drive round again. He went up to the farm and demanded his horse.
"But no tricks now," said he, letting his big hand rest on the creature's back. And this time everything was eaten up. Lars Peter came back and sat under the lantern again. "Old Klavs is wise," said Ditte, "he knows exactly how far to go. But he's very faddy all the same."
They would like to take it all with them. "We must go through it again and have no nonsense," said Lars Peter. "We can't take the whole bag of tricks with us. Money'll be needed too and not so little either." So they went over the things again one by one. Klavs was out of the question. It would be a shame to send him to strangers in his old age; they could feed him on the downs.
Then he expected that the nag since it could no longer gallop and was so slow to set going should keep moving when he jumped off. As a butcher he was accustomed to jump off the cart, run into a house with a piece of meat, catch up with the cart and jump on again without stopping the horse. But Klavs did not feel inclined for these new tricks. The result was they clashed.
It had happened before that Lars Peter and Klavs had spent the night searching. And once Ditte had nearly run herself off her legs looking for the boy, while all the time he was quite happy driving round with his father on his rounds. He had been waiting for Lars Peter on the highroad, telling him he had a holiday and got permission to go with his father. There was no trusting him.
Klavs did not mind the deception in the least, and in no way let it interfere with his own inclinations; Klavs liked his own way. Things must be black indeed, if the highroad did not put the rag and bone man into a good temper. The calm rhythmic trot of the nag's hoofs against the firm road encouraged him to hum.
Master Poul and Jens Kofoed rode after him, expecting to meet a band of their fellows on the way, but missed them. The parson stayed behind then to lay the fuse to the mine, while Kofoed kept on to town. By the time he got there he had been joined by four others, Aage Svendsön, Klavs Nielsen, Jens Laurssön, and Niels Gummelöse. The last two were town officers.
They were people who traveled far; yesterday they had come from Helsingör; in a week's time they would perhaps be over the borders in the south and down in Germany. They wore heavily nailed boots, and had a hollow instead of a stomach, a handkerchief round their throat and mittens on their red wrists and were full of good humor. Klavs knew them quite well, and stopped of his own accord.
They were so poor that in the winter they never had anything to eat but herrings and potatoes, and it delighted Ditte to give them a really good meal: sandwiches of the best, and bottles of beer out of which the cork popped and the froth overflowed. Lars Peter stood by the water-trough where Klavs was drinking his fill.
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