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Below her, on the narrow board-walk that ran in front of the Eating-House, were four men. She recognized three of them Deveny, Strom Rogers, and Meeder Lawson, the Rancho Seco foreman. The other man was a stranger. Evidently it was the stranger to whom Deveny had spoken, for it was the stranger who answered. "He's in his office now." Deveny turned to Lawson and Rogers.
Very soon the neighbours from below will be coming up. Axel Ström is interested in things, he may be up tomorrow. But Brede from Breidablik, he might be here that very evening. Isak would not be loth to show them his machine, explain it to them, tell them how it works, and all about it. He can point out how that no man with a scythe could ever cut so fine and clean.
Pelle heard him groping to and fro across the floor and out on the landing. Seized with alarm, he sprang out of bed and struck a light. Outside stood Strom, in the act of throwing a noose over the rafters. "What do you want here?" he said fiercely. "Can I never get any peace from you?" "Why do you want to lay hands on yourself?" asked Pelle quietly.
"I was thinkin' of you; an' I wasn't thinkin' mean things about you. I was thinkin' of Deveny an' of what your dad told me over there by Sentinel Rock. "Your dad told me that you was in danger that Deveny an' Strom Rogers an' some more of them had their eyes turned on you. Your dad made me promise that I'd come here an' look out for you an' I mean to do it.
That another person should cry melted something in Pelle, and filled him with a feeble sense of something living; he raised himself on his elbows and listened to Strom struggling with terror, while cold shudders chased one another down his back. People said that Strom lived here because in his youth he had done something at home.
Do not isolate yourself. Be among men, and among things, and among troubles, and difficulties, and obstacles. You remember Goethe's words: Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Doch ein Character in dem Strom der Welt. "Talent develops itself in solitude; character in the stream of life."
Pelle could hear Strom attacking his bread with great bites, and chewing it with a smacking sound; and suddenly in the intervals of mastication, another sound was audible; a curious bellowing, which was interrupted every time the man took a bite; it sounded like a child eating and crying simultaneously.
As though from a remote distance he could hear his next-door neighbor, Strom the diver, moving about his room with tottering steps, and clattering with his cooking utensils close at hand. The smell of food, mingled with tobacco smoke and the odor of bedding, which crept through the thin board partition, and hovered, heavy and suffocating, above his head, became even more overpowering.
And if any one suggested that Geissler was dejected, and a broken man, why, he had only to look at the costly machines that same Geissler had sent up as a present to Axel Ström. This man it was then, who held the fate of the district in his hand; they would have to come to some agreement with him. What price would Geissler ultimately be disposed to accept for his mine?
It's likely he ain't at that. I've heard, bad as he is, that he plays square. An' if I was runnin' things I'd take a look at him before chargin' him with killin' Lane Morgan, when the killin' had been done by the Chief, an' Dolver, an' Laskar." It was Strom Rogers' voice.
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