Part 49

"Are you really?" he said, and drew a long breath, which he had not dared to do so long as she was speaking.

"Is it yours, this goat?" asked the girl again.

"Ye-es," he said, and looked up.

"I have taken such a fancy to the goat. You will not give it to me?"

"No, that I won't."

She lay kicking her legs, and looking down at him, and then she said, "But if I give you a butter-cake for the goat, can I have him then?"

Oeyvind came of poor people, and had eaten butter-cake only once in his life; that was when grandpa came there, and anything like it he had never eaten before or since. He looked up at the girl. "Let me see the butter-cake first," said he.

She was not long about it, and took out a large cake, which she held in her hand. "Here it is," she said, and threw it down.

"Ow, it went to pieces," said the boy. He gathered up every bit with the utmost care; he could not help tasting the very smallest, and that was so good he had to taste another, and, before he knew it himself, he had eaten up the whole cake.

"Now the goat is mine," said the girl.

The boy stopped with the last bit in his mouth, the girl lay and laughed, and the goat stood by her side, with white breast and dark brown hair, looking sideways down.

"Could you not wait a little while?" begged the boy; his heart began to beat. Then the girl laughed still more, and got up quickly on her knees.

"No, the goat is mine," she said, and threw her arms round its neck, loosened one of her garters, and fastened it round. Oeyvind looked up. She got up, and began pulling at the goat. It would not follow, but twisted its neck downward to where Oeyvind stood.

"Bay-ay-ay," it said.

But she took hold of its hair with one hand, pulled the string with the other, and said gently, "Come, goat, and you shall go into the room and eat out of mother's dish and my apron." And then she sang:

"Come, boy's goat, Come, mother's calf, Come, mewing cat In snow-white shoes. Come, yellow ducks, Come out of your hiding-place; Come, little chickens, Who can hardly go; Come, my doves With soft feathers; See, the grass is wet, But the sun does you good; And early, early is it in summer, But call for the autumn, and it will come."

There stood the boy.

He had taken care of the goat since the winter before, when it was born, and he had never imagined he could lose it; but now it was done in a moment, and he would never see it again.

* * * * *

His mother came up humming from the beach, with wooden pans which she had scoured; she saw the boy sitting with his legs crossed under him on the grass, crying, and she went up to him.

"What are you crying about?"

"Oh, the goat, the goat!"

"Yes; where is the goat?" asked his mother, looking up at the roof.

"It will never come back again," said the boy.

"Dear me! How could that happen?"

He would not confess immediately.

"Has the fox taken it?"

"Ah, if it only were the fox!"