"We've heard that it's your name. He's been boasting that it's Norby himself that is surety for him; but now we hear from the house servants that it's a lie."
"It's no business of that idiot's anyhow!" thought the old man, and passed on without answering.
But on going round by the barn, where threshing was in progress, he had the same question of Wangen's forgery put to him. He still made no answer, but plunged his hand into the grain at the back of the machine, whereupon an old labourer said, as he scratched his head:
"Well, well; haven't I always said that man would see the inside of a prison some day?"
This, however, made Norby a little uneasy. "If it comes out that I have circulated a report like that," he thought, "he can make it unpleasant for me, and give people enough to talk about." He was on the point of nipping the report in the bud by explaining matters, when he caught sight, through the barn-door, of the smith going along the road with a sack upon his back.
"Yes," was the answer from several voices amidst the rustling of straw in the half-darkness.
"Then _he_ knows it too!" thought Norby; "and by the evening it will be all over the parish. I must stop the smith!--Why, he was to have come and done the new sledges!" he said aloud as a pretext for rushing out and hastening down the road after the smith.
The snow-plough had not been driven along the road since the fall during the night, and it was heavy walking and still heavier running. The farther the old man ran, the angrier he became. "Here am I running like a madman," he thought, "and all because I've helped that rogue!--Ola, Ola!" he shouted, waving his hand.
But the sack on the smith's back could neither see nor hear, and the old man had to go on running. The tale must be stopped, or he might have to pay dearly for it.
At last the smith stopped because he met a man on _ski;_ but before Norby came up to them the man had gone on down the hill.
"What's this I hear?" said the smith, advancing a few steps towards Norby. "That Wangen _is_ a nice fellow, he is! He's fleeced me too. I've just got a bill from him for a sack of rye-flour that I paid for down!"
"It's a lie!" cried Norby, thinking of the forgery, and breathless after his run.