Now the cracked old dinner gong sounded and with his booty in his damp hands, Peter stole out of the lion’s den.
After dinner came the first disappointment. The dog-cart was never brought out, for Brundin received some Saturday-guests and put off his journey to town until Sunday. Peter had got to wait—a difficult task. He could not stay at home. He felt so brittle and queer from the strain that he scarcely dared to put his foot down on the ground and still he had to go on walking and walking. Now he had already reached town and once there he of course made for the hay market. Shivering, and with a queer trembling in the pit of his stomach he stood in the Saturday crush, amidst sacks of potatoes and sides of beef, staring at a big sign on a low yellow house with a tiled roof:
It was not the first time Peter had stood there spying. He felt a need, as it were, to assure himself all the time that the shop was still there. A fat old man usually stood in the doorway with his thumbs stuck in the armholes of his waistcoat. He was Brundin’s brother. He knew him from the crayfish party. Most of the produce of Selambshof went to him. And Peter had an intuition that here lay the solution of some of the problems that worried him.
Just fancy if only he could send in a policeman to take a big bag of money from that fat old rascal! Slowly Peter the Watch-dog sauntered homewards in the dark and raw November night.
He awoke very early on Sunday morning. First he examined the office window. Yes, the hooks were still unfastened. Then he might just slip down to the outhouses for a little. There had been frost during the night and there were a few light snowflakes in the air. Peter crept into the barn through a broken shutter. On the ground floor the pig carcases gleamed with a pale light in the deep twilight. He touched the hard cold fat. He felt how the pigs hung helpless there. And once more he had a frantic sense of his duty to defend them against Brundin. He promised them that they had not died in vain.
Then Peter climbed to the next floor. Here the grain lay about in big heaps on the floor. He sat down and let the wheat run through his fingers. Usually it is pleasant to sit in a granary and let the cool, round, fragrant grains of corn run softly through the fingers. It makes one think of summer and sunshine and the wide green fields.