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He is said to
have been the last Red Man
In Acton. And the Miller
is said to have laughed-
If you like to call such a
sound a laugh.
But he gave no one else a laugher's
license.
For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,
"Whose business,-if I take it on myself,
Whose
business-but why talk round the barn?-
When it's just
that I hold with getting a thing done with."
You
can't get back and see it as he saw it.
It's too long
a story to go into now.
You'd have to have been there
and lived it.
Then you wouldn't have looked on it as
just a matter
Of who began it between the two races.
Some guttural exclamation of surprise
The Red Man
gave in poking about the mill
Over the great big
thumping shuffling mill-stone
Disgusted the Miller
physically as coming
From one who had no right to be
heard from.
"Come, John," he said, "you want to see
the wheel pit?"
He took him down below a cramping
rafter,
And showed him, through a manhole in the
floor,
The water in desperate straits like frantic
fish,
Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails.
Then he shut down the trap door with a ring in it
That jangled even above the general noise,
And came
up stairs alone-and gave that laugh,
And said
something to a man with a meal-sack
That the man with
the meal-sack didn't catch-then.
Oh, yes, he showed
John the wheel pit all right.
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