Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/35

 speaking. He didn't like wasting words, and speaking was mostly wasted when the saw was screaming, the belts slapping, and down below was the pound! pound! pound! of the mill-wheel.

After a time Neale went down to the far end of the mill where the fresh sawed boards fell off from the logs. A new lad he didn't know was "taking away." He wasn't keeping up with the work very well, and to help him Neale picked up a slab and started to cut it into stove lengths on the cut-off saw.

"Hey there! Whacher doin'? You'll saw your arm off, boy!" yelled the lad. But Silas, stopping the saw so that his voice could be heard, saved Neale's face, "Let be, Nat. He won't get hurt. He knows more about the mill now than you do, or ever will."

Neale felt his heart swell with pride. He sawed pine slabs till his back ached from lifting and his shirt and hands were black from the dried resin.

There were other things to do at Grandfather Crittenden's, all the other things that boys do in the country, and Neale did them all. But none of them came up to the mill. Day in and day out it was around the mill that he spent his time, lying on the piles of fresh sawed boards in the sunlight, watching teamsters roll huge logs on the skidway with cant-hooks. Or he went below where you could look through the doorway at the flapping belts, and watch the sawdust raining down and making a great yellow pyramid. Even such an experienced millhand as Neale was not allowed to go into the cellar while the mill was running, under pain of all sorts of violent and disagreeable deaths. Getting your coat caught by the shafting and being whirled round and round and beaten to a pulp against the beams was one of the mildest.

But after supper, when the mill was shut down, he used to saunter out to it, in the long soft twilight, and then tiptoe down into the cellar and play uneasily in the sawdust, casting scared looks now and then at the shining semi-circle of the saw, with its wicked hooked teeth just over his head.

One day, as he played thus about the mill, his destiny