When Bonnyboy was twenty years old his father gave up, once for all, his
attempt to make a carpenter of him. A number of saw-mills had been built
during the last years along the river down in the valley, and the old
rapids had been broken up into a succession of mill-dams, one above the
other. At one of these saw-mills Bonnyboy sought work, and was engaged
with many others as a mill hand. His business was to roll the logs on
to the little trucks that ran on rails, and to push them up to the saws,
where they were taken in charge by another set of men, who fastened and
watched them while they were cut up into planks. Very little art was,
indeed, required for this simple task; but strength was required, and of
this Bonnyboy had enough and to spare. He worked with a will from early
morn till dewy eve, and was happy in the thought that he had at last
found something that he could do. It made the simple-hearted fellow
proud to observe that he was actually gaining his father’s regard; or,
at all events, softening the disappointment which, in a vague way, he
knew that his dulness must have caused him. If, occasionally, he was
hurt by a rolling log, he never let any one know it; but even though
his foot was a mass of agony every time he stepped on it, he would march
along as stiffly as a soldier. It was as if he felt his father’s eye
upon him long before he saw him.
There was a curious kind of sympathy between them which expressed
itself, on the father’s part, in a need to be near his son. But he
feared to avow any such weakness, knowing that Bonnyboy would interpret
it as distrust of his ability to take care of himself, and a desire to
help him if he got into trouble. Grim, therefore, invented all kinds of
transparent pretexts for paying visits to the saw-mills. And when he saw
Bonnyboy, conscious that his eye was resting upon him, swinging his axe
so that the chips flew about his ears, and the perspiration rained from
his brow, a dim anxiety often took possession of him, though he could
give no reason for it. That big brawny fellow, with the frame of a man
and the brain of a child, with his guileless face and his guileless
heart, strangely moved his compassion. There was something almost
beautiful about him, his father thought; but he could not have told what
it was; nor would he probably have found any one else that shared his
opinion. That frank and genial gaze of Bonnyboy’s, which expressed
goodness of heart but nothing else, seemed to Grim an “open sesame”
to all hearts; and that unawakened something which goes so well with
childhood, but not with adult age, filled him with tenderness and a
vague anxiety. “My poor lad,” he would murmur to himself, as he caught
sight of Bonnyboy’s big perspiring face, with the yellow tuft of hair
hanging down over his forehead, “clever you are not; but you have that
which the cleverest of us often lack.”