bleated piteously. The mother returned to its side, caressed it anew,
pushed it with her nose, and again moved away a few feet, urging it to
go with her. Again the feeble little creature refused, bleating loudly.
At this moment there came a terrible hissing rush out of the sky, and a
great form fell upon the lamb. The ewe wheeled and charged madly; but at
the same instant the eagle, with two mighty buffetings of his wings,
rose beyond her reach and soared away toward the mountain. The lamb hung
limp from his talons; and with piteous cries the ewe ran beneath, gazing
upward, and stumbling over the hillocks and juniper bushes.
In the nest of the eagles there was content. The pain of their hunger
appeased, the nestlings lay dozing in the sun, the neck of one resting
across the back of the other. The triumphant male sat erect upon his
perch, staring out over the splendid world that displayed itself beneath
him. Now and again he half lifted his wings and screamed joyously at the
sun. The mother bird, perched upon a limb on the edge of the nest,
busily rearranged her plumage. At times she stooped her head into the
nest to utter over her sleeping eaglets a soft chuckling noise, which
seemed to come from the bottom of her throat.
But hither and thither over the round bleak hill wandered the ewe,
calling for her lamb, unmindful of the flock, which had been moved to
other pastures.
Within Sound of the Saws.
Lumber had gone up, and the big mill on the Aspohegan was working
overtime.
Through the range of square openings under the eaves the sunlight
streamed in steadily upon the strident tumult, the confusion of sun and
shadow, within the mill. The air was sweet with the smell of fresh
sawdust and clammy with the ooze from great logs just "yanked" up the
dripping slides from the river. One had to pitch his voice with peculiar
care to make it audible amid the chaotic din of the saws.
In the middle of the mill worked the "gang," a series of upright saws
that rose and fell swiftly, cleaving their way with a pulsating, vicious
clamor through an endless and sullen procession of logs. Here and there,
each with a massive table to itself, hummed the circulars, large and
small; and whensoever a deal, or a pile of slabs, was brought in contact
with one of the spinning discs, upon the first arching spirt of sawdust
spray began a shrieking note, which would run the whole vibrant and
intolerable gamut as the saw bit through the fibres from end to end. In
the occasional brief moments of comparative silence, when several of the
saws would chance to be disengaged at the same instant, might be heard,
far down in the lower story of the mill, the grumbling roar of the two
great turbine wheels, which, sucking in the tortured water from the
sluices, gave life to all the wilderness of cranks and shafts above.
That end of the mill which looked down river stood open, to a height of
about seven feet, across the whole of the upper story. From this opening
ran a couple of long slanting ways each two feet wide and about a
hundred feet in length, raised on trestles. The track of these "slides,"
as they are technically termed, consisted of a series of wooden rollers,
along which the deals raced in endless sequence from the saws, to drop
with a plunge into a spacious basin, at the lower end of which they were
gathered into rafts. Whenever there was a break in the procession of
deals, the rollers would be left spinning briskly with a cheerful
murmur. There was also a shorter and steeper "slide," diverging to the
lumber yard, where clapboards and such light stuff were piled till they
could be carted to the distant station.
In former days it had been the easy custom to dump the sawdust into the
stream, but the fish-wardens had lately interfered and put a stop to the
practice. Now, a tall young fellow, in top boots, gray homespun trousers
and blue shirt, was busy carting the sawdust to a swampy hollow near the
lower end of the main slides.
Sandy MacPherson was a new hand. Only that morning had he joined the
force at the Aspohegan Mill; and every now and then he would pause,
remove his battered soft felt from his whitish yellow curls, mop his red
forehead, and gaze with a hearty appreciation at the fair landscape
spread out beyond the mill. With himself and with the world in general
he felt on fairly good terms--an easy frame of mind which would have
been much jarred had he been conscious of the fact that from a corner in
the upper story of the mill his every movement was watched with a
vindictive and ominous interest.
In that corner, close by the head of one of the main slides, stood a
table whose presiding genius was a little swinging circular. The
circular was tended by a powerful, sombre-visaged old mill-hand called
'Lije Vandine, whose office it was to trim square the ragged ends of the
"stuff" before it went down the slide. At the very back of the table
hummed the saw, like a great hornet; and whenever Vandine got two or
three deals in place before him he would grasp a lever above his head,
and forward through its narrow slit in the table would dart the little
saw, and scream its way in a second through the tough white spruce.
Every time he let the saw swing back, Vandine would drop his eyes to the
blue-shirted figure below, and his harsh features would work with
concentrated fury. These seven years he had been waiting for the day
when he should meet Sandy MacPherson face to face.
Seven years before, 'Lije Vandine had been working in one of the mills
near St. John, New Brunswick, while his only daughter, Sarah, was living
out at service in the city. At this time Sandy MacPherson was employed
on the city wharves, and an acquaintance which he formed with the pretty
housemaid resulted in a promise of marriage between the two. Vandine and
his wife were satisfied with the girl's account of her lover, and the
months slipped by swiftly without their making his acquaintance. Among
the fishing and lumbering classes, however, it not seldom happens that
betrothal brings with it rather more intimate privileges than propriety
could sanction, whence it came to pass that one evening Sarah returned
to her parents unexpectedly, having been dismissed from her situation in
disgrace. Vandine, though ignorant, was a clear-seeing man, who
understood his own class thoroughly; and after his first outburst of
wounded indignation he had forgiven and comforted his daughter no less
tenderly than her mother had done. He knew perfectly that the girl was
no wanton. He went at once into the city, with the intention of fetching
Sandy out and covering up the disgrace by an immediate marriage. He
visited the wharves, but the young man was not there. With growing
apprehension he hastened to his boarding-house, only to learn that
MacPherson had left the place and was departing for the States by the
next train, having been married the previous evening. The man's pain and
fury at this revelation almost choked him, but he mastered himself
sufficiently to ask a boy of the house to accompany him to the station
and point out the betrayer. If the train had not gone, he would be in
time to avenge his poor girl. The boy, however, took alarm at something
in Vandine's face, and led him by a roundabout way, so that just as he
drew near the station the Western Express rolled out with increasing
speed. On the rear platform stood a laughing young woman bedecked in
many colors, and beside her a tall youth with a curly yellow head, whom
the boy pointed out as Sandy MacPherson. He was beyond the reach of
vengeance for the time. But his features stamped themselves ineffaceably
on the avenger's memory. As the latter turned away, to bide his time in
grim silence, the young woman on the platform of the car said to her
husband, "I wonder who that was, Sandy, that looked like he was going to
run after the cars! Didn't you see? His arms kind o' jerked out, like
that; but he didn't start after all. There he goes up the hill, with one
pant-leg in his boot. He looked kind of wild. I'm just as glad he didn't
get aboard!"
"He's one of your old fellers as you've give the go-by to, I kind of
suspicion, Sis," replied the young man with a laugh. And the train
roared into a cutting.
About a year after these events Vandine's wife died, and Vandine
thereupon removed, with Sarah and her baby, to the interior of the
province, settling down finally at Aspohegan Mills. Here he built
himself a small cottage, on a steep slope overlooking the mill; and here
Sarah, by her quiet and self-sacrificing devotion to her father and her
child, wiped out the memory of her error and won the warm esteem of the
settlement. As for the child, he grew into a handsome, blue-eyed, sturdy
boy, whom his grandfather loved with a passionate tenderness intensified
by a subtle strain of pity. As year by year his daughter and the boy
twined themselves ever closer about his heart, Vandine's hate against
the man who had wronged them both kept ever deepening to a keener
anguish.
But now at last the day had come. When first he had caught sight of
MacPherson in the yard below, the impulse to rush down and throttle him
was so tremendous that as he curbed it the blood forsook his face,
leaving it the color of ashes, and for a few seconds he could not tend
his saw. Presently, when the yelping little demon was again at work
biting across the timbers, the foreman drew near, and Vandine asked him,
"Who's the new hand down yonder?"
"Oh!" said the foreman, leaning a little over the bench to follow
Vandine's pointing, "yon's one Sandy MacPherson, from over on the
Kennebec. He's been working in Maine these seven year past, but says he
kind of got a hankering after his own country, an' so he's come back.
Good hand!"
"_That_ so!" was all Vandine replied.
All the long forenoon, amid the wild, or menacing, or warning, or
complaining crescendos and diminuendos of the unresting saws, the man's
brain seethed with plans of vengeance. After all these years of waiting
he would be satisfied with no common retribution. To merely kill the
betrayer would be insufficient. He would wring his soul and quench his
manhood with some strange unheard-of horror, ere dealing the final
stroke that should rid earth of his presence. Scheme after scheme burned
through his mind, and at times his gaunt face would crease itself in a
dreadful smile as he pulled the lever that drove his blade through the
deals. Finding no plan altogether to his taste, however, he resolved to
postpone his revenge till night, at least, that he might have the more
time to think it over, and to indulge the luxury of anticipation with
realization so easily within his grasp.
At noon Vandine, muttering to himself, climbed the steep path to the
little cottage on the hillside. He ate his dinner in silence, with
apparently no perception of what was being set before him. His daughter
dared not break in upon this preoccupation. Even his idolized Stevie
could win from him no notice, save a smile of grim triumph that
frightened the child. Just as he was leaving the cottage to return to
the mill, he saw Sarah start back from the window and sit down suddenly,
grasping at her bosom, and blanching to the lips as if she had seen a
ghost. Glancing downward to the black road, deep with rotted sawdust, he
saw MacPherson passing.
"Who is it?" he asked the girl.
"It's Sandy," she murmured, flushing scarlet and averting her face.
Her father turned away without a word and started down the hill.
Presently the girl remembered that there was something terrifying in the
expression of his face as he asked the curt question. With a sudden
vague fear rising in her breast, she ran to the cottage door.
"Father!" she cried, "father!" But Vandine paid no heed to her calls,
and after a pause she turned back into the room to answer Stevie's
demand for a cup of milk.
Along about the middle of the afternoon, while Sandy MacPherson was
still carting sawdust, and Vandine tending his circular amid the
bewildering din, Stevie and some other children came down to play around
the mill.
The favorite amusement with these embryo mill-hands, stream-drivers, and
lumbermen, was to get on the planks as they emerged from the upper story
of the mill, and go careering swiftly and smoothly down the slides,
till, just before coming to the final plunge, they would jump off, and
fall on the heap of sawdust. This was a game that to strangers looked
perilous enough; but there had never been an accident, so at Aspohegan
Mills it had outgrown the disapproval of the hands. To Sandy MacPherson,
however, it was new, and from time to time he eyed the sport
apprehensively. And all the while Vandine glared upon him from his
corner in the upper story, and the children raced shouting down the
slides, and tumbled with bright laughter into the sawdust.
Among the children none enjoyed more than Stevie this racing down the
slides. His mother, looking out of the window on the hillside, saw the
merry little figure, bareheaded, the long yellow curls floating out
behind him, as he half knelt, half sat on the sliding plank ready to
jump off at the proper moment. She had no thought of danger as she
resumed her housework. Neither had Stevie. At length it happened,
however, that just as he was nearing the end of the descent, an eagle
came sailing low overhead, caught the little fellow's eye, and diverted
his attention for a moment. It was the fatal moment. Just as he looked
down again, gathering himself to jump, his heart sprang into his throat,
and the plank with a sickening lurch plunged into the churning basin.
The child's shrill, frightened shriek was not half uttered ere the
waters choked it.
Vandine had just let the buzzing little circular slip back into its
recess, when he saw MacPherson spring from his cart and dash madly down
to the shore.
At the same instant came that shrill cry, so abruptly silenced.
Vandine's heart stood still with awful terror,--he had recognized the
child's voice. In a second he had swung himself down over the
scaffolding, alighting on a sawdust heap.
"Hold back the deals!" he yelled in a voice that pierced the din. It was
not five seconds ere every one in the mill seemed to know what had
happened. Two men sprang on the slides and checked the stream of deals.
Then the great turbines ceased to grumble, and all the clamor of the
saws was hushed. The unexpected silence was like a blow, and sickened
the nerves.
And meanwhile--Stevie? The plank that bore his weight clinging
desperately to it, plunged deeper than its fellows, and came up somewhat
further from the slide, but not now with Stevie upon it. The child had
lost his hold, and when he rose it was only to strike against the
bottoms of three or four deals that lay clustered together.
This, though apparently fatal, was in reality the child's salvation, for
during the half or three-quarters of a minute that intervened before the
slides could be stopped, the great planks kept dropping and plunging and
crashing about him; and had it not been for those very timbers that cut
him off from the air he was choking to breathe, he would have been
crushed and battered out of all human semblance in a second. As it was,
ere he had time to suffocate, MacPherson was on the spot.
In an instant the young man's heavy boots were kicked off, and without
pausing to count the odds, which were hideously against him, he sprang
into the chaos of whirling timbers. All about him pounded the falling
deals, then ceased, just as he made a clean dive beneath that little
cluster that covered Stevie. As Vandine reached the shore, and was
casting desperate glances over the basin in search of some clue to guide
his plunge, MacPherson reappeared at the other side of the deals, and
Stevie's yellow curls were floating over his shoulder. The young man
clung rather faintly to the supporting planks, as if he had overstrained
himself; and two or three hands, who had already shoved off a "bateau,"
pushed out and picked him up with his burden.
Torn by a convulsion of fiercely antagonized passions, Vandine sat down
on the edge of the bank and waited stupidly. About the same moment Sarah
looked out of the cottage door in wonder to see why the mill had stopped
so suddenly.
In all his dreams, Vandine had never dreamed of such chance as that his
enemy should deserve his gratitude. In his nature there had grown up one
thing stronger than his thirst for vengeance, and that one thing was his
love for Stevie. In spite of himself, and indeed to his furious
self-scorn, he found his heart warming strangely to the man who, at
deadliest risk, had saved the life of his darling. At the same time he
was conscious of a fresh sense of injury. A bitter resentment throbbed
up in his bewildered bosom, to think that MacPherson should thus have
robbed him of the sweets of that revenge he had so long anticipated. The
first clear realization that came to him was that, though he must kill
the man who had wronged his girl, he would nevertheless be tortured with
remorse for ever after. A moment more, and--as he saw Sandy step out of
the "bateau" with the boy, now sobbing feebly, in his arms--he knew that
his vengeance had been made for ever impossible. He longed fiercely to
grasp the fellow's hand, and make some poor attempt to thank him. But he
mastered the impulse--Sarah must not be forgotten. He strode down the
bank. One of the hands had taken Stevie, and MacPherson was leaning
against a pile of boards, panting for breath. Vandine stepped up to him,
his fingers twitching, and struck him a furious blow across the mouth
with his open hand. Then he turned aside, snatched Stevie to his bosom,
and started up the bank. Before going two paces, however, he paused, as
if oppressed by the utter stillness that followed his astounding act.
Bending a strange look on the young man, he said, in a voice as harsh as
the saw's:--
"I _was_ going to kill you to-night, Sandy MacPherson. But now after
this day's work of yourn, I guess yer safe from me from this out." He
shut his mouth with a snap, and strode up through the piles of sawdust
toward the cottage on the hill.
As for MacPherson, he was dumbfounded. Though no boaster, he knew he had
done a magnificently heroic thing, and to get his mouth slapped for it
was an exigency which he did not know what to do with. He had staggered
against the boards from the force of the stroke, but it had not occurred
to him to resent it, though ordinarily he was hot-blooded and quick in a
quarrel. He stared about him sheepishly, bewildered and abashed, and
unspeakably aggrieved. In the faces of the mill-hands who were gathered
about him, he found no solution of the mystery. They looked as
astonished as himself, and almost equally hot and ashamed. Presently he
ejaculated, "Well, I swan!" Then one of the men who had taken out the
"bateau" and picked him up, found voice.
"I'll be gosh-darned ef that ain't the damnedest," said he, slowly.
"Why, so, I'd thought as how he was a-goin' right down on his
prayer-handles to ye. That there kid is the apple of his eye."
"An' he was sot on _killin'_ me to-night, was he?" murmured MacPherson
in deepest wonderment. "What might his name be, anyhow?"
"'Lije Vandine," spoke up another of the hands. "An' that's his
grandchild, Stevie. I reckon he must have a powerful grudge agin you,
Sandy, or he'd never 'a' acted that way."
MacPherson's face had grown suddenly serious and dignified. "Is the
boy's father and mother livin'?" he inquired.
"Sarah Vandine's living with the old man," answered the foreman, "and as
fine a girl as there'll be in Aspohegan. Don't know anything about the
lad's father, nor don't want to. The man that'd treat a girl like Sarah
Vandine that way--hangin 's too good for 'im."
MacPherson's face flushed crimson, and he dropped his eyes.
"Boys," said he, huskily, "ef 'Lije Vandine had 'a' served me as he
intended, I guess as how I'd have only got my deserts. I reckon as how
_I'm_ the little lad's father!"
The hands stared at each other. Nothing could make them forget what
MacPherson had just done. They were all daring and ready in emergency,
but each man felt that he would have thought twice before jumping into
the basin when the deals were running on the slides. The foreman could
have bitten his tongue out for what he had just said. He tried to mend
matters.
"I wouldn't have thought you was that sort of a man, to judge from what
I've just seen o' you," he explained. "Anyhow, I reckon you've more'n
made up this day for the wrong you done when you was younger. But Sarah
Vandine's as good a girl as they make, an' I don't hardly see how you
could 'a' served her that trick."
A certain asperity grew in the foreman's voice as he thought of it; for,
as his wife used to say, he "set a great store by 'Lije's girl, not
havin' no daughter of his own."
"It was lies as done it, boys," said MacPherson. "As for _whose_ lies,
why _that_ ain't neither here nor there, now--an' she as did the
mischief's dead and buried--and before she died she told me all about
it. That was last winter--of the grippe--and I tell you I've felt bad
about Sarah ever since. An' to think the little lad's mine! _Boys_, but
ain't he a beauty?" And Sandy's face began to beam with satisfaction at
the thought.
By this time all the hands looked gratified at the turn affairs were, to
them, so plainly taking. Every one returned to work, the foreman
remarking aside to a chum, "I reckon Sarah's all right." And in a minute
or two the saws were once more shrieking their way through the logs and
slabs and deals.
On the following morning, as 'Lije Vandine tended his vicious little
circular, he found its teeth needed resetting. They had been tried by a
lot of knotty timber. He unshipped the saw and took it to the foreman.
While he was waiting for the latter to get him another saw, Sandy
MacPherson came up. With a strong effort Vandine restrained himself from
holding out his hand in grateful greeting. There was a lull in the
uproar, the men forgetting to feed their saws as they watched the
interview.
Sandy's voice was heard all over the mill:--
"'Lije Vandine, I saved the little lad's life, an' _that_, counts for
_something_; but I know right well I ain't got no right to expect you or
Sarah ever to say a kind word to me. But I swear, so help me God, I
hadn't no sort of idee what I was doin'. My wife died las' winter, over
on the Kennebec, an' afore she died she told me everything--as I'd take
it kindly ef you'd let _me_ tell _you_, more particular, another time.
An' as I was wantin' to say now, I'd take it kind ef you'd let me go up
along to your place this evenin', and maybe Sarah'd let me jest talk to
the boy a little. Ef so be ez I could persuade her by-and-by to forget
an' forgive--and you'd trust me after what I'd done--I'd lay out to
marry her the minute she'd say the word, fur there ain't no other woman
I've ever set such store by as I do now by her. An' then ther's
Stevie----"
"Stevie and the lass hez both got a good home," interrupted Vandine,
roughly.
"An' I wouldn't want a better for 'em," exclaimed MacPherson, eagerly,
catching the train of the old man's thought. "What I'd want would be, ef
maybe you'd let me come in along with them and you."
By this time Vandine had got his new saw, and he turned away without
replying. Sandy followed him a few paces, and then turned back
dejectedly to attend his own circular--he having been moved into the
mill that morning. All the hands looked at him in sympathy, and many
were the ingenious backwoods oaths which were muttered after Vandine for
his ugliness. The old man paid little heed, however, to the tide of
unpopularity that was rising about him. Probably, absorbed in his own
thoughts, he was utterly unaware of it. All the morning long he swung
and fed his circular, and when the horn blew for twelve his mind was
made up. In the sudden stillness he strode over to the place where
MacPherson worked, and said in a voice of affected carelessness--
"You better come along an' have a bite o' dinner with us, Sandy. You'll
be kinder expected, I reckon, for Stevie's powerful anxious to see you."
Sandy grabbed his coat and went along.
The Butt of the Camp.
He was a mean-looking specimen, this Simon Gillsey, and the Gornish Camp
was not proud of him. His neck was long, his mouth was long and
protruding, like a bird's beak, his hair was thin and colorless, his
shoulders sloped in such a manner that his arms, which were long and
lean, seemed to start from somewhere near his waist.