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Updated: June 20, 2025
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
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