for humor, but this touched him a little closely. Didn't they think he could do any work?
Grandfather puckered his old face into a grin and nodded him into the job.
"If so be so, then so be it. Kin or no kin, I guess we can afford to pay him what we were giving Hubbard."
So Neale bought a suit of overalls at the general store and began to work. For the first three days he wished with all his heart he'd kept his mouth shut. Handling green beech for ten hours a day was very different from helping out a half-hour at a time. Besides, his muscles and above all his hands were pitifully soft after an indoor winter and his fortnight of vegetating. It didn't seem worth while to make an ox of himself for five cents an hour and board—the wage of unskilled labor in that non-unionized Arcadia—but he was ashamed to quit on a job that was always handled by boys of his age; Nobody had asked him to do it. He had offered himself, pushed himself in. It would be too worthless to back out. But, oh gee! he was tired when he got through at six o'clock, and clumped heavily up the hill after Grandfather and Si, walking, it seemed to him, with as stiff and aged a gait as theirs. He shovelled supper up, starved, starved to his toes, and staggered to bed immediately afterward. The first week he lost five pounds. Thereafter he gained steadily, and all solid muscle.
After a time he mastered the mill-hand's basic axiom, "Never lift a plank if you can slide it," his hands stopped blistering and hardened, and he grew muscles in various places up and down, his back, where he had never had any before, so that the boards became singularly lighter in his hands.
And then, just when he had mastered his job, the water-god took a hand in the game. Since the spring rains, there had been nothing but the gentlest showers. The mill-pond had shrunk to a pool, and grass began to show far down its dried-up sides. The water no longer ran over the mill-dam. One day about five o'clock the mill stopped, with a log half-sawed.
