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The Vanishing Red
by Robert Frost
He is said to have been the last Red Man In Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed--- If you like to call such a sound a laugh. But he gave no one else a laugher’s license. For he turned suddenly grave as if to say, “Whose business---if I take it on myself, Whose business---but why talk round the barn?--- When it’s just that I hold with getting a thing done with.” You can’t get back and see it as he saw it. It’s too long a story to go into now. You’d have to have been there and lived it. Then you wouldn’t have looked on it as just a matter Of who began it between the two races. Some guttural exclamation of surprise The Red Man gave in poking about the mill, Over the great big thumping, shuffling millstone, Disgusted the Miller physically as coming From one who had no right to be heard from. “Come, John,” he said, “you want to see the wheel pit?” He took him down below a cramping rafter, And showed him, through a manhole in the floor, The water in desperate straits like frantic fish, Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails. Then he shut down the trap door with a ring in it That jangled even above the general noise, And came upstairs alone---and gave that laugh, And said something to a man with a meal sack That the man with the meal sack didn’t catch---then. Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel pit all right.
© Dave MacKen
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