an
action fit for a half-breed. Sawyer Gundry hath cut and run, without a
word behind him--no instructions for orders in hand, and pouring in--no
directions where to find him, not even 'God bless you' to any one of the
many hands that looked up to him. Only a packet of dollars for me to pay
the wages for two months to come, and a power of lawyer to receive all
debts, and go on anyhow just the same. And to go on just the same is
more than the worst of us has the heart for, without the sight of his
old red face. He may have been pretty sharp, and too much the master now
and then, perhaps; but to do without him is a darned sight worse, and
the hands don't take to me like him. Many's the time I have seen his
faults, of having his own way, and such likes, and paying a man beyond
his time if his wife was out of order. And many's the time I have said
myself I was fitter to be at the head of it.

"About that I was right enough, perhaps, if I had started upon my own
hook; but to stand in the tracks he has worn to his own foot is to
go into crooked compasses. There is never a day without some hand
threatening to strike and to better himself, as if they were hogs to
come and go according to the acorns; and such low words I can never put
up with, and packs them off immediate. No place can be carried on if
the master is to shut up his lips to impudence. And now I have only
got three hands left, with work enough for thirty, and them three only
stopped on, I do believe, to grumble of me if the Sawyer do come home!

"But what we all want to know--and old Suan took a black stick to make
marks for you--is why the old man hath run away, and where. Young Firm,
who was getting a sight too uppish for me to have long put up with him,
he was going about here, there, and every where, from the very first
time of your going away, opening his mouth a deal too much, and asking
low questions how long I stopped to dinner. Old Suan said he was
troubled in his mind, as the pale-faces do about young girls, instead
of dragging them to their wigwams; and she would give him a spell to get
over it. But nothing came of that; and when the war broke out, he had
words with his grandfather, and went off, so they said, to join the
rebels.

"Sawyer let him go, as proud as could be, though he would sooner have
cut his own head off; and the very same night he sat down by his fire
and shammed to eat supper as usual. But I happened to go in to get some
orders, and,