“Well,” said Silas, slow and kind of groping around in his mind, “if this don’t beat all! It does beat all. Sufferin’ codfish! I swan to man!”
He turned around quick and began to shuffle off, muttering to himself and grabbing handfuls of his whiskers. The last we saw of him he had both his hands grabbed into them and he was pulling like all-git-out. Those whiskers must have been rooted in tight.
“Better git to bed,” says Mark. “To-morrow’s goin’ to be a b-b-busy day.”
CHAPTER II
We were all down at the mill before seven o’clock. It wasn’t much of a mill, but when I stood there looking at it, and figuring that I was going to help run it, why, it looked bigger than the Capitol at Washington, and pretty gorgeous, too. Somehow the feeling that you’re interested in a thing always makes it look bigger and better. I guess that’s why a boy always gets the notion that his dog is better than anybody else’s dog, no matter what kind of a dog it really is. I was downright proud of that mill, and I could tell by the way Mark Tidd stood and looked at it, with his head cocked on one side, that he was proud of it, too.
It was all painted red, and was right on the edge of the river, with a mill-race running underneath it. It didn’t run with an engine, but with water-power, and the power came from a dam that ran across the river. I didn’t think much about that dam just then, nor about water-power, but before we got through with things I did a heap of thinking about them, and so did Mark Tidd. Up till then a river didn’t mean anything to me but a thing to fish in or swim in, but before I was many months older I discovered that rivers weren’t invented just for kids to monkey with, nor yet to make a home for fish. They have business, just like anybody else, and they’re valuable just like any other business, getting more valuable the more business they can do.
We went into the mill. The floor was all littered up with sawdust, and chunks of wood, and machinery, and belts, and saws, and holes in the floor. It seemed like there was almost as much hole as there was floor, and you had to pick your way or down you’d go. I didn’t know much about machinery nor what the machines were for, but Mark, he’d hung around there some, and he knew. He was one of them kind that’s always finding out. Always asking questions and bothering folks for no reason but that he’s got an itch to know things and has to be scratching it constant. I’ll admit it pays sometimes. You never know when a mess of information is coming in handy.
“L-let’s see,” says Mark, “you got two back-knife lathes and three novelty lathes.”
“Yep,” says Silas Doolittle Bugg, exploding his voice like a blast of dynamite.
“And a planer, and a swing-off saw, and a circular-saw mill.”