Looking as if he could strike Pete Todd, Rob stood in the centre of his kitchen, a saw-miller for the last time. Though they did not know it, his neighbours there were photographing him in their minds, and their children were destined to gape in the days to come over descriptions of Rob Angus in corduroys.
These pictures showed a broad-shouldered man of twenty-six, whose face was already rugged. A short brown beard hid the heavy chin, and the lips were locked as if Rob feared to show that he was anxious about the child. His clear grey eyes were younger-looking than his forehead, and the swollen balls beneath them suggested a student rather than a working man. His hands were too tanned and hard ever to be white, and he delved a little in his walk, as if he felt uncomfortable without a weight on his back. He was the best saw-miller in his county, but his ambition would have scared his customers had he not kept it to himself. Many a time strangers had stared at him as he strode along the Whunny road, and wondered what made this stalwart man whirl the axe that he had been using as a staff. Then Rob was thinking of the man he was going to be when he could safely leave little Davy behind him, and it was not the firs of the Whunny wood that were in his eye, but a roaring city and a saw-miller taking it by the throat. There had been a time when he bore no love for the bairn who came between him and his career.
Rob was so tall that he could stand erect in but few rooms in Thrums, and long afterwards, when very different doors opened to him, he still involuntarily ducked, as he crossed a threshold, to save his head. Up to the day on which Davy wandered from home he had never lifted his hat to a lady; when he did that the influence of Thrums would be broken for ever.
'It's oncommon foolish o' Rob,' said Pete Todd, retreating to the side of the mole-catcher, 'no to be mair resigned-like.'
'It's his ind'pendence,' answered Jamie; 'ay, the wricht was sayin' the noo, says he, "If Davy's deid, Rob'll mak the coffin 'imsel, he's sae michty ind'pendent."'
Tammas Haggart stumbled into the saw-miller's kitchen. It would have been a womanish kind of thing to fling-to the door behind him.
'Fine growin' day, Rob,' he said deliberately.
'It is so, Tammas,' answered the saw-miller hospitably, for Haggart had been his father's bosom friend.
'No much drowth, I'm thinkin',' said Hobart, relieved by the turn the conversation had taken.
Tammas pulled from beneath the table an unsteady three-legged stool—Davy's stool—and sat down on it slowly. Rob took a step nearer as if to ask him to sit somewhere else, and then turned away his head.