Though with patience He stands waiting
With exactness grinds He all.’”
I murmured the words, as Dave hurried back to Rob, fearing that he would take cold in the fresh wind. They were beautifully true words, I know, and yet I felt wicked enough at that moment to long to help a little in the grinding of Uncle Horace!
I loitered, reflecting, on the way back to the others. With a vague recollection of the feeling I had had that some one was near I turned around. The great unfinished vessel, some of its ribs still bare, so slowly had the work progressed of late, loomed large between the blue of the river and the blue of the sky.
Stepping from the shadow of a great heap of sawdust a tall, gaunt figure was visible for a moment, then was lost to sight behind the vessel’s stern. To the back pastures his father had gone, Rob said, and he was going thence to Penfield; but was there another figure in the world that could be mistaken for Uncle Horace’s?
I stepped back to the rattling boards. There were huge tracks behind them, that went zigzagging away as if their maker had moved stealthily behind one pile of boards and then another. From the ground I picked up a dog-skin driving-glove—a very large one. Had I, all unwittingly, assisted vigorously at the grinding of Uncle Horace?
CHAPTER XIII
LOVEDAY MAKES A SURPRISING ANNOUNCEMENT
Dave had espied Dennis, Uncle Horace’s man, driving post-haste across the bridge and was whistling and waving frantically to attract his attention when I returned to the lunching place. He had found another coat to wrap Rob in, but the boy was shivering. Dennis drove into the yard and over piles of chips and heaps of sawdust, down to the river-brink where we were. His relief was plainly visible when he saw Rob.
“We’d be kilt intoirely, if the masther came home and found him gorn,” said Dennis with deep feeling. “Sure it’s on the bank o’ the river for miles I’m after seekin’ and it’s for thraggin’ it the women do be!”
“Dennis, where is Mr. Partridge?” I asked.