The farmer, even before he replied to my questionings, began to subject me to many of his own: "Where was I bound?" "Where did I come from?" and, "Who did I know in the parts?" To these I replied as best I could, and with a directness that seemed rather to disconcert him.
But he was a kindly man, and noticing that I limped, and that I was in no condition to travel, he proposed my stopping the night with him, and he would carry me part way on my journey on the morrow. To this I agreed, as I found I had wandered somewhat out of my way.
At supper that evening I tasted for the first time the delightful cakes made out of buckwheat, and had to relate again, for the benefit of my host and his wife (a tall, sharp-featured woman who spoke with a whining drawl), the story of my adventures and the eventful voyage of the Minetta.
When I told of the affair of the severed hand, and the action of the English, the woman quoted a passage from the Bible that was quite as much as a curse on the heads of the offenders, it breathed so of vengeance. But we had not burned half a candle before we all were yawning. Well, to be short, I slept in a great feather bed that night, and the next morning I started northward, mounted astride, behind Farmer Lyman on a jolting gray nag.
When my friend put me down he bade me a farewell, and told me I had but five miles before me to the town of Miller's Falls.
It was up and down hill, slow going, and noon, I should judge by the shadows, before I saw the village, nestling at the bend of a small valley. On the wind came to me the shrieking and clanking of machinery and the jarring of a waterfall.
I sat down on the top rail of a fence, and surveyed the village for some time before I descended the hill. As I walked along I saw in a steep gorge, a sheer descent of some fifty feet to one side of the roadway, a rushing brook, and almost in the centre of the town itself a pond that spread back into the hills.
The mill that was raising such a clatter stood at one side of a dam built of stone and timber that had backed the water of the pond; and I walked up close to the building and looked with wonder at everything. A huge over-shot wheel was turning and plashing busily, and the water was roaring over the dam and breaking on the brown slippery rocks below. It fascinated me, and I stood for some time leaning over the rail watching it. I grew so interested, in fact, that I almost forgot my mission or where I was, and was recalled to myself by a voice hailing me from only a few feet above my head.
"Well, sonny," said a drawling voice, "be ye wondering where all that water is goin' to?"
A thin cadaverous face with a very pointed nose and chin was thrust out of a little window, and two long hands on either side gave the man the effect of holding himself in his position by the exercise of sheer strength.