"What's dat 'bout mush?" asked Eradicate.
"Mesh--not mush. I mean it makes the cogs fit together. See," and Tom pressed the lever. In an instant, with a musical whirr, the saw began revolving.
"Hurrah! Dere it goes! Golly! see de saw move!" cried the delighted colored man. He seized a stick of wood, and in a trice it was sawed through.
"Whoop!" yelled Eradicate. "I'm sabed now! Bless yo', Mistah Swift, yo' suttinly am a wondah!"
"Now I'll show you how it works," went on Tom. "When you want to stop Boomerang, you just pull this handle. That locks the tread, and he can't move it," and, suiting the action to his words, Tom stopped the mill. "Then," he went on, "when you want him to move, you pull the handle this way," and he showed the darky how to do it. In a moment the mule was moving again. Then Tom illustrated how to throw the saw in and out of gear, and in a few minutes the sawmill was in full operation, with a most energetic colored man feeding in logs to be cut up into stove lengths.
"You ought to have an assistant, Rad," said Tom, after he had watched the work for a while. "You could get more done then, and move on to some other wood-patch."
"Dat's right, Mistah Swift, so I had. But I 'done tried, an' couldn't git any. I ast seberal colored men, but dey'd radder whitewash an' clean chicken coops. I guess I'll hab t' go it alone. I ast a white man yisterday ef he wouldn't like t' pitch in an' help, but he said he didn't like to wuk. He was a tramp, an' he had de nerve to ask me fer money--me, a hard-wukin' coon."
"You didn't give it to him, I hope."
"No, indeedy, but he come so close to me dat I was askeered he might take it from me, so I kept hold ob a club. He suah was a bad-lookin' tramp, an' he kept laffin' all de while, like he was happy."
"What's that?" cried Tom, struck by the words of the colored man. "Did he have a thick, brown beard?"