He is said to have been the last Red man <br />In Action. And the Miller is said to have laughed-- <br />If you like to call such a sound a laugh. <br />But he gave no one else a laugher's license. <br />For he turned suddenly grave as if to say, <br />'Whose business,--if I take it on myself, <br />Whose business--but why talk round the barn?-- <br />When it's just that I hold with getting a thing done with.' <br />You can't get back and see it as he saw it. <br />It's too long a story to go into now. <br />You'd have to have been there and lived it. <br />They you wouldn't have looked on it as just a matter <br />Of who began it between the two races. <br /> <br />Some guttural exclamation of surprise <br />The Red man gave in poking about the mill <br />Over the great big thumping shuffling millstone <br />Disgusted the Miller physically as coming <br />From one who had no right to be heard from. <br />'Come, John,' he said, 'you want to see the wheel-pint?' <br /> <br />He took him down below a cramping rafter, <br />And showed him, through a manhole in the floor, <br />The water in desperate straits like frantic fish, <br />Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails. <br />The he shut down the trap door with a ring in it <br />That jangled even above the general noise, <br />And came upstairs alone--and gave that laugh, <br />And said something to a man with a meal-sack <br />That the man with the meal-sack didn't catch--then. <br />Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel-pit all right.<br /><br />Robert Lee Frost<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/vanishing-red-the/
