The Vanishing Red

by Robert Frost

　　

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He is said to have been the last Red ManIn Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed––If you like to call such a sound a laugh.But he gave no one else a laugher’s license.For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,“Whose business,––if I take it on myself,Whose business––but why talk round the barn?––When it’s just that I hold with getting a thing done with.”You can’t get back and see it as he saw it.It’s too long a story to go into now.You’d have to have been there and lived it.Then you wouldn’t have looked on it as just a matterOf who began it between the two races. Some guttural exclamation of surpriseThe Red Man gave in poking about the millOver the great big thumping shuffling mill-stoneDisgusted the Miller physically as comingFrom one who had no right to be heard from.“Come, John,” he said, “you want to see the wheel pit?” He took him down below a cramping rafter,And showed him, through a manhole in the floor,The water in desperate straits like frantic fish,Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails.Then he shut down the trap door with a ring in itThat jangled even above the general noise,And came up stairs alone––and gave that laugh,And said something to a man with a meal-sackThat the man with the meal-sack didn’t catch––then.Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel pit all right.

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