The Singer was about to ask him where he found the mason to quarry such impressive stones, when suddenly he discovered that one of the Miller’s hands was badly scarred and crippled.

“Can you run so great a stone with but a single hand?” The Singer asked.

“I manage … though it always was much easier with two.”

“Did you lose your hand in this machinery?”

“I was in much too great a hurry three harvest-times ago. I was trying to sweep the grist away when I dropped my broom upon the floor stone. When I reached to pick it up, the great stone caught my arm and hand. And when they rolled the grinder back, this was all that I had left,” he said.

“I will,” observed the Singer, “make it useful once again if you will just desire it whole and believe it can be.”

“It cannot be so easy, Singer. Would you wave your magic wand above such suffering and have it all be done with? I sometimes wake at midnight with a searing flame of fire and throbbing agony alive through all this twisted, dying limb. You have both hands and cannot understand this sort of pain.”

“I have no pain like yours, but I have a healing melody. Earthmaker gave the song to me for healing hands like yours. Already it has helped a little girl to be made whole.”

“Was her hand as badly mangled as my own?”

“It was her legs—but yes, they were …”

“How often I have wished that I might trade a useless hand for such a leg,” the Miller interrupted.

“Why either—why not simply be made whole?”

“Oh that such a healing now were possible—the speed I might regain in working at the mill. But no, it cannot be. Can you not understand? Have you no sympathy for suffering? Are you so empty of conscience as to suggest a hopeless remedy. You only add to misery by forcing me to see myself a cripple. I soon shall have to close the mill or sell it. I cannot make the necessary quota since the accident occurred.”

“There is power within the Melody I know to make you well. Please, Miller, trust and let me sing and you will run the mill alone with two good hands.”

“Stop your mocking. I am a sick old man whom life has cheated of a hand. The nightly pain has already now begun. The season of my hope is gone.”

The Singer watched him caught in some dread spasm of his aching circumstance. He moaned and fell upon the floor and with his healthy fingers he held his mangled hand.

His surging pain caused him to cry, “O God deliver me from this body … I never can be well and whole as other men.”

He waited for the Singer to join him in his pity, but when he raised his head for understanding, the door stood open on the night and the Singer was nowhere to be seen.