“What you'd ask, if you were quick enough with your point, is whether Wood ever did you a bad turn? No, he didn't. Nor said a word to me in his life, nor I to him, nor want to. Will you ask me what I got against him, then, or won't you, or are you too fat-headed to know what I'm talking about?”
“Oi!” said Coglan. “Yer right. I'll ask ye that.”
“And I'll say that so long as this 'me' of mine”—tapping his narrow chest—“ain't fertilising a patch of potatoes, a friend ain't going to mean any man that does me a good turn, nor an enemy mean anybody that does me a bad turn. A man that means no more'n that, ain't fit to fertilise turnips. That's my meaning, Tom Coglan.”
“Oi! Quotin' the Preacher.”
“Yes, I am, some of it.”
He went back to his stitching sullenly. Coglan and Shays looked at each other and then stealthily at Hicks.
“I hear no talk against the Preacher,” Hicks went on, after a time; “I won't, and why not is my business. He ain't for you to understand, nor the like of you, nor the like of Jimmy Shays,—neither him, nor his talk, nor his book. What of it? There ain't another man in Port Argent but me that understands that book. But the Preacher don't do all my thinking for me, and you're wrong there, Coglan. What do you know about him, or me? What's the use of my talking to you? But if you did know, and then if you said, 'The Preacher holds a man back till he's like to go crazy, and always did'; or if you said, 'The Preacher's for setting you on fire and then smothering it, till he's burnt your bowels out'; and if you talked like that, as understanding him and me, maybe I'd talk to you. I'd talk so, too, for his way ain't my way.”
He pointed a crooked finger at the torn book on the table.
“See that book! It's called 'Communism.' Half of it's right and half of it's not. That's my way.”
His two-handed gesture of ripping the book in two was so sudden and savage that Coglan dropped his chair and turned to look at the book in a startled way, as if he expected to see something ghastly.