Even then he didn’t look at but beyond me, following with his bloodshot eyes, as it were, the movements of something on the stone wall at my back.
“So you’re translated, it appears?”
“Eh?” he said, vaguely.
“You’re promoted to the yard here, aren’t you?”
“I come to oblige Jem Sweet, ars be down wi’ the arsmer,” he said.
“That was friendly, anyhow. It was an unchancy task you took upon yourself.”
“What isn’t?” he shouted, quite fiercely, all in a moment. “Give me another marn as’ll walk all day wi’ the devil arm in arm, as I does.”
“You found him down there, eh?”
He took off his cap and flung it with quick violence at the wall behind me, then pounced upon it lying on the ground, as if something were caught underneath it.
“My!” he muttered, rising with the air of a schoolboy who has captured a butterfly, and, seeking to investigate his prize, made a frantic clutch in the air, as if it had escaped him.