CHAPTER XIV. A DISCUSSION
“When that old man comes,” said Grenfell—“Malone, I think, is the name—let him come in here. I want to speak to him.”
“He’s outside now, before the door,” said O’Rorke, whose prying looks showed how eager he felt to know what might be the subject of their conversation.
“Does he hold any land in this neighbourhood?”
“He’s like the rest,” replied the other, half sullenly; “he lives where he can, and how he can.”
“What you would call a squatter?” said the Englishman, who smiled at his own sharpness in employing the word.
“What I wouldn’t call any such thing,” replied O’Rorke, firmly. “No more than I’d say it was squatting to sit down on my own hearthstone.”
“Which, perhaps, wouldn’t be your own, my good friend, if you were merely a tenant, and not a solvent one.”
“You may talk that way up in Leinster, or some of the counties that border on Leinster; but I tell you that you know mighty little of Ireland if you think that what your newspapers call the ‘Great name of England’ terrifies any one down here. Just try it. It’s about fifty miles from this to the Land’s End, and I’ll give you all that distance to find ten, no, but five men, that you’ll frighten by the threat of British law or British vengeance—which is about the same thing.”