Tom smoked away without replying.
“Sulky brute you are!” cried the groom; “I 'm glad we 're to see the last of you soon.”
With this he managed to open the gate and pass on his way.
“So it's for turnin' me out yez are,” said Tom to himself; “turnin' me out on the road—to starve, or maybe—to rob”—(these words were uttered between the puffs of his tobacco-smoke)—“after forty years in the same place.”
The shrill barking of a cur-dog, an animal that in spitefulness as in mangy condition seemed no bad type of its master, now aroused him, and Tom muttered, “Bite him, Blaze! hould him fast, yer soule!”
“Call off your dog, Keane—call him off!” cried out a voice whose tones at once bespoke a person of condition; and at the same instant Linton appeared. “You'd better fasten him up, for I feel much tempted to ballast his heart with a bullet.”
And he showed a pistol which he held at full cock in his fingers.
“Faix, ye may shoot him for all I care,” said Tom; “he's losing his teeth, and won't be worth a 'trawneen' 'fore long. Go in there—into the house,” cried he, sulkily; and the animal shrank away, craven and cowed.
“You ought to keep him tied up,” said Linton; “every one complains of him.”
“So I hear,” said Tom, with a low, sardonic laugh; “he used only to bite the beggars, but he's begun now to be wicked with the gentlemen. I suppose he finds they taste mighty near alike.”