Before the rage in the old man's eyes—before the convulsed features and the quivering limbs—he felt a savage joy suddenly take possession of him.
"It's all your doing, every last bit of it," repeated Fletcher hoarsely, "and I'll live to pay you back if I hang for it in the end!"
"Go ahead, then," retorted Christopher; "you might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb, you know."
"Oh, you think I'm fooling?" said the other, wiping a fleck of foam from his mouth, "but you'll find out better some day, unless the devil gets you mighty quick. You've made that boy a scamp and a drunkard, and now you've gone and married him to a—" He swallowed the words and stood gasping above his loosened collar.
Christopher paled slightly beneath his sunburn; then, as he recovered his assurance, a brutal smile was sketched about his mouth.
"Come, come, go easy," he protested flippantly; "there's such a thing, you remember, as the pot calling the kettle black."
His gay voice fell strangely on the other's husky tones, and for the moment, in spite of his earth-stained hands and his clothes of coarse blue jean, he might have been a man of the world condescending to a peasant. It was at such times, when a raw emotion found expression in the primitive lives about him, that he realised most vividly the gulf between him and his neighbours. To his superficial unconcern they presented the sincerity of naked passion.
"You've made the boy what he is," repeated the old man, in a quiver from head to foot. "You've done your level best to send him to the devil."
"Well, he had a pretty good start, it seems, before I ever laid eyes on him."
"You set out to ruin him from the first, and I watched you," went on Fletcher, choking over each separate word before he uttered it; "my eye was on your game, and if you were anything but the biggest villain on earth I could have stopped it. But for you he'd be a decent chap this very minute."