“I’ll give you plenty to do, Jock, and find wage for it, lad, if thou’lt drop being a shack and sattle down.”
Jock Morrison laughed in a deep and silent manner.
“Nay, lad, nay,” he said at last. “Thankye kindly, Tom, all the same. What’s the good o’ working?”
“To be respectable and save money.”
“I don’t want to be respectable. I don’t want to save money, lad. There’s plenty do that wi’out me.”
“But how will it be when thou grows old and sick, lad?”
“Why then, Tommy, I shall die; just the same as you will. I’m happy my way, lad. Thou’rt happy thy way. Folk say I’m a shack, and a blackguard, and a poacher. Well, let ’em; I don’t keer.”
“Nay, don’t say that, lad,” said Tom Morrison; “I don’t like it. I’d like to see thee tak’ to work and be a man.”
“Ha, ha, ha, Tom! Why, I’m a bigger and a stronger man than thou art anyways. Nay, I don’t keer for work. Let them do it as likes. I don’t want boxing up in a house or a shed. I want to be in the free air, and to come and go as I like. I see no good in your ways. Let me bide.”
Tom looked at him in a dull, careworn way.