“Billy, my lad, David comes back with the spring,” said Hirst, his natural voice striking easily across the uproar of the bellows and the anvil.
Billy, as befitted one who was short of wit, went on with the work in hand and finished it before he turned about. He was none of your wise fellows who drop a tool at the first hint of gossip, and afterwards return reluctantly to the unfinished job.
“Te-he! There’ll be terrible pranksome doings when David comes back,” said Billy, leaning on his hammer. “He’s like the swallows in a manner of speaking, this same man David—off for the winter, and home when Garth has got nicely warmed up again. When will he be coming, like? The first swallow’s nest I mind last year began a-building when the ousel hatched out her clutch of five up in Winnybrook Wood. Seems a long while to wait,” he added, glancing at the ribbon of firelit snow across the highway.
“Oh, ’twill soon pass. Time does for busy folk,” said Hirst, warming his hands at the smithy fire and thinking, with some compunction, of the daughter he had left at Good Intent “to have her cry out, like.”
Billy was silent for awhile, his massiveness and air of detachment from the world suggesting some impersonal figure of destiny. Then suddenly, as his way was, he returned to extreme childishness.
“David will be bringing a lile pipeful o’ baccy; and, if he can no way find a match, I’ve got the fire to light it at right soon.”
The yeoman laughed, rattling the horseshoes on the walls, and handed his pouch to Billy. When the clay pipe was loaded, and the quiet puffs of smoke were going up to the blackened rafter-beams, Billy laughed foolishly.
“Seems I’m in a terrible puzzlement, like a hen with an addled egg.”
“Are ye, now, and why?”
“Well, soon as ever David comes back wi’ the swallows, blessed if he won’t want a daft body to go working all at bellows-blowing. Look at Dan Foster’s lad, and say by yond same token if bellows-blowing isn’t work.”