“Another day, Billy, another day. I’m due with Farmer Hirst, and must be getting back.”
“Well, then, a body must turn when he must turn. There’s no denying that, David. I’m going to see the little shy bird a-sitting myself, so I’ll bid ye good e’en.”
Billy the Fool was moving away, after the loose easy way he had of carrying his great body, when he felt a lack of something, and stopped and turned about.
“Haven’t a fill o’ baccy on ye, David?”
“Ay, lad—three, if ye’ll take them.”
“Nay, I’m only wanting one,” said the other, briskly filling his pipe. “And a match, as a body’s body might say.”
He lit his pipe, nodded tranquilly at David, then went up the fields. David watched his unhurried stride, the unhurried trail of smoke that drifted in his wake.
“A born smoker, is the lad. Puffs none too fast and none too slow, but fair as if he had ’twixt this and Judgment to finish a pipeful in. No wonder Billy needs only a match at a time; yond pipeful will burn its way till there isn’t a strand o’ baccy left in ’t.”
In some dim way, David Blake was awakening nowadays from that bluntness and reserve which, even toward himself, it had been his habit to maintain. In part he was vastly diffident, and in part his days were filled with earnest labour, so that all his life he had feared to indulge in what he named “fancy feelings.” Yet to-night, as he saw the utter content of Billy the Fool, he was moved to a speculation which, before the spring came in, he would have counted dreaminess.
“Will die a lad, yond Fool Billy,” he muttered, as the summing up of all his thoughts. “He’s the only man of his age in Garth that’s what ye might call rightly happy. Has no worries, he, and can make a wise fool like myself see ladhood pictured all afresh in a clutch of blackbird eggs. Would swop places with Billy, I rather fancy, if the chance were gi’en me.”