She picked up the tray with Davey's untouched meal on it, and went out of the room.
CHAPTER XXVII
A sou'wester was tearing across the plains, threatening to sweep the whole Wirree township off its foundations and dash the fragments of the mud houses against the hills. It broke round the Black Bull with the noise of great guns, and in the pauses of its blowing the booming of the sea on the beaches five miles away could be heard.
When Davey burst open the door he brought a gust of wind into the tap-room that set the lights sputtering and flaring. Two of them went out. The glasses on McNab's bench danced as he hammered it with his fists.
"For two pins I'd thrash you," he yelled. "You got me into borrowing money from you. I was a blamed young fool! But what's your game? What do you mean playing fair to me and then giving me away to the old man. A neat way of bleeding him, that's what it was. Getting me in here drunk and then—"
The Schoolmaster was playing cards with a couple of men on an upturned box behind the door. He threw down his cards and took Davey's arm.
The boy threw it off.
"Leave me alone, Mr. Farrel," he cried. "I'd sweep the floor with the—the damned swine, if he were worth sweeping the floor with. You're all afraid of him. Well, I'm not! You see here, Mister McNab," he leant across the bar and his eyes burnt their way into the pale shifty eyes of Thad McNab. "I'll break every bone in your body if you ever interfere between me and mine again. D'you hear that? I don't know what you've got up your sleeve, and I don't care! You just keep it there, see, or it'll be the worse for you."
McNab had blenched at the boy's headlong passion. The quivering long arms seemed scarcely able to keep themselves off his miserable shoulders.