"My friend, it is not 'of course' to me. You might be going to kick up your heels in Turkey for ought I know."
"In Tur-tur-key?" stammered the youth. "Who of all the Orthodox would think of going there? What do you mean?"
"I mean that you're a fool!" sighed Chelkash, and again he turned away from the speaker, and this time he felt an utter disinclination to waste another word upon him. There was something in this healthy country lad which revolted him.
A troublesome, slowly ripening irritating feeling was stirring somewhere deep within him, and prevented him from concentrating his attention and meditating on all that had to be done that night.
The snubbed young rustic kept murmuring to himself in a low voice, now and then glancing furtively at the vagabond. His cheeks were absurdly chubby, his lips were parted, and his lackadaisical eyes blinked ridiculously and preposterously often. Evidently he had never expected that his conversation with this moustached ragamuffin would have been terminated so quickly and so offensively.
The ragamuffin no longer paid him the slightest attention. He was whistling reflectively as he sat on the post and beating time with his naked dirty paw.
The rustic wanted to be quits with him.
"I say, fisherman, do you often get drunk?"—he was beginning, when the same instant the fisherman turned round quickly face to face with him and asked:
"Hark ye, babby! Will you work with me to-night? Come!—yes or no?"
"Work at what?" inquired the rustic suspiciously.