"At whatever work I give you. We'll go a fishing. You'll have to row...."
"Oh!... All right!... No matter. I can work. Only don't let me in for something ... You're so frightfully double-tongued ... you're a dark horse...."
Chelkash began to feel something of the nature of a gangrened wound in his breast, and murmured with cold maliciousness:
"No blabbing, whatever you may think. Look now, I've a good mind to knock your blockhead about till I drive some light into it."
He leaped from his post, and while his left hand still twirled his moustache, he clenched his right into a muscular fist as hard as iron, while his eyes flashed and sparkled.
The rustic was terrified. He quickly looked about him, and timidly blinking his eyes, also leapt from the ground. They both stood there regarding each other in silence.
"Well?" inquired Chelkash sullenly, he was boiling over and tremulous at the insult received from this young bull-calf, whom during the whole course of their conversation he had despised, but whom he now thoroughly hated because he had such clear blue eyes, such a healthy sun-burnt face, such short strong arms. He hated him, moreover, because, somewhere or other, he had his native village, and a house in it, and because he numbered among his relatives a well-to-do peasant farmer; he hated him for all his past life and all his life to come, and, more than all this, he hated him because this creature, a mere child in comparison with himself, Chelkash, dared to love freedom, whose value he knew not, and which was quite unnecessary to him. It is always unpleasant to see a man whom you regard as worse and lower than yourself, love or hate the same thing as you do, and thus become like unto yourself.
The rustic looked at Chelkash, and felt that in him he had found his master.
"Well ..." he began, "I have nothing to say against it. I am glad, in fact.... You see I am out of work. It is all one to me whom I work for, for you or another. I only mean to say that you don't look like a working man ... you're so terribly ragged, you know. Well, I know that may happen to us all. Lord! the topers I've seen in my time! No end to 'em! But I've never seen any like you."
"All right, all right! It is agreed then, eh?" asked Chelkash. His voice was now a little softer.