"There's a good time comin', though we may never live to see it," said Joe, as he shoved the silver into his pocket and cast a farewell glance at me as I climbed into the cart. I caught my mate's square look for a minute. In the left eye a faint glimmer appeared and the eyelid slowly descended. Then he bit a piece off the end of his plug, started whistling a tune and went on his way.
The farmer set the young cob at a gallop, and in about a quarter of an hour we arrived at his place, which was called Braxey Farm. When evening came round my master found that I could not milk.
"You'll learn," he said, not at all unkindly, and proceeded to teach me the correct way in which to coax a cow's udder. In a fortnight's time I was one of the best milkers in the byre.
Just off the stable I had a room to sleep in, an evil-smelling and dirty little place crammed with horses' harness and agricultural implements. But after the nights spent on the snow I thought the little room and the bed the most cosy room and bed in the world. I slept there all alone, and by night I could hear the horses pawing the floor of the stable, and sometimes I was wakened by the noise they made and thought that somebody had gotten into my room.
I started work at five o'clock in the morning and finished at seven in the evening, and when Sunday came round I had to feed the ploughman's horses in addition to my ordinary work.
I liked the place in a negative sort of way; it was dull and depressing, but it was better than the life of the road. Now and again I got a letter from home, and my people were very angry because I had sent so little money to them during the summer months. For all that, I liked to get a letter from home, and I loved to hear what the people whom I had known since childhood were doing. On the farm there was no one to speak to me or call me friend. The two red-cheeked servant girls who helped me at the milking hardly ever took any notice of me, a kid lifted from the toll-road. They were decent ploughmen's daughters, and they let me know as much whenever I tried to become familiar. After all, I think they liked me to speak to them, for they could thus get an excuse to dwell on their own superior merits.
"Workin' wi' a lad picked off the roads, indeed! Whoever heard of such a thing for respectable lassies!" they exclaimed.
Even the ploughman who worked on the farm ignored me when he was out of temper. When in a good humour he insulted me by way of pastime.
"You're an Eerish pig!" he roared at me one evening.
I am impulsive, and my temper, never the best, was becoming worse daily. When angry I am blind to everything but my own grievance, and the ploughman's taunt made me angrier than ever I had been in my life before. He had just come into the byre where the girls and I were milking. He was a married man, but he loved to pass loose jokes with the two young respectable lassies, and his filthy utterances amused them.