“If I went at all I would go at once.”
“Then you won't come?”
“No.”
“I'll bet you a sovereign you never see a poacher, and then how sad you will be in the morning! It will be much worse coming in to breakfast with empty hands and a cold in the head, than going in now. They will chaff then, I grant you.”
“Well, then, they may chaff and be hanged, for I shan't go in now.”
Tom's interlocutor put his hands in the pockets of his heather mixture shooting coat, and took a turn or two of some dozen yards, backwards and forwards above the place where our hero was sitting. He didn't like going in and facing the pool players by himself; so he stopped once more and reopened the conversation.
“What do you want to do by watching all night, Brown?”
“To show the keeper and those fellows indoors that I mean what I say. I said I'd do it, and I will.”
“You don't want to catch a poacher, then?”
“I don't much care; I'll catch one if he comes in my way—or try it on, at any rate.”