And that fool Kimble says the newspaper's talking about peace. Why,
the country wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Prices 'ud run down
like a jack, and I should never get my arrears, not if I sold all
the fellows up. And there's that damned Fowler, I won't put up with
him any longer; I've told Winthrop to go to Cox this very day. The
lying scoundrel told me he'd be sure to pay me a hundred last month.
He takes advantage because he's on that outlying farm, and thinks I
shall forget him.'
The Squire had delivered this speech in a coughing and
interrupted manner, but with no pause long enough for Godfrey to
make it a pretext for taking up the word again. He felt that his
father meant to ward off any request for money on the ground of the
misfortune with Wildfire, and that the emphasis he had thus been led
to lay on his shortness of cash and his arrears was likely to
produce an attitude of mind the most unfavourable for his own
disclosure. But he must go on, now he had begun.
'It's worse than breaking the horse's knees- he's been staked and
killed,' lie said, as soon as his father was silent, and had begun
to cut his meat. 'But I wasn't thinking of asking you to buy me
another horse; I was only thinking I had lost the means of paying
you with the price of Wildfire, as I'd meant to do. Dunsey took him to
the hunt to sell him for me the other day, and after he'd made a
bargain for a hundred and twenty with Bryce, he went after the hounds,
and took some fool's leap or other, that did for the horse at once.
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