Читать книгу The Queen Versus Billy, and Other Stories онлайн

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“And the girl?” I asked.

“Who’d tyke her?” he replied, with a drop of his lip. “Did you ever see an uglier piece in all your life?”

“What do you mean to do with her?” I asked, knowing that the firm had promised him a passage to Sydney in the Ransom, and wondering what would become of the unfortunate Bo, whom he was little likely to drag with him to the colonies.

“You don’t think I’m going to desert that girl,” he said truculently, giving me a look of deep suspicion. “My word!” he went on, “after having taught her to byke bread and sew, and regularly broke her in to all kinds of work, it ain’t likely I am going to leave her to be snapped up by the first feller that comes along. The man as gets her will find himself in clover, and might lie in bed all day and never turn his hand to nothink, as I’ve done myself time and time again at Pingalap, while she’d make breakfast and tend the store. It would tyke several years to bring a new girl up to her mark, and then maybe she mightn’t have it in her, after all,—not all of them has,—and so your pains and lickings would be wasted.”