“You got into difficulties with the police for his sake! It was the first time you were at odds with the authorities, I think.”
“Well, the boy hadn’t done anything; I saw that myself. So I hobbled the copper that was going to run him in. His mother was ill—and my old ’un was alive; and so I was a big idiot! You’ll see you won’t get far with your weak pity. Do we owe any one anything, I should like to know?”
“Yes, _I_ do,” said Pelle, suddenly raising his face toward the light. “But I can’t say you’ve much to thank any one for.”
“What confounded nonsense!” exclaimed Ferdinand, staring at him. “Have they been good to you, did you say? When they shut you up in prison too, perhaps? You’re pretending to be good, eh? You stop that! You’ll have to go farther into the country with it. So you think you deserved your house-of-correction turn, while another was only suffering the blackest injustice? Nonsense! They know well enough what they’re doing when they get hold of me, but they might very well have let you off. You got together fifty thousand men, but what did you all do, I should like to know? You didn’t make as much disturbance as a mouse in a pair of lady’s unmentionables. Well-to-do people are far more afraid of me than of you and all your fellows together. Injustice! Oh, shut up and don’t slobber! You give no quarter, and you don’t ask any either: that’s all. And by the way, you might do me the favor to take back your two-krone. _I_ don’t owe any one anything.”
“Well, borrow it, then,” said Pelle. “You can’t go to town quite without money.”
“Do take it, won’t you?” begged Ferdinand. “It isn’t so easy for you to get hold of any as for any one else, and it was a little too mean the way I got it out of you. You’ve been saving it up in there, a halfpenny a day, and perhaps gone without your quid, and I come and cheat you out of it! No, confound it! And you gave mother a little into the bargain; I’d almost forgotten it! Well, never mind the tin then! I know a place where there’s a good stroke of business to be done.”
A little above Damhus Lake they turned into a side road that led northward, in order to reach the town from the Nörrebro side. Far down to the right a great cloud of smoke hung in the air. It was the atmosphere of the city. As the east wind tore off fragments of it and carried them out, Ferdinand lifted his bull-dog nose and sniffed the air. “Wouldn’t I like to be sitting in the ‘Cupping-Glass’ before a horse-steak with onions!” he said.