He still expressed no satisfaction at Trenholme's arrival that would have been a comment on his own hard case and a confession of his need.

Yet, on the whole, Trenholme's interest in him would have been heightened rather than decreased by a nearer view of his monotonous life and his dry reserve, had it not been that the man was to the last degree contentious and difficult to deal with.
Taking for granted that Trenholme was of gentle extraction, he treated him with the generosity of pride in the matter of rations; but he assumed airs of a testy authority which were in exact proportion to his own feeling of physical and social inferiority.

Seen truly, there was a pathos in this, for it was a weak man's way of trying to be manful but his new labourer, could not be expected to see it in that light.

Then, too, on all impersonal subjects of conversation which arose, it was the nature of Bates to contradict and argue; whereas Trenholme, who had little capacity for reasonable argument, usually dealt with contradiction as a pot of gunpowder deals with an intruding spark.

As regarded the personal subject of his own misfortune--a subject on which Trenholme felt he had a certain right to receive confidence--Bates's demeanour was like an iron mask.
Bates scorned the idea, which Turrif had always held, that Cameron had never really died; he vowed, as before, that the box he had sent in Saul's cart had contained nothing but a dead body; he would hear no description of the old man who, it would seem, had usurped Cameron's name; he repeated stolidly that Saul had put his charge into some shallow grave in the forest, and hoaxed Trenholme, with the help of an accomplice; and he did not scruple to hint that if Trenholme had not been a coward he would have seized the culprit, and so obviated further mystery and after difficulties.