Chapter II

Before noon on the following day the two children had come considerably nearer the fulfilment of Atty’s prediction that they might be lost and starved. Lost, in truth, they were very thoroughly, for their quest of the Fottrells’ goat had lured them with many false hopes so far over the bog that they no longer knew in what direction Clochranbeg lay; and a fast of four-and-twenty hours feels unpleasantly like starvation to people of seven or eight. In the lonesome track through which they were straying they had met neither man nor beast, and after a night spent huddled in misery under a furzy bank, they had been since the return of light wandering on, growing hungrier, colder, and more terrified with the lapse of each endless hour. The Union van, loaded with constables, would have appeared to them a blessed ark of safety. But now, when mid-day was still distant, they had espied before them, not far off, the pale twinkling of the sea, and they made towards it, rejoicing at the sight of any familiar object.

On the edge of the cliff they were once more disappointed, because no houses came into view; still, there was an easy slope leading down to the beach, and it would be a relief to escape from the dreadful desert that stretched behind them. If they had but known, they were at that moment standing on the brink of a grimmer peril than famine, captivity, or any other of the harms that threatened them; for there at their feet lay spread Slughnatraigh.

The bit of the strand so-called does not outwardly show much to account for its very evil repute all about Meenaclochran. It is a little semi-oval of a bay, curved round by cliffs with swarded crests. Midway in their curve a spur of the cliff shelves down to the strand, jutting out seaward in a low rocky ridge, overgrown with a curious entanglement of seaweed, woodbine and brier bushes. The highest tides seldom reach quite to the base of these cliffs; and it is to the sands spread beneath them that Slughnatraigh owes its ill-omened name. Quicksands they are, of the most treacherous and tenacious quality. Woeful has been the fate of many a one who, setting foot unawares on their smooth grey face, has felt a cold mouth open and fasten upon him, enlarging itself, and gaping wider and deeper for him the more wildly he struggles against its grip, until at last, half sucked in, half sinking, he goes helplessly under, and the rest of his miserable tragedy, stifled away from light and air, is to be surmised only by the heaving and quivering, which subside slowly, as the death-trap gulps down its victim. More than once it has happened that those trailing bramble bushes have served as bait. On this bog-land they grow rarely enough to make blackberries seem a covetable prize; and roving children have sometimes been lured by the sight of them into terrible toils.

They attracted Min now, and she pointed them out to Atty, saying: “There might be an odd few berries stickin’ on them yet,” with which hope they began all the more eagerly to descend the rough track towards the beach. But when they had scrambled nearly half-way down, they came upon a much more important discovery. From behind a projecting crag gleamed into view the white-washed gable-end of a cabin. “Look there, Min,” said Atty, who saw it first. “It’s a house. If there’s any people in it, they’d be apt to give us a bit of bread or somethin’.” Min said: “Glory be--we’ll try would they,” and was hurrying on to make the experiment, when a sudden thought checked her.

“I declare to goodness,” she said, “I believe it’s the man-trappers’ house. They said it was just beyant the stones on the strand, and there’s the big stones, sure enough, and there’s itself. We’d a right to not go near it.”

Min’s conjecture was so far correct. The man-trappers did live almost on the verge of Slughnatraigh, in fact to its neighbourhood was partly due their long-continued ill-repute, as many an anxious parent endeavoured to scare the children from that real and ghastly danger of the place by setting up the man-trappers as a half-mythical bogey. All the rumours she had ever heard about them now occurred to Min. She remembered how a cross-looking old woman had been pointed out to her at Mass as the mother of the man-trappers, and how she had been assured that any one of the family would drown a person as soon as look at him. Here on the spot, these stories seemed more true and more terrific than ever before, and Min resolved firmly that, hungry or no, she and Atty must give the house as wide a berth as possible, without returning to the desolate bog. “Let’s try first is there e’er a blackberry yet,” she said, “and after that we can creep along down close by the edge of the say below there. Some more houses is sure to be in it prisently a wee bit further on.”

She turned towards the thorn-clad rocks, with Atty following her. But their path brought them at one point a fuller view of the cabin with its blue smoke-plume, and glint of red fire through the open door, outside which a pinkish pig and several speckled hens rooted and pecked round a large black pot, while a white goat browsed on the patch of thrift-sprinkled sward. And all this looked so home-like to Atty, who was just then less conscious of fear than of a chilly hunger, that he warily lagged behind Min, till he found an opportunity to slip aside, and make a dart for the scene which seemed to him much more attractive and hopeful than those dark bushes shivering in the bleak morning wind.

Mrs Mulrane was mixing meal and water for stirabout on the dresser, when a shrill sound of singing rose up suddenly close by: “What is it to goodness?” she wondered with a start, for nothing like it had been heard there since her sons grew up; and going to the door, she was aware of a very small boy in a bluish woollen bib, who sang the louder at her approach. It had struck Atty that a rendering of his most popular lay might prove a successful introduction, and accordingly:

“_I would I were a mountain pig_,”

he was chanting,

“_I would indeed bedad;
I would I were a mountain pig
A-aitin’ of some bread.
I would I were a mountain pig
A-drinkin’ of some milk--
I would I were a mountain pig
A-gettin’ bits of food._”

The last line vibrated with a vehement shrillness, and Mrs Mulrane said: “Och, whist, whist. Where at all are you streelin’ about to at this time of day?” For she was never very early astir, and had but lately made up her fire.

“We’re goin’ home to wherever the town is,” said Atty, “And if I had e’er an ould crust of bread, I’d sing you a lot more of the ‘Mountain Pig’ before I began aitin’ it at all.”

With an abrupt dive backwards Mrs Mulrane vanished indoors and speedily reappeared. Her hands were filled with the remains of last night’s supper, two flat griddle-cakes, either of which would cover this page. “Here’s for you,” she said, interrupting a piercing _I would_. “Take them, and stop your mouth, and run off home wid them, before you have the crathur inside roused up.”

This crathur was in reality a most harmless person, but the vagueness of the term left room for alarming imaginations, and Atty, with an uncomfortable remembrance about the man-trappers, ran off as fast as he could to join Min, whom he soon saw clambering on the low rocks across a smooth stretch of sand. The rocky spit went dwindling seaward, and ended in a line of detached boulders with sandy spaces between, like a row of stepping-stones, only suited, however, to a giant’s striding; and the last boulder was almost reached by the white edge of the tide as it came seething in. Beyond the cold slate-coloured water a band of dull red lingered on the north-western horizon, a belated remnant drifted round from the morning glow.

Running at the top of his speed, with both hands full, Atty tripped up over a shrivelled black coil of seaweed, knotted to a stony weight, and he came down headlong on the sand. He fell soft, and at first his chief concern was to recover his two cakes, which had flown out of his grasp; but when he scrambled to his feet, it was only to feel that cold clammy mouth closing round his ankles, and to find himself sinking, swiftly, horribly, until all the solid world seemed to be crumbling away beneath him. Min, who had come hurrying to meet him, almost rushed into the same entanglement, but luckily stood still on the lowest boulder, a small, sea-weedy slab, scarcely showing above the sand, whence she reached him a hand before it was too late. “What ailed you at all?” she said reprovingly, as he struggled up beside her. “Can’t you walk where it’s firm-like?” But immediately afterwards, attempting to set foot on a firm-like place, she plunged down even more deeply than he had done, and floundered back again in much affright.

Their plight, in truth, was extremely grave, and the more so, the less they understood the real nature of their peril. On one side the rough breakers were rolling in loud and swift, and all round was spread the deadly snare of the quicksand. At any moment the children might be urged by the more visible danger to flee into the jaws of the more fatal one too far for retreat. Meanwhile, however, they only uttered dismayed little shrieks as they groped vainly with tentative half-steps in every direction for a footing they never could find.

It was just at this time that Stacey Colgan with her daughters, and the widow Joyce, and old six-pound-ten Gallaher, accompanied by several lads and lasses, reached the end of the shingle belt, which forms the beach most of the way from Clochranbeg to Slughnatraigh. They had gone out early in quest of salt leaves, and finding these scarce, had wandered on till they came to the precincts of the man-trappers. A possibility of lighting upon the missing strange childer was present to their minds, though nobody thought them likely to be astray upon the strand, and the seekers for them had scattered themselves over the bogs and along the roads. So the whole party were surprised and excited when Judy Colgan exclaimed that she saw a couple of people over yonder down by the water, and that according to her belief it was the strange childer themselves.

“True for her, themselves they are bedad,” Mrs Joyce declared. “I know them by Min’s red skirt. Besides, who else would it be stravadin’ about there? And they in the very worst of the soft places, sure it’s destroyed they’ll be. Woman dear, what’ll we do at all?”

No sooner was their identity established, than the nimblest of the gossoons and _girsheachs_ raced off homewards, partly for help, and partly from emulous eagerness to communicate with the least delay the doubly sensational news that the strange childer were after bein’ got below on the strand, and they about drowndin’ themselves dead in the middle of Slughnatraigh. The rest of the party advanced as close as they dared to the verge of the dangerous ground, and stood there in a group, clamorous as sea-fowl, and as little to the purpose. For a strong breeze beat back the sound of their voices, so that their injunctions to “stand studdy where ye are, and set hand nor fut off of the dry stone for your lives,” never reached Min and Atty, who in any case would not probably have profited much thereby. But more effectual aid was at hand. By-and-by these helpless onlookers saw that two young men were coming rapidly down along the rocky spit, and finally jumping from one detached boulder to the other, till only a narrow sand strip separated them from the children. “They be Pat and Art Mulrane,” said Mrs Colgan; and by the dropping of the nickname she unconsciously showed that in this desperate crisis she had fixed some hopes upon their friendly intervention.

The first action of the brothers was hardly encouraging. One of them shook his fist fiercely at the children, and his threatening shout rose above the dull drumming of the rollers.

“If them barbarous young miscreants of man-trappers take and do anythin’ agin the unfortunate little crathurs now, I hope they’ll get hung for it, I do so,” the Widow Joyce said half-whimpering. Biddy Colgan simply ran away screeching, because, as she afterwards explained, she’d as lief not be seein’ the two of them _massacreed_ or swallied up.

“Och be aisy,” Six-pound-ten said to the widow. “Sure it’s only dispersuadin’ them he’d be of skytin’ out into the soft holes. Ah, woman, have sinse.”

Pat Mulrane had in fact roared at the children, who seemed about to rush towards him: “Don’t you offer to stir an atom off that, you young thieves of the world, or it’s settin’ the dog here at yous I’ll be to ait yous alive.” He would have found it difficult to carry out this threat, as Garry, the black-and-tan collie, himself had been once nearly engulfed, and ever since had resolutely avoided setting a paw on doubtful places. However it effectually deterred Atty and Min, who remained rooted in dismay. A finishing-touch seemed added to their tribulations by the advent of these notorious bugbears, at whom they had now and then flung with due circumspection a censorious pebble or clod. As they cowered together, motionless and mute, Min could only make some vindictive grimaces with her face hidden on Atty’s sleeve, and Atty thought wildly of setting up a propitiatory song, but could not screw up courage to begin.

Meanwhile a brief and anxious colloquy was going on between the two man-trappers. The urgency of the situation allowed scant time for words, and small choice of deeds. In a few moments the swift rising of the tide would swamp the children on their little ledge of safety, and though that lay within a man’s jump of the Mulrane’s station, to spring upon it without dislodging its other occupants was, by reason of its diminutive size and slippery surface, an altogether impossible feat.

“Musha, good gracious, what at all quare antic is the fellow at now?” commented Mrs Colgan to her criticising companions on the other side of Slughnatraigh, as they saw Pat Mulrane suddenly plunge forward as if about to dive off the lowest shelf of the rock. “Is it fallin’ after his head he’d be, to the back of everythin’ else?”

“Begorra, it’s makin’ a foot-stick of himself he is,” Six-pound-ten averred, “to let the children across,” and so it was.

By wedging his toes tightly into a crevice of the big boulder, and gripping with both hands a hold of the slimy, tawny-podded wreaths on the small one, Pat, prone at full length, just spanned the interval between them, over which Art stepped thus on a footbridge, and returned with a frightened child swinging from either arm. This manœuvre was executed with the utmost despatch, yet barely in time, for Pat’s precarious clutch of the slithery seaweed failed just as the other three were safely landed, so that down he went face foremost into the smothering slough, whence his brother hauled him out, blinded, half-choked, hideous to behold in a mask of blue-black oozy mire, after a desperate wrestle with the clinging horror of Slughnatraigh.

All serious danger, nevertheless, was at an end once they were set high and dry upon the big boulder, where they could wait securely until the rescue was completed with the help of inanimate planks and ropes. The strange childer were before long transferred to the Mulranes’ house, and joined there by the Colgans with their party. Not for many a year had Mrs Mulrane entertained so much company, and more kept dropping in through the afternoon, as rumours reached the town, and brought neighbours to investigate upon the spot.

Deep concern had prevailed at Clochranbeg towards the close of the day before, when Min and Atty were found to have entirely and unaccountably disappeared. Not only were the children general favourites, but a feeling existed that the parish was in some measure responsible for them, and that a slur would be cast upon it if they were allowed, as Joe Fottrell said, “to go to loss.” Most people had a sense that such an event would be unlucky as well as lamentable. Search-parties had been roaming over the bogs all night, and some were still going to and fro among their holes and hillocks; but an opinion that they would not again be seen alive was steadily gaining ground.

Nobody wandered more widely and with a more distracted mind than Mrs O’Hagan, the strange childer’s landlady, who was reproaching herself bitterly for having “maybe scared them away wid blamin’ them for th’ ould kilt hin, and talkin’ about the Union.” She had gone so far afield that the news of their recovery did not find her till near sunset, and even then in the shape of reports at once disquieting and contradictory. Some said that the strange childer had been last seen right in the middle of Slughnatraigh. Some that old Mrs Mulrane had hunted them away from her door, and set the dog at them. Others, with much convincing persistency and detail, related that the man-trappers “were after drowndin’ both of them below on the strand, and they screechin’ the way you might hear them in Derry.”

Her relief was therefore intense when she found them happily established by the Mulranes’ fire, little the worse for their adventures, which several neighbours graphically recounted to her, laying especial stress upon the heroism displayed by Pat Mulrane, who had come, Six-pound-ten said, “widin an ames ace of losin’ his life over it.” Upon Pat, who still looked limp and woebegone as he sat in the chimney-corner, Mrs O’Hagan showered, vastly to his further discomfort, profuse praises and benedictions.

“Long sorry I’d be,” she said in peroration, “to be passin’ remarks agin any person in the parish, but I question is there e’er another boy in it that would take and make a foot-stick of himself above the bewitched ould houle out yonder, that’s neither land nor water, unless ’twas the Divil had the stirrin’ of them together accordin’ to some plan of his own, as is like enough, for the unnathural thrimblin’ and quakin’s in them yit. Sure now, if it wasn’t only for yourself, Pat Mulrane, it’s at the black bottom of that awful place them two little imps of innicent crathurs ’ud be lyin’ this minyit, supposin’ there is a bottom to it at all, instead of sittin’ here as grand as you plase, aitin’ bread and treckle, the bould little tormints, and half the parish heart-scalded runnin’ over the country after them the lenth of the night.”

“Och, they’re welcome, ma’am,” Pat muttered ambiguously.

“Take a cup of tay, ma’am; it’s dry you’re apt to be after all that fine talk you’re givin’ Pat,” his mother said with a sub-acid suavity, for while exulting on his behalf she retained a resentful memory of her last visit to Mrs O’Hagan, and of Dan’s rejected suit.

Mrs O’Hagan accepted the tea unsuspectingly, though protesting that she had only looked in to fetch home the children; yet in the end she went her way without them. The Mulranes were loth to relinquish them so soon, chiefly on account of Maggie Dowling, who from her imprisoning box-bed declared that “the little gossoon wid his quare song done her heart good,” and who seemed sadly cast down by the prospect of their departure. “You might lave them at all events,” Mrs Mulrane suggested, “till the crathur’s tired of the fantigue.” And Mrs O’Hagan consented, mindful of what poverty prevailed in her own and her neighbours’ houses, and not ignorant that the Mulranes were at this time some degrees better off than the rest. As for Min and Atty themselves, the friendliness of Garry, and the abundance of freshly-baked griddle cakes, very sufficiently reconciled them to their change of quarters.

In this way it came about that the strange childer took up their abode with the man-trappers, and one result of it was that the latter shook off the bad name which had been fastened upon them. From that day the youth of Clochranbeg transferred their animosity to unchancy Slughnatraigh, which they thenceforth regarded with increased dread and aversion, and at whose impassively sullen, grey face they pelted vanishing stones from an even more cautious distance than when the man-trappers had been their mark. Six-pound-ten’s oft-repeated narrative of the strange childer’s hair’s-breadth escape always wound up with, “Ay, bedad, ’twas the fine foot-stick he made of himself entirely that time;” and this helped to suggest the new nickname with which it somehow seemed necessary to replace the old. It became customary to speak of Pat Mulrane and his brother as “the foot-sticks,” a title which, in the circumstances, nobody could shout after them with hostile derision. Moreover, as Min and Atty often accompanied them to the strand or the town, they were gradually drawn out of the isolation into which they had shrunk, and began to hold again some intercourse with their kind.

These changes were all more or less soothing to Mrs Mulrane, and under their influence she showed a perceptible diminution in the eccentricity and moodiness of her demeanour. But her clearing sky showed its brightest patch one day when a friend of the M‘Evoys looked in on her charged with what were obviously overtures to the making up of a match between their Lizzie and her Pat. On that occasion she uttered dark and riddling speeches, which would not have misbeseemed an ancient Pythoness, or the heroine of an Æschylean drama, about people whose ignorance and pride “hindered them of taking what was offered them, when belike nothing ailed it all the while except bein’ a dale too good for them, or the likes of them, and who were very apt to find they had missed their chances, if ever they come lookin’ after it again.”

Nevertheless this lifting of her clouds was only partial and transitory. Their shadow dropped upon her once more before the dissatisfied go-between had well re-crossed the threshold, and she fell into a gloomy reverie, standing idle at her door, while the chant of the _Mountain Pig_ came faintly from the inner room, where it was beguiling that long spring afternoon for Maggie Dowling. If she had put her dejection into words they would have run somewhat as follows: “It’s poor Dan I do be thinkin’ bad of. Them other two boys might be right enough, but me heart’s scalded about him, for he didn’t get fairity wid it all, troth he did not. And it’s blamin’ me he is, I well know. There might be a letter at the office agin next Saturday, but it’s not to me he’ll write. Last time it was to Pat, and before that to Maggie and Art; niver a word he sent to me. It’s him I’m thinkin’ bad of, the poor child. But I might maybe get news of him on Saturday.”

OLD ISAAC’S BIGGEST HAUL

Grace M‘Evoy heard the boys talking about it after supper as they sat on the rocks before their doorway, in which she stood knitting; and the conversation very much grieved and vexed her for several reasons. She was the only daughter of old Isaac M‘Evoy, and sister of “the boys,” so called merely because they were still unmarried. They were all three her elders, and she herself was “well on to thirty.” Theirs was a fishing family, and the chief event of her days had always been the going and coming of the boat. Not the same boat, for their old _Granuaile_, condemned as unseaworthy, had lain discarded by the tiny rough pier for the last half-dozen years or so. Her successor and namesake, however, sadly dissatisfied old M‘Evoy, who seldom failed to draw invidious comparisons between the two craft when embarking or disembarking. He had done so this evening as the _Granuaile_ junior was being fastened to a staple wedged in among the boulders.

“Sure, if we’d been in _her_, the crathur,” he had said, looking regretfully at the black, slug-like shape, “we’d ha’ got home in one-half the time. She knew how to be takin’ advantage of every breath of win’ she met wid. But this lump of a baste ’ill go sulkin’ along wid herself before the handiest breeze ever blew in the bay, as sodden as a gob of mud.”

“At all events,” Thady had replied, handing out an oar to Grace, “_she_ isn’t apt to be springin’ a leak on us any minyit, might land us to the bottom like a handful of cockles droppin’ out of your pocket.”

But his father had stumped unheeding across the shingle-strip that led indoors. He was smoking a last pipe now by the hearth, safely beyond hearing of his sons’ discourse, although to Grace in the doorway the voices came so clearly that she sometimes glanced to and fro nervously, apprehensive lest they should penetrate too far.

“The long and the short of it is, it’s too ould he’s gettin’,” summed up Thady, the middle brother; “we’d do a dale better wid him out of the boat.”

“Ay would we so,” said Tim, the youngest, “and himself would as well.”

“If he’d contint himself at all,” Joe said more doubtfully. “Goodness knows he’s been at it long enough. But he’s as headstrong as a two-year-ould; and, sure, how can we go agin the man, if he’s got a mind to be comin’ along?”

“What I was thinkin’ is this,” said Thady; “we might slip out early to-morra very quiet, before he’s awake, and pick up young Farrelly goin’ by the point. _He’s_ smart enough. And then, wid nothin’ on board delayin’ us, we’d have a good chance of a bit of luck.”

“Bedad, now, ’twould be the best way,” Tim said with decision.

“Me father’d be ragin’ and annoyed, belike, over it,” Joe said with doubt.

“Sure, man, it’s one of them things that can’t be helped if he is, like the rain fallin’ straight and the water flowin’ crooked,” said Thady. “He might better be ragin’ than drowndin’ himself and the whole of us, as he might very aisy one of these rough days, let alone losin’ the mackerel on us. It stands to raison we’ll have to take and lave him behind sooner or later if he won’t lave himself. We can bid Grace tell him we didn’t like to be disturbin’ him that early, and she’ll conthrive to pacify him. If he wants to be doin’ somethin’ there’s plinty of nets to mend.”

After a little further discussion this plan was adopted, and as a preliminary step the boys presently went indoors to bed, for they agreed that they must start with the soon-returning summer sun. But their sister lingered for a while in the doorway, looking out into the waning twilight with a pucker of anxiety between her eyes and an angry grief at her heart.

“Cruel annoyed himself ’ill be,” was the burden of her meditations, “cruel annoyed. And he as gay and plisant in his mind this evenin’ as anythin’, and sayin’ it looked to be grand fishin’ weather the morra--and so it will, worse luck; but they’ll all be after slippin’ off wid themselves on him, and nobody only me about the place to thry put a good face on it, and I might as well spare meself the trouble, for he’ll see the raison they done it as plain as I see the moon risin’ up behind Slieve Sterran. Sure now, if I was them, I’d liefer every mackerel ever swum in the green say went to loss than to be vexin’ him that way, the crathur, troth I would so.... And Thady agin him, that he thought a dale on ever,” she continued bitterly. “I wouldn’t scarce have believed it of him. But ah, sure, after all ’tisn’t Thady’s fau’t entirely if Himself’s gettin’ ould--a thrifle ouldish--on us. Goin’ on for eighty he is--and then suppose he went, and by chance anythin’ happint him?” Grace had lived too long by the sea to underrate the risk of such chances. “I daren’t say a word,” she said to herself, “only it’s sorry I am in me heart wid thinkin’ of one thing and the other.”

So, still disconsolately thinking, she shut herself into the dark little house, with a mind full of evil auguries for the morrow.

And next morning everything began to happen very much in accordance with her forecasts. It was serene blue and white weather when she awoke somewhat later than usual, because her unquiet thoughts had delayed her falling asleep. There was not a sound to be heard, and for a while she cherished a hope that her father had been roused after all, and that the plans of the boys for leaving him behind had thus come harmlessly to naught. But presently her heart, hopes and all, sank plump down, like a full jug when you let go its handle in the well, for a call came from without: “Grace! Grace!” in tones of peremptory excitement.

Old Isaac was tramping about on the boulders when she obeyed his summons. He was a tall, long-bearded old man, gaunt and stooped, and Grace fancied that he looked more gaunt and more stooped than usual this morning. The many lines on his face were complicated by fresh creases of anxiety, and the gaze he bent upon his daughter was as intent as if he had been landing a twelve-pound salmon in a doubtful net.

“What the mischief and all’s took the boys and the boat?” was the question he had been waiting there to ask her. The hope he was cherishing was that he might hear they were only gone a little way to get bait, or on some such errand, and would be calling back for him. But Grace replied, in as innocent and matter-of-course a manner as she could: “Is it the boys? Sure they went off wid themselves this good while ago. Startin’ early they had to be for fear of missin’ the tide in the Headstones. Away beyond that they said they would be goin’ after the mackerel, and they thought bad of wakenin’ you out of your sleep.”

Down sank her father’s hope, and up swelled his wrath. “So that’s what they done on me,” he said. “That’s the thrick they’re after playin’ on me--the young thieves of the world!”

“Just for ’fraid of wakenin’ you,” Grace interposed, clinging desperately to her one flimsy excuse. “For ’fraid of wakenin’ you out of your sleep, daddy darlint.”

“Ay, begor, afraid of that they’d be, sure enough,” said he.

“’Deed were they,” Grace said, eagerly receiving his assent as a sign that he accepted her explanation. “Rael quiet and cautious they must ha’ went, the way you wouldn’t be woke.”

“The divil doubt it. Arrah then, git along wid yourself out of that, standin’ there tellin’ lies,” he said, turning upon her with a sudden savageness. “Is it dotin’ and demented you consait I am, forby an ould creepin’ cripple? The schemers, the villins--well enough they seen ’twould be a grand day for the fishin’, so they thought they’d slink off and do whatever plased themselves widout me obsthructin’ of them--that taught every one of them to handle an oar. I’m no better in a boat these times--and it me own boat--than a lump of ballast; that’s the opinion they have of me. And wishin’ the whole pack of them is--Thady and all the rest of yous--wishin’ I was in me clay, instead of to be wastin’ their time, if you plase, and hinderin’ them of their chances because I’m grown a bit stiff and clumsy. Git along wid yourself, and hould your fool’s tongue.”

Grace retreated indoors, where she stood aimlessly by the grey hearth, too much dejected to set about stirring up the smouldering peat-sod. “They’d a right to be ashamed of themselves to go do such a thing on him,” she was thinking, “but I wouldn’t be sayin’ aught agin them anyway behind their backs. ’Twould only annoy Himself there the worse, and indeed now they have him greatly annoyed--a good-for-nothin’ pack they are. And I dunno is there a hand’s turn I could be doin’ for him, unless I baked him a bit of griddle-cake for the breakfast. But as like as not he wouldn’t look at it.”

On these sad reflections broke a sound which sent her darting out of doors again. It was the rattle of a chain, and a grating on the shingle, such as betoken arrivals and departures by water. And there, indeed, was her father, fumbling about the fastenings of the old _Granuaile_. In a moment the rusty bolt slipped, falling with a clank, and he began to shove her down seaward.

“Och, saints above! What are you at, father, at all?” Grace called to him aghast.

But he only continued to push the boat. The light canvas frame slid along expeditiously, and close to the water’s edge he righted it with a sudden twist.

“You aren’t ever thinkin’ to go out in that ould crathur?” Grace protested, pursuing him in extreme consternation. “And she lyin’ there this half-dozen year and more, and leakin’ like twenty sieves.”

“Bedad then, it’s fine and dhry she ought to be by this time,” old Isaac replied grimly.

“To be sure, in coorse you wouldn’t be that cracked and crazy,” Grace asserted with a confidence she was far from feeling.

“Never you mind troublin’ yourself to considher how cracked and how crazy I’ve a fancy to be,” said her father. “Quare enough in his head you might say anybody was that ’ud sit at home the best fishin’ day of the saison; and it’s not what I’m goin’ to do, not for to plase all the impident young rapscallions in Ireland. Run along and be fetchin’ me the coil of line there’s lyin’ on the ledge of the back windy.”

But instead of running Grace sat down on the rugged little pier-end and began to cry miserably in the golden early sunshine. “It’s dhrowndin’ yourself on us you’ll be, I well know,” she said. “And ne’er a bit of breakfast you’ve had, and the fire not made up to be gettin’ you anythin’ quick--och, what ’ill become of me at all at all? For it’s sinkin’ under your feet she’ll be.”

Her father answered nothing, but stumped off into the house, whence he soon re-appeared laden with a coil of line, a small bundle, and a flappy brownish roll--the boat-sail, in fact, which he had reached down from among the rafters. The sight of these final preparations seemed to freeze Grace into composure. She watched him silently for a while as he fitted the little mast into its socket and shifted boards and benches. Then she said, in the tone of one stating some incontrovertible proposition: “Well, you’ll have me along wid you, anyhow, daddy. Joe always says it’s meself’s the great one for pullin’ and balin’ out; and mindin’ the boat I’ll be while yourself’s fishin’.”

At this her father chuckled cheerfully as he spliced a rope. “Why to be sure,” he said, “unless it’s one of the ould hins I’ll be bringin’ along to take care of me, or maybe ould Tib, the cat, ’ud suit me better. In coorse I’ll be takin’ the aither or the other of yous. Just you wait there aisy till I do, me dear.”

“May goodness forgive me, but it’s yourself’s the ungovernable man,” Grace said, and then stood watching him in dumb despair. He had apparently recovered his spirits, and laughed to himself occasionally; but Grace saw his hands shaking as he tied the knots, and she felt bitterly that her own hands were bound into helplessness by some invincible, invisible power.

The fair morning seemed to her like a dismal parody of other fair mornings very long ago, when she, a small child, used to be watching him get ready to go out fishing alone, for the boys were not yet big enough to give any substantial assistance. Hale and hearty he was in those days, and the thought of his ever being otherwise occurred to her no more than did doubts about the sun’s duly rising. And when he had rowed or sailed away she could run indoors to her mother with her razor-shells and wonderfully curious pebbles. Now, with Herself dead on them this ten year, and Himself, old and feeble, setting off to get drowned, for all she could do or say, she seemed to have strayed a terribly long way from that care-free paradise.

Suddenly a change in the light made her look round, and as suddenly she plucked her father by the sleeve. “It isn’t goin’ to be anyways such fine weather, then, at all,” she announced triumphantly. “Look at the fog where it’s blowin’ in like a stone wall. Sorra the boat i’ll be after mackerel in the bay this day whatever.”

Grace was right in her facts. One of the low-lying cloud-banks that wander more perilously than the ancient Jostling Rocks upon the plains of ocean had drifted shoreward by some caprice of the wind, and was now crowding into half a hundred inlets, among them the M‘Evoys’ creek. She was wrong, however, in the conclusion to which she had so happily hurried, and she speedily learned her mistake.

“Well now,” old Isaac said deliberately, looking round the shrunken horizon, “all I can say is that if there was five fogs in it, or fifty fogs, or five hundred for the matter of that, every one of them on the top of the other, niver a bit I’d be at a loss of me day’s fishin’ for the likes of them--or anybody else,” and he stepped on board with a determined stride.

“And the boys ’ill go to loss in it too, belike,” Grace said, standing by in her woe; “ne’er a one of yous ’ill ever be comin’ home to me again, and I haven’t a sowl in the width of the world. I wisht to God I was away in the ould buryin’-ground there at Lisannagh, along wid Herself, and then me heart wouldn’t be broke among yous all.”

Her father, now in the very act of pushing off, gave no signs of hearing, and she sat down upon the pier, oppressed by utter despondency. If she had any motive at all for lingering there it must have been supplied by her last flicker of hope. The boys, she thought, might possibly soon return, to be instantly despatched in quest of the mistrusted _Granuaile_.

How long Grace sat, crouched on the stones with her head in her hands, she could not have guessed. All her thoughts were out at sea, whence it seemed to her that news, good or bad, must soonest come. But it was a sound of steps clattering on the loose shingle behind her that first caused her to start up expectant. And what she saw made her stand gazing in wide-eyed terror. For the newcomer was young Farrelly, the boys’ comrade, alone, bare-headed and wet-haired, with drops glistening and falling as he moved.

“Is it you then, Con Farrelly?” she said. “And what’s gone wid the rest of them?”

“Och, Grace, mavrone--the Headstones!” said Con Farrelly.

Now the Headstones is a name of fear round about Kilavawn. It has been bestowed on a small square-shaped bay which bears an evil reputation. The salt water has there flowed over the grey crested ridges of a sea-sunken hill, and these rocks emerge in such numbers that they give it somewhat the aspect of a burial-ground. Jagged reefs and sandy bars help to make the place a very difficult passage to thread safely, even in fair weather; storms, and especially fogs, convert it into a mazy labyrinth of perils. Many a luckless keel has missed the clue and come to fatal grief among them. Con’s brief answer, therefore, conjured up a clear and cruel picture in Grace’s imagination.

“Is it dhrownded all of them was, and you comin’ away?” she asked calmly.

“Look you, Grace, you crathur, this was the way of it,” Con said in a breathless hurry. “Takin’ the short cut through the Headstones we were, intendin’ to thry off Malinish, when up come the fog like a wing clappin’ down on us, and we in among the thick of them snaggy rocks--you could see as far through a feather pillow--and a win’ whistlin’ up along wid it. So the first thing we knew, on agin a one we druv, and knocked a big houle in her--she wouldn’t keep afloat while you would be shippin’ an oar, that’s sartin, and sure you know ne’er a one of them swims a stroke, only meself. So they bid me get to shore, if I could at all, and they’d make a shift to hould on to the rock--but, telling you the truth, I misdoubt could they. I heard them lettin’ a woeful shout just afore I come to land, that was the most I could do,” he confessed. “But I run round along this strand, thinkin’ I’d borry the loan of your other ould boat, and thry would there be e’er a chance of raichin’ to them in her--she’d be apt to keep afloat that far--and the fog’s liftin’ a bit. I might maybe find them right enough yet, if I had no delayin’. Where have you her lyin’ now?”

“Sure me father’s took and dhrownded himself in her this mornin’, Con,” Grace said, quietly still. “He wouldn’t take me along wid him, sorra a bit would he, or else ’twould ha’ all happint very handy like. But the ould boat’s gone.”

“The Lord be good to us, Grace, is it romancin’ you are?” asked Con. “Why, what would bewitch the man to do such a thing all of a suddint? Ne’er a word the lads told me of his comin’ out this day. True for you, though--the boat’s away; and what am I to be at next?”

“Why wouldn’t you go look for another one, then, this minyit?” Grace said with a flash of vehemence. “Wasn’t you sayin’ there might be a chance yet? And is it standin’ there you are and talkin’ foolish, instead of runnin’ for your life?”

“Runnin’ I could be fast enough,” said Con, “but where to thry for a boat’s more than I can tell. Divil a one have I in me mind that I could be layin’ me hand on. Howane’er, I’ll do me endeavours, Grace M‘Evoy, troth will I so.”

Con darted off again along the beach, and was quickly out of sight. He left Grace in an infinite solitude. She had spoken truly when declaring that her father and brothers were all she possessed, for outside the little circle gathered round yonder central hearth-fire she could count no kinsfolk and few neighbours. Daddy and Joe and Thady and Tim, she felt certain that she was never to behold one of them more.

Under stress of that appalling belief she could only cower down among the boulders, closing eyes and ears to the outer world with a fold of her grey shawl, as if she might thus exclude also the inward desolation. She was holding back her thoughts much as she would have held her breath, drowning under deep water, conscious all the while that the terrible moment could not be long deferred.

“Grace, you big gawk! Is it asleep or wool-gatherin’ you are? Sittin’ crooched there like an ould wet hin. Grace, you great _stronsach_ you--instead of catchin’ a holt of the rope, and us bawlin’ to you this last half-hour.”

Her father’s voice thus loudly accosting her broke roughly on her muffled ears. But seraphic strains could not have sounded to Grace more bewilderingly sweet. Up she started out of her black dream. The white fog had lifted and lightened wonderfully, so that there were golden gleams shining about its farthest silvery edges; but this was not what she saw. For close by bobbed up and down the old _Granuaile_, with her father standing in the bow, just striking the sail, and with all the three boys sitting in the stern, safe and sound, albeit rather sheepish and disconcerted of demeanour. Grace seized the tossed rope, and in another minute the whole party were tramping on the noisy stones. They had no fish to unload--not so much as a herring.

“Well, Grace, it’s the quare fine haul I’m after bringin’ home this day at all evints,” said old Isaac, “the biggest ever I took--if it was good for much, which it may be, or maybe it mayn’t. Where am I after findin’ them? Sure now, tellin’ you the truth, ’twas more be good luck than good guidance I happint on them, for the fog was that thick you couldn’t sort your fingers from your thumbs, when I come where I heard the bawls. But says I to meself: ‘That’s Thady,’ says I, ‘be the powers, it is himself.’ For he was a great hand at the roarin’ if anythin’ wint agin him, ever since he was the len’th of a sizeable mackerel. And, be the same token,” he continued, “very prisently I come widin a knife’s edge of scrapin’ desthruction into the ould boat off the lump of a rock me three hayroes there was sittin’ gathered up atop of. And bedad now, accordin’ to the look of them, for all the pleasure they were gettin’ out of it they needn’t ha’ throubled themselves to be flouncin’ off that outragious early--and bad manners to them--before other people had got rightly asleep. They might be none the worser if they waited till their hurry was over.”

“Och wirrasthrew, dad, you’ve got the laugh agin us this time, and no mistake,” Joe said with his wonted good-humoured grin, “and we’re very apt to not hear the last of it this saison anyway.”

Joe’s forebodings proved to be well founded. But the morning’s event had another result which nobody would have predicted. Old Isaac has never gone fishing again. Many a time--such is the contrariness of the human mind--have Joe and Thady and Tim come talking to him persuasively and wistfully about the grandeur of the weather, but his answer is always the same. “I’m after takin’ me’ biggest haul,” he says, “and nothin’ less ’ud satisfy me now. Stoppin’ at home I’ll be and contintin’ meself wid that.”

THE WRONG TURNING