“How did he let on to you?”
“He did not let on,” said the Man from Kilsheelan.
Tom Tool lay long silent in the darkness; he had a mistrust of the Man, knowing him to have a forgetful mind; everything slipped through it like rain through the nest of a pigeon. But at last he asked him: “Where is he now?”
“He’ll be at Ballygoveen.”
“You to know that and you with no word from him?”
“O, I know it, I know; and if I’d a trusty comrade I’d walk out of this and to him I would go. Bags of diamonds!”
Then he went to sleep, sudden; but the next night he was at Tom Tool again: “If I’d a trusty comrade,” said he; and all that and a lot more.
“’Tis not convenient to me now,” said Tom Tool, “but to-morrow night I might go wid you.”
The next night was a wild night, and a dark night, and he would not go to make a break from the asylum, he said: “Fifty miles of journey, and I with no heart for great walking feats! It is not convenient, but to-morrow night I might go wid you.”
The night after that he said: “Ah, whisht wid your diamonds and all! Why would you go from the place that is snug and warm into a world that is like a wall for cold dark, and but the thread of a coat to divide you from its mighty clasp, and only one thing blacker under the heaven of God and that’s the road you walk on, and only one thing more shy than your heart and that’s your two feet worn to a tissue tramping in dung and ditches....”