“There was no rest in the ocean for a week, the bay was full of storms, and the vessel burst, and the big bales split, and the hemp was scattered and torn and tangled on the rocks, or it did drift. But at last it soothed, and we gathered it and brought it to the field here. We brought it, and my father did buy it of the salvage man for a price; a Mexican valuer he was, but the deal was bad, and it lies there; going rotten it is, the rain wears it, and the sun’s astray, and the wind is gone.”
“That’s a great misfortune. What is on it?” said the Man from Kilsheelan.
“It is a great misfortune, mister man. Laid out it is, turned it is, hackled it is, but faith it will not dry or sweeten, never a hank of it worth a pig’s eye.”
“’Tis the devil and all his injury,” said Kilsheelan.
The young girl, her name it was Christine, sat grieving. One of her beautiful long hands rested on her knee, and she kept beating it with the other. Then she began to speak.
“The captain of that ship lodged in this house with us while the hemp was recovered and sold; a fine handsome sport he was, but fond of the drink, and very friendly with the Mexican man, very hearty they were, a great greasy man with his hands covered with rings that you’d not believe. Covered! My father had been gone travelling a week or a few days when a dark raging gale came off the bay one night till the hemp was lifted all over the field.”
“It would have lifted a bullock,” said Denis, “great lumps of it, like trees.”
“And we sat waiting the captain, but he didn’t come home and we went sleeping. But in the morning the Mexican man was found dead murdered on the strand below, struck in the skull, and the two hands of him gone. ’Twas not long when they came to the house and said he was last seen with the captain, drunk quarrelling; and where was he? I said to them that he didn’t come home at all and was away from it. ‘We’ll take a peep at his bed,’ they said, and I brought them there, and my heart gave a strong twist in me when I see’d the captain stretched on it, snoring to the world and his face and hands smeared with the blood. So he was brought away and searched, and in his pocket they found one of the poor Mexican’s hands, just the one, but none of the riches. Everything to be so black against him and the assizes just coming on in Cork! So they took him there before the judge, and he judged him and said it’s to hang he was. And if they asked the captain how he did it, he said he did not do it at all.”
“But there was a bit of iron pipe beside the body,” said Denis.
“And if they asked him where was the other hand, the one with the rings and the mighty jewels on them, and his budget of riches, he said he knew nothing of that nor how the one hand got into his pocket. Placed there it was by some schemer. It was all he could say, for the drink was on him and nothing he knew.