"Poorly only. Ah, John, this is the hard day on me always, the Sunday. I declare to me God I detest Sunday. Here am I marching through the woods since seven and I having no drink whatever. That cursed Sergeant McGoldrick! May he have a tongue upon him some day the color of an ould brick and he in the seventh cavern of Hell! Did ye see Ned?"
The sudden and tense question was not immediately intelligible to John Brennan. There were so many of the name about Garradrimna. Padna Padna pranced impatiently as he waited for an answer.
"Ah, is it letting on you are that you don't know who I mean, and you with your grand ecclesiastical learning and all to that. 'Tis your own father, Ned Brennan, that I mean. I was in a 'join' with him to get a can out of Brannigan's. Mebbe you didn't see him anywhere down through the wood, for I have an idea that he's going to swindle me. Did ye see him, I'm asking you?"
Even still John did not reply, for something seemed to have caught him by the throat and was robbing him of the power of speech. The valley, with its vast malevolence of which his mother had so recently warned him, was now driving him to say something which was not true.
"No, Padna, I did not see him!" he at last managed to jerk out.
"Mebbe he didn't manage to get me drink for me yet, and mebbe he did get it and is after drinking it somewhere in the shadows of the trees where he couldn't be seen. But what am I saying at all? Sure if he was drinking it there before me, where you're standing, I couldn't see him, me eyes is that bad. Isn't it the poor and the hard case to be blinded to such an extent?"
John Brennan felt no pity, so horrible was the expression that now struggled into those dimming eyes. He thought of a puzzling fact of his parentage. Why was it that his mother had never been able to save his father from the ways of degradation into which he had fallen, the low companions, the destruction of the valley; from all of which to even the smallest extent she was now so anxious to save her son?
Padna Padna was still blowing upon his fingers and regretting:
"Now isn't it the poor and the hard case that there's no decent fellows left in the world at all. To think that I can meet never a one now, me that spent so much of me life driving decent fellows, driving, driving. John, do ye know what it is now? You're after putting me in mind of Henry Shannon. He was the decentest fellow! Many's the time I drove him down to your grandmother's place when he wouldn't have a foot under him to leave Garradrimna. That was when your mother was a young girl, John. Hee, hee, hee!"