Whatever might have been the reasons for my fellow-traveller’s anxiety about my name and occupation, I knew not, yet could not help feeling gratified at thinking that as I had not given my name at the coach office, I was a great a puzzle to him as he to me.
“A severe night, sir,” said I, endeavouring to break ground in conversation.
“Mighty severe,” briefly and half crustily replied the unknown, with a richness of brogue, that might have stood for a certificate of baptism in Cork or its vicinity.
“And a bad road too, sir,” said I, remembering my lately accomplished stage.
“That’s the reason I always go armed,” said the unknown, clinking at the same moment something like the barrel of a pistol.
Wondering somewhat at his readiness to mistake my meaning, I felt disposed to drop any further effort to draw him out, and was about to address myself to sleep, as comfortably as I could.
“I’ll jist trouble ye to lean aff that little parcel there, sir,” said he, as he displaced from its position beneath my elbow, one of the paper packages the guard had already alluded to.
In complying with this rather gruff demand, one of my pocket pistols, which I carried in my breast pocket, fell out upon his knee, upon which he immediately started, and asked hurriedly—“and are you armed too?”
“Why, yes,” said I, laughingly; “men of my trade seldom go without something of this kind.”
“Be gorra, I was just thinking that same,” said the traveller, with a half sigh to himself.