Sometimes the pocket was empty, and at such times Mick was put to an elaborate explanation of what had happened, embracing the origin of this mysterious fruit.
‘Wait an’ I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘Last night, when I looked in my box where the leprechaun puts it, there was a beautiful lot of fruit there. Oranges and grapes and apples and the rest, more’n I could lift in the both of my hands.’
‘Not any bananas?’ Morgan asked anxiously.
‘Bananners? Ah, don’t be talkun! Three beautiful bunches of them fresh from the tree, with the juice runnun’ out of the stalks of them, they was that ripe. “So,” says I, “I’ll put them all in my pocket, I will, and go out and ate one or two of them.” His voice sank to an awed, confidential level. ‘So, when I was after leaving Mainstone, and got out on the turnpike, I walked quick along the cemetery wall, for you never know what you mightn’t see in a place the likes of that. An’ then I heard a sound of wheels behind me and the hoofs of horses trottun’ up to the corner. An’ I thought, “Who would be driving after me at that time of night, an’ not a star showun’. Houly saints, I thought, what can it be?”’
‘I know what it was,’ said Morgan grimly, for he had heard of this adventure before.
‘Is that a fact?’ said Mick, with impressive surprise.
‘It was the dead-coach, mam,’ said Morgan in a whisper.
‘And so it was,’ replied Mick, slapping his thigh. ‘The dead-coach—and on the box of ut two men in long black coats with the faces blacked on them and hair like our ass. When they see me they pulls up sudden, and these black pair jumps off of the box and takes hould on me and puts their hands in my pocket, the way my shirt stuck to my back for fright, and stole all the fruit on me and drove off without a word.’
The sensation of this adventure was almost enough to compensate Morgan for the loss of his fruit. It was Morgan’s favourite story. But Gladys was Abner’s girl, and would rather sit on his knee listening with wide eyes. On Abner’s knee she felt quite safe.
Sometimes Abner, Mick, and the two children would leave Mary busy with her sewing and walk down together to the bridge over the Folly Brook, or to the meadows where thickets of hazel and shy companies of birches stood along the stream. Mick always carried a catapult with him. Ever since his boyhood he had been a deadly shot with this weapon, and could ‘knock the head off of a wran,’ as he put it, at a range of thirty yards. He made Morgan a catapult with which the child blackened his thumb-nails, and carried in his pocket small round pebbles that he picked from the bed of the stream, now shrunken to a thread of gin-clear water.