It seems that he is not quite so fastidious about dogs as he used to be.
When in the west of Ireland some years ago, pretending to be on the look-out for “local colour” for a novel, I heard, with about ten thousand others, a very amusing story regarding a gun. It was told to me by a man who was engaged in grazing a cow along the side of a ditch where I sat while partaking of a sandwich, fondly hoping that at sundown I might be able to look a duck or two straight in the face as the “fly” came over the smooth surface of the glorious lake along which the road skirted.
“Your honour,” said the narrator—he pronounced the words something like “yer’an’r,” but the best attempts to reproduce a brogue are ineffective—“Your honour will mind how Mr. Egan was near having an accident just as he drew by the bit of stone wall beyond the entrance to his own gates?”
“Yes,” I replied, “I remember hearing that he was fired at by some ruffian, and that his horse ran away with him.”
“It’s likely that that’s the same story only told different. Maybe you never heard tell that it was Patsy Muldoon that was bid to do the job for Mr. Egan, God save him!”
“I never heard that.”
“Maybe not, sir. Ay, Patsy has repented for that shot, for it knocked the eye of him that far into the inside of his head that the doctors had no machine long enough to drag for it in the depths of his ould skull. Patsy wasn’t a well-favoured boy before that night, and with the loss of his ear and the misplacement of his eye—it’s not lost that it is, for it’s somewhere in the inside of his head—he’s not a beauty just now. You see, sir, Patsy Muldoon, Conn Moriarty, Jim Tuohy, and Tim Gleeson was all consarned in the business. They got the lend of a loan of ould Gleeson’s gun, and the powder was in a half-pint whisky-bottle with a roll of paper for a cork, and every boy was supposed to bring his own bullets. Well, sir, ould Gleeson, before going quiet to his bed, had put a full charge of powder and a bullet down the throat of the gun, and had left her handy for Tim in the turf stack. But when Tim got a hoult of the wippon, he didn’t know that the ould man had loaded her, and so he put another charge in her, and rammed it home to make sure. Then he slipped the bottle with the rest of the powder into his pocket and strolled down to the bit of dead wall—I suppose they call them dead walls, sir, because they’re so convanient for such-like jobs. Anyhow, he laid down herself and the powder-bottle handy among the grass, and went back to the cabin, so as not to be suspected by the polis of interferin’ with the job that was Patsy’s by right. Well, sir, my brave Conn was the next to come to the place, just to see that Tim hadn’t played a thrick on him. He knew that it was all right when he saw herself lying among the grass, and as he didn’t know that Tim had loaded her, he gave her a mouthful of powder himself and rammed down the lead. After him came my bould Tuohy, and, by the Powers, if he didn’t load herself in proper style too. Last of all came Patsy that was to do the job—he’d been consalin’ himself in the plantation, and it was barely time he had to put another charge into the ould gun, when Mr. Egan came up on his horse. Patsy slipped a cap on the nipple, and took a good aim from the side of the wall. When he pulled the trigger it’s a dead corp that the gentleman would ha’ been only for the accident that occurred just then, for by some reason or other that nobody can account for, herself burst—a thing she’d never done before—and Patsy’s eye was druv into his head, and he was left searching by the aid of the other for the half of his ear, while Mr. Egan was a mile away on a mad horse. That’s the story, your honour, only nobody can account to this day for the quare way that Patsy smiles when he sees a single barr’l gun with the barr’l a bit rusty.”
It was, I recollect, on the day following the rehearsal of this pretty little tale—the moral of which is that no man should shoot at a fellow man from the shelter of a crumbling wall, without having ascertained the exact numerical strength of the charges already within the barrel of the gun—that I was caught on the mountain in a shower of rain which penetrated my two coats within half-an-hour, leaving me in the condition of a bath sponge that awaits squeezing. While I was trickling down to the plains I met with the narrator of the story just recorded, and to him I explained that I was wet to the skin.