“Nor I don’t know. But Jimmy says she doesn’t speak like one that would be any ways in with the police.”
“She was in Brannigan’s last night, buying peppermint drops and every kind of foolishness, the same as she might be a little girleen that was given a penny and her just out of school.”
“If she hasn’t more sense at her time of life,” said Kinsella, “she never will.”
“Seeing it’s that sort she is, I wouldn’t say we’d any need to be caring where she goes so long as it isn’t to Inishbawn.”
“She’ll not go there,” said Kinsella, “for if she does I’ll flay the skin of Jimmy’s back with the handle of a hay-rake, and well he knows it.”
“If I was easy in my mind about the strange gentleman that’s up at the big house——”
“It’s a curious thing, so it is, him sending for the sergeant the minute he came.”
“Bedamn,” said Peter Walsh, “but it is.”
The extreme oddness of the strange gentleman’s conduct affected both men profoundly. For fully five minutes they sat staring at the sea, motionless, save when one or the other of them thrust his head forward a little in order to spit. Kinsella at last got out his pipe, probed the tobacco a little with the point of his knife so as to loosen it, pressed it together again with his thumb, and then lit it.
“I wouldn’t mind the sergeant,” he said, “cute and all as he thinks himself, I wouldn’t mind him. It’s the strange gentleman I’m thinking of.”