“I’d be glad,” said Sweeny, “if you’d step up to my house with me for two minutes the way I could speak to you without the whole town listening to what we’re saying.”
Peter Walsh rose from his seat with quiet dignity and followed Sweeny up the street.
“You’ll take a sup of porter,” said Sweeny, when they reached the bar of the public house.
Peter finished the half pint which was offered to him at a draught.
“They tell me,” said Sweeny, “that the police sergeant was up at the big house again this morning. I don’t know if it’s true but it’s what they’re after telling me.”
“It is true,” said Peter. “I’ll say that much for whoever it was that told you. It’s true enough. The sergeant was off last night after dark. He thinks he’s damned smart that sergeant, and it was after dark he went the way nobody would see him; but he was seen, for Patsy the smith was on the side of the road, mortal sick after the way that Joseph Antony Kinsella made him turn to making a rudder iron and him as drunk at the time as any man ever you seen. It was him told me about the sergeant and where he went last night.”
“Well,” said Sweeny, “and what did he tell you?”
“He told me that the sergeant went along the road till he met with the gentleman that does be going about the country and has the two ladies with him, the one of them that might be his wife and the other has Jimmy Kinsella engaged to row her round the bay while she’d be bathing.”
“There’s too many going round the country and the bay and that’s a fact. We could do with less.”
“We could, surely. But there’s no harm in them ones. What the sergeant said to the gentleman Patsy the smith couldn’t hear but it was maybe half an hour after when the sergeant went home again and he had a look on him like a man that was middling well satisfied. Patsy the smith saw him for he was in the ditch when he passed, terrible sick, retching the way he thought the whole of his liver would be out on the road before he’d done. Well, there was no more happened last night; but it wasn’t more than nine o’clock this morning before that same sergeant was off up to the big house and I wouldn’t wonder but it was to tell the strange gentleman that’s there whatever it was he heard him last night. He had that kind of a look about him anyway.”