"It was like this. 'Would you be making a fortune?' Harry asked me. And who wouldn't, Miss Molly, not you nor I. 'Blue Peter is a cert,' said he; 'my brother Bill will be riding.' Could you resist that?"
"Hem!" Molly would reply; "and did he win?"
"If his neck had been as long as Smoker's he would have won," Joe would explain.
After a few days he would return to favour, and continue a pensioner until he found work for a short time. But ill-luck ever dogged Joe's footsteps, and his periods of work were ever briefer and briefer, until he threatened to relapse into chronic idleness. Then, to her own surprise, and that of all who knew her, Molly suddenly compelled Joe to reform.
"I have a place for you, Joe, and the last you will ever be getting," she said. "It's a disgrace to me you are, and everyone saying I have spoiled you. Mr. Quirk will take you on, and he is a slave-driver. He stands over his men with a whip. It was hard work I had to get you the place—milking the cows, and helping in the garden. But I told the man you were a hard worker. If you don't work hard, Joe, it is the whip I will give you with my own hands."
Whether it was this threat, a fear of Mr. Quirk, or the effects of the mission cannot be clearly said, but Joe McCarthy clung to his work until he eventually became overseer at "Layton." With his change in habits, Joe also acquired a self-respect that led him to dress neatly, and to sign the pledge. Thenceforward Molly Healy quoted him as the proof of her powers as a reformer when taunted because of the rabble over whom she reigned.
"There was Joe McCarthy, that would not work until I persuaded him," she would say. "Leave the boys to me; I am correcting them."
Yet only Mrs. Quirk had absolute confidence in the girl's vocation as a reformer. The old lady was never told of a good-for-nothing son or husband but she would cry:
"Send him to Molly Healy. If there is any good in him, Molly will bring it out."
Her hearers, knowing of Molly's long succession of failures, naturally smiled at these commendations.