“Oh, but I’ll come!” he exclaimed. “An’ whatever ye bid me that I’ll do!”
“Ah, but,” Jerry shook his head dubiously, “’t is you that must be biddin’ me what to do.”
“To the best of me power that I’ll do, too,” the other affirmed; and the two men shook hands.
“On to-morrow I’ll get clothes for ye at Bantry,” Jerry said, an hour later, at the end of the conference they had been holding, “an’ nixt day we’ll inthroduce ye to daylight an’ to—O’Daly.”
CHAPTER XX—NEAR THE SUMMIT OF MT. GABRIEL.
A vast sunlit landscape under a smiling April sky—a landscape beyond the uses of mere painters with their tubes and brushes and camp-stools, where leagues of mountain ranges melted away into the shimmering haze of distance, and where the myriad armlets of the blue Atlantic in view, winding themselves about their lovers, the headlands, and placidly nursing their children, the islands, marked as on a map the coastwise journeys of a month—stretched itself out before the gaze of young Bernard O’Mahony, of Houghton County, Michigan—and was scarcely thanked for its pains.
The young man had completed four-fifths of the ascent of Mount Gabriel, from the Dunmanus side, and sat now on a moss-capped boulder, nominally meditating upon the splendors of the panorama spread out before him, but in truth thinking deeply of other things. He had not brought a gun, this time, but had in his hand a small, brand-new hammer, with which, from time to time, to point the shifting phases of his reverie, he idly tapped the upturned sole of the foot resting on his knee.
From this coign of vantage he could make out the white walls and thatches of at least a dozen hamlets, scattered over the space of thrice as many miles. Such of these as stood inland he did not observe a second time. There were others, more distant, which lay close to the bay, and these he studied intently as he mused, his eyes roaming along the coast-line from one to another in baffled perplexity. There was nothing obscure, about them, so far as his vision went. Everything—the innumerable croft-walls dividing the wretched land below him into holdings; the dark umber patches where the bog had been cut; the serried layers of gray rock sloping transversely down the mountain-side, each with its crown of canary-blossomed furze; the wide stretches of desolate plain beyond, where no human habitation could be seen, yet where he knew thousands of poor creatures lived, all the same, in moss-hidden hovels in the nooks of the rocks; the pale sheen on the sea still further away, as it slept in the sunlight at the feet of the cliffs—everything was as sharp and distinct as the picture in a telescope.