“Yes, simply wonderful weather,” he pursued. “Only April, and here’s the skin all peeling off from my nose.”
Kate could not but in courtesy look at this afflicted feature. It was a short good-humored nose, with just the faintest and kindliest suggestion of an upward tilt at the end. One should not be too serious with the owner of such a nose.
“You have business here, thin?” she asked. “I thought you were looking at castles—and shooting herons.”
He gave a little laugh, and held up his hammer as a voucher.
“I’m a mining engineer,” he explained: “I’ve been prospecting for a company all around Cappagh and the Mizzen Head, and now I’m waiting to hear from London what the assays are like. Oh, yes—that reminds me—I ought to have asked before—how is the old man—the chap we had to carry to the boat? I hope his ankle’s better.”
“It is, thank you,” she replied.
He chuckled aloud at the recollections which the subject suggested.
“He soured on me, right from the start, didn’t hee?” the young man went on. “I’ve laughed a hundred times since, at the way he chiseled me out of my place in the boat—that is to say, some of the time I’ve laughed—but—but then lots of other times I couldn’t see any fun in it at all. Do you know,” he continued, almost dolefully, “I’ve been hunting all over the place for you.”
“I’ve nothing to do wid the minerals on our lands,” Kate answered. “’T is a thrushtee attinds to all that.”
“Pshaw! I didn’t want to talk minerals to you.”