“Egor! O’Daly has it. He begged me for it, to keep ’em together. If I’d ask him for it, belike he’d refuse me. You’ve no knowledge of the characther of that same O’Daly.”
For just a moment the young man turned away, his face clouded with the shadows of a baffled mind. Then he looked Jerry straight in the eye.
“See here,” he said, “you trust me, don’t you? You believe that I want to act square by you and help you in this thing?”
“I do, sir,” said Jerry, simply.
“Well, then, I tell you that O’Daly can be made to show up, and the whole affair can be set straight, and the young lady—my cousin—can be put into her own again. Only I can’t work in the dark. I can’t play with a partner that ‘finesses’ against me, as a whist-player would say. Now, who is this man here? I know he isn’t your cousin any more than he is mine. What’s his game?”
Linsky took the words out of his puzzled companion’s mouth.
“’T is a long story, sir,” he said, “an’ you’d be no wiser if you were told it. Some time, plase God, you’ll know it all. Just now’t is enough that I’m bound to this man and to The O’Mahony, who’s away, an’ perhaps dead an’ buried, an’ I’m heart an’ sowl for doin’ whatever I can to help the young lady. Only, if you’ll not moind me sayin’ so, she’s her own worst inemy. If she takes the bit in her mouth this way, an’ will go into the convint, how, in the name of glory, are we to stop her or do anything else?”
“There are more than fifteen hundred ways of working that” replied the young man from Houghton County, simulating a confidence he did not wholly feel. “But let’s get along down toward the village.”
They entered Muirisc through the ancient convent churchyard, and at his door-way Jerry, as the visible result of much cogitation, asked the twain in. After offering them glasses of whiskey and water and lighting a pipe, Jerry suddenly resolved upon a further extension of confidence. To Linsky’s astonishment, he took the lantern down from the wall, lighted it, and opened the door at the back of the bed.
“If you’ll come along wid us, sir,” he said to Bernard, “we’ll show you something.”