The somber walls of the Three Castles looked down in silence upon this strange procession as it filed past under their shadows—and if the gulls which wheeled above and about the moss-grown turrets described the spectacle later to the wraiths of the dead-and-gone O’Mahonys and to the enchanted horse-shaped woman in the lake, there must have been a general agreement that the parish of Kilmoe had seen never such another sight before, even in the days of the mystic Tuatha de Danaan.
The route to the boat abounded to a disheartening degree in rough and difficult descents, and even more trying was the frequent necessity for long détours to avoid impossible barriers of rock. Moreover, Murphy turned out to be vastly heavier than he had seemed at the outset. Hence the young man, who had freely enlivened the beginning of the journey with affable chatter, gradually lapsed into silence; and at last, when only a final ridge of low hills separated them from the strand, confessed that he would like to take off his coat. He rested for a minute or two after this had been done, and wiped his wet brow.
“Who’d think the sun could be so hot in April?” he said. “Why, where I come from, we’ve just begun to get through sleighing.”
“What is it you’d be slaying now?” asked Kate, innocently. “We kill our pigs in the late autumn.”
The young man laughed aloud as he took Murphy once more on his back.
“Potato-bugs, chiefly,” was his enigmatic response.
She pondered fruitlessly upon this for a brief time, as she followed on with the gun and coat. Then her thoughts centered themselves once more upon the young stranger himself, who seemed only a boy to look at, yet was so stout and confident of himself, and had such a man’s way of assuming control of things, and doing just what he wanted to do and what needed to be done.
Muirisc did not breed that sort of young man. He could not, from his face, be more than three or four and twenty—and at that age all the men she had known were mere slow-witted, shy and awkward louts of boys, whom their fathers were quite free to beat with a stick, and who never dreamed of doing anything on their own mental initiative, except possibly to “boo” at the police or throw stones through the windows of a boycotted shop, Evidently there were young men in the big unknown outside world who differed immeasurably from this local standard.
Oh, that wonderful outside world, which she was never going to see! She knew that it was sinful and godless and pressed down and running over with abominations, because the venerable nuns of the Hostage’s Tears had from the beginning told her so, but she was conscious of a new and less hostile interest in it, all the same, since it produced young men of this novel type. Then she began to reflect that he was like Robert Emmett, who was the most modern instance of a young man which the limits of convent literature permitted her to know about, only his hair was cut short, and he was fair, and he smiled a good deal, and—And lo, here they were at the boat! She woke abruptly from her musing day-dream.
The tide had gone out somewhat, and left the dingey stranded on the dripping sea-weed. The young man seated Murphy on a rock, untied the game-bag and put on his coat, and then in the most matter-of-fact way tramped over the slippery ooze to the boat, pushed it off into the water and towed it around by the chain to the edge of a little cove, whence one might step over its side from a shore of clean, dry sand. He then, still as if it were all a matter of course, lifted Murphy and put him in the bow of the boat, and asked Kate to sit in the stern and steer.