(He goes on stitching. Nora makes the tea.)
MICHEAL.
(After looking at the tramp rather scornfully for a moment.) That’s a poor coat you have, God help you, and I’m thinking it’s a poor tailor you are with it.
TRAMP.
If it’s a poor tailor I am, I’m thinking it’s a poor herd does be running back and forward after a little handful of ewes the way I seen yourself running this day, young fellow, and you coming from the fair.
(Nora comes back to the table.)
NORA.
(To Micheal in a low voice.) Let you not mind him at all, Micheal Dara, he has a drop taken and it’s soon he’ll be falling asleep.
MICHEAL.
It’s no lie he’s telling, I was destroyed surely. They were that wilful they were running off into one man’s bit of oats, and another man’s bit of hay, and tumbling into the red bogs till it’s more like a pack of old goats than sheep they were. Mountain ewes is a queer breed, Nora Burke, and I’m not used to them at all.
NORA.
(Settling the tea things.) There’s no one can drive a mountain ewe but the men do be reared in the Glen Malure, I’ve heard them say, and above by Rathvanna, and the Glen Imaal, men the like of Patch Darcy, God spare his soul, who would walk through five hundred sheep and miss one of them, and he not reckoning them at all.
MICHEAL.
(Uneasily.) Is it the man went queer in his head the year that’s gone?
NORA.
It is surely.
TRAMP.
(Plaintively.) That was a great man, young fellow, a great man I’m telling you. There was never a lamb from his own ewes he wouldn’t know before it was marked, and he’ld run from this to the city of Dublin and never catch for his breath.