“What keeps you from laughing, you who used to laugh so loud that the whole world heard you?”
“I’m sorry,” said the Gruagach, “that the daughter of the king of Erin sent you here.”
“If you don’t tell me of your own will, I’ll make you tell me,” said the cowboy; and he put a face on himself that was terrible to look at, and running through the house like a madman, could find nothing that would give pain enough to the Gruagach but some ropes made of untanned sheepskin hanging on the wall.
He took these down, caught the Gruagach, fastened him by the three smalls, and tied him so that his little toes were whispering to his ears. When he was in this state the Gruagach said: “I’ll tell you what stopped my laughing if you set me free.”
So the cowboy unbound him, the two sat down together, and the Gruagach said:–
“I lived in this castle here with my twelve sons. We ate, drank, played cards, and enjoyed ourselves, till one day when my sons and I were playing, a slender brown hare came rushing in, jumped on to the hearth, tossed up the ashes to the rafters and ran away.
“On another day he came again; but if he did, we were ready for him, my twelve sons and myself. As soon as he tossed up the ashes and ran off, we made after him, and followed him till nightfall, when he went into a glen. We saw a light before us. I ran on, and came to a house with a great apartment, where there was a man named Yellow Face with twelve daughters, and the hare was tied to the side of the room near the women.
“There was a large pot over the fire in the room, and a great stork boiling in the pot. The man of the house said to me: ’There are bundles of rushes at the end of the room, go there and sit down with your men!’
“He went into the next room and brought out two pikes, one of wood, the other of iron, and asked me which of the pikes would I take. I said, ’I’ll take the iron one;’ for I thought in my heart that if an attack should come on me, I could defend myself better with the iron than the wooden pike.
“Yellow Face gave me the iron pike, and the first chance of taking what I could out of the pot on the point of the pike. I got but a small piece of the stork, and the man of the house took all the rest on his wooden pike. We had to fast that night; and when the man and his twelve daughters ate the flesh of the stork, they hurled the bare bones in the faces of my sons and myself. We had to stop all night that way, beaten on the faces by the bones of the stork.