When they appeared again they were clad in stout, ordinary clothing. They did not look a bit different from Patsy Mac Cann except that they were all taller men than he, but between his dilapidation and theirs there was very little to choose.
Mac Cann dug a hole beside a tree and carefully buried their property, then with a thoughtful air he bade Mary move ahead with the ass, while he and the angels stepped forward at the tailboard.
They walked then through the morning sunlight, and for a time they had little to say to each other.
CHAPTER IX
In truth Patsy Mac Cann was a very able person.
For forty-two years he had existed on the edges of a society which did not recognise him in any way, and, as he might himself have put it, he had not done so very badly at all.
He lived as a bird lives, or a fish, or a wolf. Laws were for other people, but they were not for him; he crawled under or vaulted across these ethical barriers, and they troubled him no more than as he had to bend or climb a little to avoid them—he discerned laws as something to be avoided, and it was thus he saw most things.
Religion and morality, although he paid these an extraordinary reverence, were not for him either; he beheld them from afar, and, however they might seem beautiful or foolish, he left them behind as readily as he did his debts, if so weighty a description may be given to his volatile engagements. He did not discharge these engagements; he elongated himself from them; between himself and a query he interposed distance, and at once that became foreign to him, for half a mile about himself was his frontier, and beyond that, wherever he was, the enemy lay.