CHAPTER XX
They continued their travels.
It would be more correct to say they continued their search for food, for that in reality was the objective of each day's journeying.
Moving thus, day by day, taking practically any road that presented itself, they had wandered easily through rugged, beautiful Donegal down into Connaught. They had camped on the slopes of rough mountains, slept peacefully in deep valleys that wound round and round like a corkscrew, traversed for weeks in Connemara by the clamorous sea where they lived sumptuously on fish, and then they struck to the inland plains again, and away by curving paths to the County Kerry.
At times Mac Cann got work to do—to mend a kettle that had a little hole in it, to stick a handle on a pot, to stiffen the last days of a bucket that was already long past its labour, and he did these jobs sitting in the sunlight on dusty roads, and if he did not do them Mary did them for him while he observed her critically and explained both to her and to his company the mystery of the tinker's craft.
"There's a great deal," he would say, "in the twist of the hand."
And again, but this usually to Art when that cherub tried his skill on a rusty pot:
"You'll never make a good tinker unless you've got a hand on you. Keep your feet in your boots and get to work with your fingers."
And sometimes he would nod contentedly at Mary and say:
"There's a girl with real hands on her that aren't feet."