"Ah thin, hurry up and finish it," said Judy, betraying by this injunction an invincible ignorance touching a man's sentiments towards his last screw of tobacco, "or else I'll be off sound. It's the fine warmth makes me sleepy. Sure wid this on me sorra a breath of could gits next or nigh me to be keepin' me awake."
"Och thin, wait till it's out," said Thady.
"I will so," said Judy. "Sling another stick on the fire, lad, the way you won't be perished sittin' there in thim woful ould rags. I've plinty of prayers I might be sayin' till you're ready."
But in a little while, Thady, lingering over his pipe, became aware, somewhat to his relief, that she had gone fast asleep, muffled up to the chin in her cloak, with her head leaning back against the stone wall. He sat and looked at her for some moments with an expression partly complacent and partly compunctious. "Bedad now the crathur was bein' perished alive before I brought that to her," he said to himself. "Very apt she was to be gettin' her death. 'Twas great luck I had entirely to pick it up. It's the hard life the likes of her has whatever thrampin' around. Ay, glory be to God, 'twas the best good turn iver I done her."
Just at the time when Thady the Tinker was making these reflections while the firelight flickered and the waters fleeted under Rosbride bridge, some mile or so higher up the stream, where the long mountain slopes are folded closer and steeper about it, a great turmoil had arisen in a deep hollow among walls of the bare rock. Down one face of these, a huge glistering slab, the river had for certain thousands of years been taking a foamy leap; but to-night it happened that the rains, beating for many days on the mountains, had eaten away the clay setting which cemented a ponderous lump of rock into a niche immediately over the fall, and the mass had now crashed down into the channel on the very verge, blocking all the waterway. This, however, was a door hard to keep shut, when every affluent rill and runnel out on the broad mountain shoulders went darting swift and white, so that every minute swelled the forces gathering pent in the barred passage. As the bridled torrent seethed and climbed, hissing, behind that barrier, the great stone tottered and swayed, and before the first foam-crest could overpeer it, yielded to the weight of waters leaned against it, and rocks and flood, thunderously roaring, rushed down together.
The sound of it, dulled into a moan, came through Rosbride bridge, and Thady, who had grown very drowsy, thought to himself that the wind was getting up, and that they couldn't have done better than stop where they were, instead of to be setting off tramping on such a dirty wild night. God knew where they might have got to.
The flood that broke away, with wave tumbled over wave, out of the whirling pool, had not far to race down its stony stairs before it reached a place with a turbulent floor, where the white mouths of other two streams foamed into it through rock-rifts, loud-throated on either hand. Thenceforward the water which had threaded the large boulders in heavy strands coiled like monstrous braids of snaky locks, rose up and drew together above their tallest heads into a single obliterating fold, as it slid on smoothly with only now and then a quiver puckering its surface, as if it had rolled over some live creature that writhed. Its mounded solidity made its rapid motion look strange and terrible. Where circles of thin froth swam round on it slowly, it was as black and white as a bit of the bog in a snowstorm or under a drift of summer daisies. At the turn of the ravine's last winding above the bridge, it plucked away as it passed a small company of fir-trees, that long had dropped their cones and needles into the river from a coign of vantage on a jutting crag, and a minute after, anybody who had looked up from beneath the arch would have seen the glimmering points of foam extinguished like lights, further and nearer, lost amid the shadowy onsweeping of something that set all the darkness astir as if it were one vast wing unfurling. And then for a moment, in the narrow space lit by the fading fire, he would have known that he was cut off from the world by chaos, which poised towards him a formless surging front, and stooped and fell. But as it happened nobody was keeping a watch there.
What wakened Thady was the clang of his cluster of tinware, which the wave dashed against the wall behind him. But before he knew this, it had gathered him up and swung him across with it over to the other side of the arch. There he caught hold of a twisted ivy-tod and a bough of mountain-ash, whence he dropped on the bank, and crawled up it out of reach, commenting in forcible language upon the occurrence, by which he was still astoundedly bewildered.
Judy, who was aroused in like manner, had her chance too. For a branch of the same tree crooked a friendly arm towards her as she was borne past, and she would have grasped it only that the weight of her heavy cloth cloak dragged her down. So that instead of returning to dry land for many a long day's tramp, she went out to sea in company with sundry wrenched-off boughs, and mats of heather, and bundles of withered bracken, and other such waifs and strays, none of which were ever again heard tidings of any more than they were inquired after in the lonely places they had left. Only for some stormy days the wrecked and sodden banks of the Rosbride river were haunted by a forlorn-looking object of a lame tramp, who sought vainly what his despair hoped to find. As he roamed about in it, he had just one spell of consolation, which he was often muttering over to himself. It was something he called, "The best turn, anyway, I iver done the crathur in her life. Little enough, God knows, little enough, but the best good turn."