“She’d never stop here at all, wanting her!” he said to himself.
That minute, he heard Dan’s foot outside, and he called to him, and gave him instructions. He wasn’t to mind anything, mare or cows either, only run off to search for the child; first at the well, and then at the old quarry-hole; and if he got no signs of her at either of those places, he was to take off along the high-road, after a band of tinkers that Heffernan and he had passed that day coming home after buying the hay.
“Sure, what would they want with the child?” said Dan; “doesn’t the like of them have the full up of their ass-carts of fine children of their own?”
“Be giving me none of your chat!” said Heffernan to him, pretty severe; and at that, off went Dan. He was anxious enough himself by then.
When Dan was gone, Mickey felt worse than ever.
“How am I to stop here,” he thought, “or how could I face Marg, if she comes back to find Missie gone? Maybe it’s what she’d show fight....” She might say, wasn’t it a queer thing, that he couldn’t look after the child for one evening, and she that had always done everything for him, those years past! And well he knew that himself! He couldn’t call to mind any time that he had asked Marg to do a thing for him, but she was ready for the job. And to say he couldn’t do that much for her, only dropping off asleep...!
He couldn’t keep inside. He hobbled out into the yard again, and tried to look through the darkness that had fallen now over everything around.
“It would be very simple for any one to go astray now, let alone a little child!” he thinks to himself.
On the minute, he began to call to mind the time he had lost a lamb once, and that it was above upon the Hill of the Rath he had found it.
“And why wouldn’t a child be the same as a lamb, and try to get up higher always, when it would be lost?” he thought to himself; “and a poor thing it would be, if anything was to happen Brigeen now and she half reared ... and a Heffernan too ... and along with all, to think of the way Marg is made upon her! thinks the sun rises and sets in that child!”