“Sure you’d not be able!”
“Whoo! Me not able? Maybe I’m like the singed cat, better than I look! I’m slow, but fair and easy goes far in a day! Never you fear but I’ll get your calves to Balloch, the same way the boy ate the cake, very handy....”
The simplest thing would have been for Heffernan to take and drive the calves himself. But he never had the fashion of doing such things. Anyway it wouldn’t answer for the people to see a man with a good means of his own, like Mickey, turning drover that way.
So he thought again, while Hughie watched him; and then says he, “You’ll have to be off out of this before the stars have left the sky!”
“And why wouldn’t I?” says Hughie; “only give me a bit of supper and a shakedown for the night, the way I’ll be fresh for the road to-morrow.”
Hughie was looking to be put sitting down in the kitchen alongside Heffernan himself, and to have the settle-bed foreninst the fire to sleep in. But he had to content himself with the straw in the barn and a plateful carried out to him. Queer and slow-going Heffernan might be, but he wasn’t thinking of having the likes of Hopping Hughie in his chimney-corner, where he had often thought to see little Rosy Rafferty and she smiling at him.
Hughie took it all very contented. Gay and happy he was after his supper, and soon fell asleep on the straw, with his ragged pockets that empty, that the Divil could dance a hornpipe in them and not strike a copper there; while Mickey above in bed in his own house, with his fine farm and all his stock about him, calves and cows and pigs, not to speak of the money in the old stocking under the thatch ... Mickey couldn’t sleep, only worrying, thinking was he right to go sell the calves at all; and to be letting Hughie drive them!
“I had little to do,” he thought, “to be letting him in about the place at all, and couldn’t tell what divilment he might be up to, as soon as he gets me asleep! Hughie’s terrible wicked, and as strong as a ditch! I done well to speak him civil, anyway. But I’ll not let them calves stir one peg out of this with him! I’d sooner risk keeping them longer....”
There’s the way he was going on, tossing and tumbling and tormenting himself; as if bed wasn’t a place to rest yourself in and not be raking up annoyances.
So it wasn’t till near morning that Mickey dozed off, and never wakened till it was more than time to be off for the fair.