“Och, I don’t know about that!” said Heffernan.
At the time, he was looking at Peetcheen standing with the big black pot in his grip. And whatever his poor old mother might think of Peetcheen, the boy was no beauty. But Mickey had a notion in his head, and he thought he would see it out.
“A quiet, steady boy might do worse, you’d think, than get a hard-working girl, settled and sensible and not too young or skittish ... and she with two heifers of her own ... and maybe a few odd pounds in an old stocking as well....”
“They might, so,” agreed Peetcheen. He wondered what was making Mickey so chatty.
Then, “Why don’t you get marrit yourself?” said Heffernan, with a grin. And slow and thick as Peetcheen was, he began to guess what it was all about.
“I might do so as well as another,” he made answer; “do you think would the sisther try me?”
And to think that marrying was the last thing he had in his mind, when he began lifting the pig’s pot, just a minute or so before! But Mickey had it all laid out, and he did not care a straw who got Julia so long as she would clear out of the house and leave him free to bring in a wife.
“Ye have a house, ye tell me?” he said to Peetcheen.
“I have, so! and not a soul in it, only me mother, and she the quietest creature!”
“How much land?” asked Heffernan.