Mick stared at him in a dazed way. "My father?" he repeated.
"Your father," said Pat; "an' it was my father murdered him."
Mick was too dazed to take it in. All he could think of, all he could see, was that thin white face before his eyes.
"Do ye think ye'll get safe to America?" he said huskily.
"My God, are ye a chile at all?" said Pat. He gave a big sob, that made Mick jump, and then began to cry and shake all over. "What did I do it for at all at all?" he wailed.
Mick put his arm round him. "Whist, Pat, whist, man; ye must be off, now, at wanst."
Pat stopped crying. "I'm not goin'," he said. "I done what he bid me, an' now I'll give myself up, an' let them hang me: it's what I disarve."
"Listen a bit, Pat," said Mick. "Ye didn't mane it, I know that. It's not you but yer ould father that ought to be hanged——" He stopped, something came back to his mind as though out of a far-off past; but it was only last night Uncle Niel had said: "We do well to forgive him, as God forgives us." "Pat," he cried, "Uncle Niel said we were to forgive your father!" Quickly he told the whole story—what Patsy had said, what Uncle Niel had answered, with such a sense of relief as he told it that he felt almost glad. "An' I know he would forgive you for murderin' him, Pat, this very minute, if he could spake." Pat did not answer. "An' if ye don't go they'll make me give evidence, an' ye wouldn't have me an informer, would ye?"
"I'll go," said Pat.
No one had missed Mick when he got home. Their mother was ill, and the doctor had come. Lull was with her, and Teressa had come to do the work. After dinner Teressa came into the schoolroom. She said she was afraid to be by herself in the big kitchen. Jane questioned her about Uncle Niel, and she told them that one of the men had found the dead body in the loney late at night as he was coming back from Newry with one of the horses. The horse had stopped half way down the loney, and when the man looked round for a bit of a stick to beat him with he saw the body lying on its face in the ditch. "But the quare thing," Teressa said, "is that yer Aunt Mary houlds to it that he come in after seein' yez all home last night. She let him in, and boulted the dour after him, but when they took the corpse home the dour was still boulted, an' his bed had never been slep' in." Here Lull came into the schoolroom, and was cross with Teressa. "Have ye no wit, woman," she said, "sittin' there like an ould witch tellin' the childer a lock a' lies?"