But there came a roar of rejoicing which penetrated even his single-tracked, murder-obsessed brain. He turned, purple-face and explosive, to see what the obscene sound could mean.
He saw. The lean and lanky figure of the chief justice of the supreme court of the Planet Eire came running down the street toward him. He bore a large slab of sheet-iron.
As he ran, he played upon it the blue flame of a welding torch. The smell of hot metal diffused behind him. The chief justice ran like a deer. But he wasn't leaving anything behind but the smell. Everything else was close on his heels.
A multicolored, multitudinous, swarming tide of dinies filled the highway from gutter to gutter. From the two-inch dwarfs to the purple-striped variety which grew to eight inches and sometimes fought cats, the dinies were in motion. They ran in the wake of the chief justice, enthralled and entranced by the smell of hot sheet iron. They were fascinated. They were bemused. They were aware of nothing but that ineffable fragrance. They hopped, ran, leaped, trotted and galloped in full cry after the head of the planet's supreme court.
He almost bumped into the stunned Sean O'Donohue. As he passed, he cried: "Duck, man! The dinies are comin' tra-la, tra-la!"
But Sean O'Donohue did not duck. He was fixed, stuck, paralyzed in his tracks. And the dinies arrived. They ran into him. He was an obstacle. They played leapfrog over each other to surmount him. He went down and was merely a bump in the flowing river of prismatic colorings which swarmed after the racing chief justice.
But there was a limit to things. This was not the first such event in Tara, this day. The dinies, this time, filled no more than a block of the street. They swarmed past him, they raced on into the distance, and Sean O'Donohue struggled to a sitting position.
His shoes were shreds. Dinies had torn them swiftly apart for the nails in them. His garters were gone. Dinies had operated on his pants to get at the metal parts. His pockets were ripped. The bright metal buttons of his coat were gone. His zippers had vanished. His suspenders dangled without any metal parts to hold them together, nor were there any pants buttons for them to hold onto. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and opened it again and closed it. His expression was that of a man in delirium.
And, even before the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the solicitor general could lift him gently and bear him away, there came a final catastrophe, for the O'Donohue. The snakes who had watched events from the curbs, as well as those which had gazed interestedly from aloft, now began to realize that this was an affair which affected them. They came out and began to follow the vanishing procession, very much as small dogs and little boys pursue a circus parade. But they seemed to talk uneasily to each other as they flowed past Sean O'Donohue, sitting in the dust of the street, all his illusions vanished and all his hopes destroyed.
But the people of Tara did not notice. They cheered themselves hoarse.