He put down a penny and won.
II
THE farmer’s son came into the shed. He was a strongly built, handsome lad of twenty-one, and was employed as a bank clerk in Paisley. It was now Saturday. He always returned home on week-ends and spent Sunday on his father’s farm. Eamon Doherty was very pleased to see young Morrison, who was a great friend of his, and sometimes, when the squad went home at the end of the year, Eamon stopped with Morrison senior and worked over the winter on the farm.
The squad interested young Morrison. “These strange, half-savage people have a certain fascination for me,” he told his friends in town—young men and women with great ideals and full of schemes and high purposes for the reformation of the human race. Morrison belonged to a club, famous for its erudite members, one of whom discovered a grammatical error in a translation of Karl Marx’s Kapital and another who had written a volume of verses, Songs of the Day. Young Morrison himself was a thinker, a moralist, earnest and profound in his own estimation. Coming into contact with the potato diggers on week-ends, he often wondered why these people were treated like cattle wherever they took up their temporary abode. Here, on his father’s farm, kindly old men, lithe, active youths and pure and comely girls were housed like beasts of burden. The young man often felt so sorry for them that he almost wept for his own tenderness.
Before entering the shed on this evening he had looked in at them from the cover of the darkness outside. He noticed the fire shining on their faces, saw old Maire a Glan telling her beads, the card-players bent over the cart, the young women knitting, and the two harridans, Gourock Ellen and Annie, holding out their hacked hands to the blaze.
The gamblers were so interested in their game that they took very little notice of the young man when he entered the shed; even Eamon Doherty who was playing had scant leisure to greet the new-comer. Morrison sat down on an up-ended box beside Gourock Ellen, who was stretching out her lean, claw-like fingers to the fire.
“Good-evening, Ellen!” he cried jovially, for he knew the woman, and sitting down, stretched out one delicate hand, on the middle finger of which a ring glittered, to the stove.
“It may be a guid e’en, but it’s gey cold,” said Ellen.
“There are many new faces here,” said Morrison, looking into the corner where Norah Ryan was sitting, sewing patches on her working dress. The girl was deep in thought.
“Why has Dermod gone away and left me for them cards?” she asked herself and for a while sought in vain for an answer. Then when it came she thrust it away angrily and refused to give it credence, although the answer came from the depths of her own soul. “He cares more for the cards than he cares for me.”