“I’ll try and.... But what does it matter to you what I do? One would think to hear you talk that I was a child.”
“I suppose there’ll be a lot of drunk people on the boat this night,” said Micky’s Jim as he tied a tin porringer in a rag and placed it in his box. “There’ll be some fightin’ too, I’ll go bail.”
“The Derry boat is the place for fightin’, as the man said.”
“Aye, sure, and the Irish are very fond of fightin’ when they’re drunk.”
“It’s more in the blood than in the bottle, all the same,” said Eamon Doherty.
“I mind one fight on the Derrier,” said Micky’s Jim, biting a mouthful from the end of his plug. “I was in the fight meself. (If the cork comes out of that bottle of milk, Owen Kelly, it’ll make a hell of a mess on yer clothes.) It started below. ‘There’s no man here,’ said I, ‘that could——’ (Them trousers are not worth taking with ye, Eamon Doherty. No man would wear clothes like that; a person would better be painted and go out bare naked)—‘that could put up his fives to me.’ (If ye dress yer hair like that, Brigit Doherty, I’ll not be seen goin’ into Greenanore with ye.) Then a man drove full but for my face and I took the dunt like an ox. (Willie the Duck, are ye goin’ to take that famine fiddle home again? Change it for a Jew’s harp or a pair of laces!) ‘That’s how a Glenmornan man takes it,’ says I, and came in with a clowt to the jowl——”
“Stop yer palaver about fightin’, Micky’s Jim, and let us get away to the station,” said Maire a Glan. “We’ll not auction time while we’re waitin’, as the man said.”
“If we go off now we’ll only have three hours to wait for the train,” remarked Jim sarcastically.
“And poor Dermod Flynn,” said Maire a Glan, tying her bundle over her shoulders with a string. “Not a penny at all left him. Where’s Norah Ryan? She’s the girl to save her money.”
At that moment Norah was outside with Morrison and the young man was asking a question. The wish to find an answer to it had kept him awake for nearly half the previous night.