“All aboard!” Micky’s Jim shouted in an excited voice, forgetting pose for a moment. “Hurry up now or the train will be away, leavin’ the biggest half of ye standin’ here. A train isn’t like Oiney Dinchy’s cuddy cart; it hasn’t to stop seven times in order to get right started. Hurry up! Go in sideways, Willie the Duck; ye cannot go through a door frontways carrying a bundle under yer oxter. Yer stupid ways would drive a sensible man to pot! Hurry up and come on now! Get a move on ye, every one of the whole lot of ye!”
Presently all, with the exception of the speaker, were in their compartments and looking for seats. Micky’s Jim remained on the platform, waiting for the train to start, when he could show by boarding it as it steamed out of the station that he had learned a thing or two beyond the water in his time; a thing or two not known to all the Frosses people.
A ticket collector examined the tickets, chatting heartily as he did so. When he found that Norah had not procured hers he ran off and came back with one, smiling happily as if glad to be of assistance to the girl. A lady and gentleman, tourists no doubt, paced up and down the platform, eyeing everybody with the tourists’ rude look of enquiry; a stray dog sniffed at Micky’s Jim’s trousers and got kicked for its curiosity; the engine driver yawned again, made the sign of the cross on his open mouth and mounted to his place; the whistle sounded, and with Micky’s Jim standing on the foot-board the train steamed out of the station.
Norah, who had never been on a train before, took up her seat near the window, and rubbed the pane with her shawl in order to get a better view of the country, which seemed to be flying past with remarkable speed. The telegraph wires were sinking and rising; the poles like big hands gripped them up, dropped them, but only to lift them up again as threads are lifted on the fingers of a knitter.
There were eleven people in the compartment, four women and seven men. One of the latter, Eamon Doherty, was eating a piece of dry bread made from Indian meal; the rest of the men were smoking black clay pipes, so short of shank that the bowls almost touched the noses of the smokers. But Jim’s pipe was different from any of these; it was a wooden one, “real briar root” he said, and was awfully proud of it. It had cost three shillings and sixpence in a town beyond the water, he now told the party, not indeed for the first time; but none of the listeners believed him. Two of the women said their prayers; one wept because she was leaving Ireland, and Norah Ryan spent her time looking out of the window.
III
“WHO’LL take a drink?” asked Micky’s Jim, pulling a half-bottle of whisky from his pocket and drawing out the cork with his fingers. “Good stuff this is, and I’m as dry as the rafters of hell.... Will ye have a wee drop, Willie the Duck?”
“No, sure,” answered Willie, who was sitting beside the weeping woman, his one leg across the other, and his hands clasped over his stomach. “I would take it if I hadn’t the pledge against drink, indeed I would. Aye, sure!”
“Aye sure, be hanged!” Jim blurted out. “Ye’ve got to take it, for it’s die-dog-or-eat-the-gallows this time. Are ye goin’ to take it?”
“No, sure——”