“Why d’ye always say ‘Aye, sure’ and ‘No, sure’ when talking to a person?” asked Jim, replacing the cork in the bottle, which he now tried to balance on the point of his finger. “Is it a habit that ye’ve got into, Willie the Duck?”
“Aye, sure,” answered Willie, edging away from Micky’s Jim, who was balancing the bottle successfully within an inch of the roof. “Ye’ll let that bottle fall on me head.”
“Aye, sure,” shouted Micky’s Jim and shook the bottle with perilous carelessness, holding out the free hand in case it should fall. “It wouldn’t crack a wooden head anyhow.”
“That’s Brockagh station that we’re comin’ into now, as the man said,” remarked one of the women who had been praying. The woman was Maire a Glan, who had been going beyond the water to work for the last four or five years. Things were not going well at home; her husband lay ill with paralysis, the children from a monetary point of view were useless as yet—the oldest boy, thin and weakly, a cripple from birth, went about on crutches, the younger ones were eternally crying for bread. Maire a Glan placed the rosary round her neck and took a piece of oaten bread from the bundle at her feet.
“Will ye have a wee bit to eat, Norah Ryan?” she asked.
“My thanks to ye, Maire a Glan, but I’m not hungry,” answered Norah, rubbing the window where her breath had dimmed it.
“I thought that ye might be, seeing that yer eye is not wet on leavin’ home,” said the woman, breaking bread and putting a bit of it in her mouth. “There, the train is stopping!” she went on, “and I have two sisters married within the stretch of a mile from this place.”
“Aye, sure,” said Willie the Duck with his usual quack. “I know both, and once I had a notion of one of them, meself.”
“Lookin’ for one of God’s stars to light yer pipe with, as the man said,” remarked the woman contemptuously, fixing her eyes on the poor fellow’s hump. “Ye have a burden enough on yer shoulders and not to be thinkin’ at all of a wife.”
“Them that carries the burden should be the first to complain of it,” said Willie the Duck, edging still further away from Micky’s Jim, who was now standing up and balancing the whisky bottle on the point of his nose. The women tittered, the men drew their pipes from their mouths and gave vent to loud guffaws. The train started out from Brockagh station, a porter ran after it, shut a door, and again Norah Ryan watched the fields run past and the telegraph wires rise and fall.