“Aye, sure,” said Willie the Duck. “But it wasn’t with his fist but with a stick that he struck Master Diver, and mind ye he made the blood to flow!”
“I’ll soon make blood to flow!” said Micky’s Jim, still holding his fist under Murtagh Gallagher’s nose.
“I was only in fun,” Gallagher repeated. “Ye’re as hasty as a briar, Jim, for one cannot open his lips but ye want to blacken his eyes.”
“Now sit down, Micky’s Jim,” said Maire a Glan. “It’s not nice to see two people, both of them from Donegal, fighting when they’re away from home.”
“Fightin’!” exclaimed Jim, dropping into his seat and pulling out his pipe. “I see no fightin’.... I wish to God that someone would fight.... Sort of soft in the head, indeed!... I never could stand a man from Meenahalla, anyway.”
IV
THE train sped on. House, field, and roadway whirled by, and Norah, almost bewildered, ceased to wonder where this road ran to, who lived in that house, what was the name of this village and whether that large building with the spire on top of it was a church (Bad luck to it!) or chapel (God bless it!).
“I’ll see him again,” she thought, her mind reverting to Dermod Flynn. “I wonder how he’ll look now; if his hair is still as curly as when he was at Frosses school.... Two years away from his own home and the home of all his people! Such a long while, and now he’ll know everything about the whole world.” Mixed with these lip-spoken words was the remembrance of her mother all alone in the old cabin at Frosses, and a vague feeling of regret filled her mind.
“Are you getting homesick, Norah?” Maire a Glan enquired, speaking in Gaelic, which came more easily than English to her tongue. “It’s not the dry eye that always tells of the lightest heart, I know myself.”
“Old Oiney Dinchy has a fine daughter,” Eamon Doherty was saying.