“Work!” laughed Judy Farrel, and her laugh ended in a fit of coughing. “Work, indeed!” she stammered on regaining breath. “Ye’ll soon have plenty of that and no fear!”
“Come now,” Micky’s Jim shouted as he came back to his own squad followed by two men and two women who detached themselves from the crowd that was looking for work. “We must go down to the Isle of Bute to-day and get some potatoes dug in a hurry. Take yer bundles in yer hands and make a start for the station.”
“It’s Gourock Ellen that’s in it,” said Maire a Glan, when the strange women came forward. “Gourock Ellen and Annie, as the man said.”
Gourock Ellen was a tall, angular woman, who might at one period of her life have been very handsome, but who now, owing to the results of a hard and loose life, bore all the indelible marks of dissolute and careless living. Her face was hard, pock-marked, and stamped with a look of impudent defiance; she smiled with ill-concealed contempt at Maire a Glan and looked with mock curiosity at the warty hand which the old woman held out to her.
“There’s a lot of new faces in the squad,” she said, glancing in turn at Norah Ryan and Dermod Flynn. “Not bad lookin’, the two of them, and they’ll sleep in the yin bed yet, I’ll go bail! And you, have you the fiddle with you?”
“Aye, sure, and I have,” said Willie the Duck, to whom she addressed this question. “I don’t go far without it.”
“You don’t,” answered the woman, and her tones implied that she would have added, “you fool!” if she thought it worth while.
Her companion, who hardly spoke a word, was somewhat older, swarthy of appearance and very ragged. Her toes peeped out through the torn uppers of her hobnailed boots, and when she lifted her dress to wring the water from the hem it could be seen that she wore no stockings and that her dark, thin legs were threaded with varicose veins above the calves.
“D’ye see them?” Micky’s Jim whispered in Dermod’s ear. “They cannot make a livin’ on the streets and they have to come and work with us.”
“I don’t like the look of them,” Dermod whispered, rubbing his hand over the sore on his face.