“By Jove! who arranged you in this guise, you and your cows?” I said to the poor devil, stopping before him.
He made a few grimaces before explaining; but the offer of a cigar, that rarely misses its effect, at last unloosed his tongue. He then told me that the Moonlighters had come with a razor to cut his ears, a week after having cut the tails of his cows as a warning.
“And what could have been the motive of such cowardly, barbarous mutilation?”
He had accepted work on a boycotted farm, though the League had expressly forbidden it; in other words, he was what the Irish call a “land-grabber.”
“Where are you going with your cows?”
“To sell them at Listowel, if I may, which is not certain.”
“Why is it not certain? Because they are unprovided with a tail? At the worst that would only prevent them being made into ox-tail soup,” I say, trying to enliven the conversation by an appropriate joke.
“That’s not it,” answers the man. “But the interdict applies to the sale of the cows as well as to having any intercourse with me. I am forbidden to buy anything, and anyone speaking to me is fined two shillings.”
He seemed to think this perfectly natural and even just, like the Leper of the “Cité d’Aoste,” or like common convicts when one talks to them of their punishment.