There was neither joy nor sorrow in Tobin's voice, and that tone expressed the general feeling of Kilcash towards the event. It was nothing to the village, neither good nor harm. He had been little more than a name to them.
"Well, you all remember an unfortunate fellow named Fahey--Mike Fahey, wasn't it?--who went down the Hole of his own free will, or, rather, when he was chased by the police, ten or eleven years ago. Of course you all remember him?"
"Oh, yes"--they all remembered him.
"Well, the affair of Mr. Davenport's death put him in my mind, and I thought we'd go and look at the place where he took his awful leap. It nearly made me giddy to look down, and sick to think of his awful end."
"And he wasn't in the wrong, after all!" said John Tobin. "Mr. Davenport, I will say, afterwards cleared the man's character. That was good of Mr. Davenport, wasn't it?"
"Yes," said O'Brien; "but why did he make away with himself? If a man knows he's innocent, he needn't run off and drown himself. He must have remembered Mr. Davenport gave him the money. Why didn't he trust Mr. Davenport to clear him?"
The three men shook their heads.
"That's what puzzles me," said O'Brien. "This unfortunate man was fond of fishing."
"And little's the good he got by it," said one of the fishermen. "He had a miserable cockleshell of a punt, and it was the wonder of every one he wasn't drowned seven days in the week. Nothing would satisfy him but to keep dodging about that Black Rock in his tub of a punt, all by himself, and he not able to swim a stroke. If he hadn't gone down the Hole of his own will, he'd have been drowned by his own foolishness some day."
"How used he to manage that boat? With a sail?"