"Down he goes!" was shouted as Andy's foot slipped in making a dash at another ditch, into which he went head over heels, and Dick followed fast, and disappeared after him.
"Ride! ride!" shouted Tom Durfy; and the horsemen put their spurs into the flanks of their steeds, and were soon up to the scene of action. There was Andy, rolling over and over in the muddy bottom of a ditch, floundering in rank weeds and duck's meat, with Dick fastened on him, pummelling away most unmercifully, but not able to kill him altogether, for want of breath.
The horsemen, in a universal screech of laughter, dismounted, and disengaged the unfortunate Andy from the fangs of Dick the Devil, who was dragged out of the ditch much more like a scavenger than a gentleman.
The moment Andy got loose, away he ran again, with a rattling "Tally-ho!" after him, and he never cried stop till he earthed himself under his mother's bed in the parent cabin.
Murtough Murphy characteristically remarked, that the affair of the day had taken a very whimsical turn;—"Here are you and I, squire, who went out to shoot each other, safe and well, while one of the seconds has come off rather worse for the wear; and a poor devil, who had nothing to say to the matter in hand, good, bad, or indifferent, is nearly killed."
The squire and Murtough then shook hands, and parted friends half an hour after they had met as foes; and even Dick contrived to forget his annoyance in an extra stoup of claret that day after dinner—filling more than one bumper in drinking confusion to Handy Andy, which seemed a rather unnecessary malediction.
CHAPTER IV
After the friendly parting of the foes (pro tempore), there was a general scatter of the party who had come to see the duel: and how strange is the fact, that as much as human nature is prone to shudder at death under the gentlest circumstances, yet men will congregate to be its witnesses when violence aggravates the calamity! A public execution or a duel is a focus where burning curiosity concentrates; in the latter case, Ireland bears the palm for a crowd; in the former, the annals of the Old Bailey can amply testify. Ireland has its own interest, too, in a place of execution, but not in the same degree as England. They have been too used to hanging in Ireland to make it piquant: "toujours perdrix" is a saying which applies in this as in many other cases. The gallows, in its palmy days, was shorn of its terrors: it became rather a pastime. For the victim it was a pastime with a vengeance; for through it all time was past with him. For the rabble who beheld his agony, the frequency of the sight had blunted the edge of horror, and only sharpened that of unnatural excitement. The great school, where law should be the respected master, failed to inspire its intended awe;—the legislative lesson became a mockery; and death, instead of frowning with terror, grinned in a fool's cap from the scaffold.
This may be doubted now, when a milder spirit presides in the councils of the nation and on the bench; but those who remember Ireland not very long ago, can bear witness how lightly life was valued, or death regarded. Illustrative of this, one may refer to the story of the two basket-women in Dublin, who held gentle converse on the subject of an approaching execution.
"Won't you go see de man die to-morrow, Judy?"