“‘Deed, now, I dunno what to say to it all,” she declared, “and I couldn’t take it on me conscience to go swear in a court of justice that I knew where you might be yesterday late. More betoken there was the bad talk you had out of you about the Quins before you come here, that they’ll be bringing up agin you now, you may depend. An ugly appearance it has, sure enough, the two of them coming over at this hour. As headstrong you are as a cross-tempered jennet; but if you’ll take my advice you’ll keep yourself out of their sight the best way you can, till I see what they want with you, and then if it’s a warrant they’ve got, I might try persuade them to go look for you somewheres else. That’s the best I can do, and, of course, I can’t say whether they will or no, but maybe—”
For a wonder Mrs. Hugh did take this advice, and most promptly, rushing with a suppressed wail out of the cowhouse and into a shed close by, where she crouched behind a heap of hay, the first hiding-place that presented itself to her in her panic. She had spent a great part of the past night in meditation on her sister’s alarming statements; and now the ominous arrival of the police put a finishing touch to her fright. How was she to escape from them, or to exculpate herself? Bridgie evidently either could or would do little or nothing. At this dreadful crisis in her affairs her thoughts turned longingly towards her own house down below, where there was Hugh, poor man, who would certainly have, somehow, prevented her from being dragged off to Athmoran gaol, even if he did believe her to have burnt the rick. Through the dusty shed window she saw two dark, flat-capped, short-caped figures sauntering up to the front door, whereupon with a sudden desperate impulse, she stole out, and fled down the cart-track along which they had just come. Getting a good start of them, she said to herself, she might be at home again with Hugh before they could overtake her—and one of them, she added, as fat as a prize pig.
As Mrs. Hugh ran most of the road’s two long miles, she was considerably out of breath when she came round a turn which brought into view an expected and an unexpected object. The one was Hugh walking out of his own gate, the other Quin’s rick, still rearing its glistening yellow ridge into the sunshine.
“Well, now, Julia woman, and is it yourself?” Hugh said, as she darted across the road to him. “What’s took you to be tearing along at that rate, and without so much as a shawl over your head?”
“Thinking I was to meet you before this—kilt I am, running all the way,” she said, panting. “And I do declare there’s the big rick in it yet.”
Hugh’s face fell. “Whethen now, if it’s with the same old blathers you’re come back,” he said, in a disgusted tone, “there was no need for you to be in any such great hurry.”
“Ne’er a word was I going to say agin it at all,” said his wife, “and I making sure the constables would be after me every minyit for burning it down.”
“What the mischief put that notion in your head?” said Hugh.
“I seen the blaze of a great fire down here last night,” she said, “and I thought it would be Quin’s rick, and they knowing I had some talk about it.”
“Sure ’twas just the big heap of dead branches and old trunks,” said Hugh, “that’s lying at the end of the cow-lane ever since the big wind. It took and went on fire yesterday evening; raison good, there was a cartful of Wexford tinkers went by in the afternoon, and stopped to boil their kettle close under it. A fine flare-up it made, and it as dry as tinder; but I’d scarce ha’ thought you’d see it that far. Lucky it is the old sticks was fit for nothing much, unless some poor bodies may be at a loss for firewood this next winter. Come along in, Julia, and wet yourself a cup of tay. You’d a right to be tired trotting about that way. And as for the pólis, bedad, they’d have their own work cut out for them, if they was to be taking up everybody they heard talking foolish.”