A Lost Recruit

Mick was bound eventually for one of those ravines which cleave the cliffs' precipitous wall and give access to the shore, generally by a deep-sunken sandy boreen. Here, under a tall bank, there are a couple of cabins, besides another which, having lost its roof, may be reckoned as a half; so that Tullykillagin is not a large place, even as places go in its neighbourhood. He knew, however, that he could count upon getting something to eat at either of the two cabins first mentioned, and, indeed, at the bare-raftered one also, if, as often chanced, it was occupied by Tim Fottrel, the gatheremup; and this prospect served for an incentive, feeble enough, though it strengthened a little as the hours wore on. So languid, in fact, was his resolution that at one moment he thought he would just sthreel home again without going any farther; if he went aisy everybody would have cleared out of Kilmacrone before he got back. But at this time he was sitting among some broom-bushes, under which last year's withered black pods were strewn, and he determined that if there were an odd number of seeds in the first one he opened he would go on to Tullykillagin. There were nine in it, and he logically continued to loiter seaward.

He dawdled so much that when he came to the cliff the sun already hung low over the water, and as he walked along the edge his shadow stretched away far inland across the dappled pale and dark green of the furze-fretted sward. The sea unrolled a ceaseless scroll of faint wild-hyacinth colour, on which invisible breeze-wafts inscribed and erased mysterious curves and strokes like hieroglyphics. Here and there it showed deep purple stains; for a flight of little snowflake clouds were fluttering in from the Atlantic, followed at leisure by deep-folded, glistering drifts, now massed on the horizon-rim to muffle the descending sun. Yet that tide, with all its smoothness, showed a broad band of foam wherever it touched the pebbles, which lay dry before its sliding, for it was on its way in. It had nearly reached the cliff's foot in most places; but Mick presently came to a point where he looked down on a small field of very green grass, set as an oasis between the waves and the walling rock, with a miniature chaos of heaped-up boulders to left and right. A few of them were scattered over it, and even the highest of these wore a scarf of leathery flat sea-ribbon, in token of occasional submergence; but amongst them grew hawthorn and sloe bushes, and a clump of scarlet-tasselled fuchsia. To heighten the incongruity of its aspect, this pasture was inhabited by a large strawberry cow, who seemed to be enjoying the alternate mouthfuls of seaweed and woodbine, which she munched off a thickly wreathed boulder, untroubled by the fact that the meal bade fair to be her last, since the rising spring tide had already all but cut off access on either hand, and would still flow for some hours.

"Musha, now I'll be skivered," said Mick, standing still, "if that's not Joe McEvoy's ould cow. You 'll be apt to experience a dampin', ould woman, if you don't quit out of there. Whethen, it's a quare man he is to lave the baste sthrayin' about permiscuous in the welther of the tide."

He peered over the edge of the cliff, evidently mistrusting its smooth face; and then he threw several stones and clods at the cow, with shouts of "Hi, out of that!" and "Shoo along!" But his missiles fell short of their mark, and if his voice reached her, she treated it with the placid disregard of which her kind are mistress on such occasions, and never raised her crumple-horned head.

"Have it your own way, then," said Mick, cynically; "it's nothin' to me if you've a mind to thry a taste of swimmin' under wather."

He had not, however, strolled much farther when he met with somebody who was vastly more concerned about the animal's impending fate. This was old Joe McEvoy himself, who, out of the mouth of a steep, sandy boreen, sprang up suddenly, like a jack-fn-the-box-one of the shock-wigged, saturnine-complexioned pattern. But no jack-in-the-box could have looked so flurriedly distracted, or have muttered to itself such queer execrations as he did, hobbling along.

"A year's loadin' of bad luck to the whoule of thim!" he was saying with gasps when Mick approached; "there's not a one of thim but 'ud do desthruction on herself sooner than lose a chanst to be annoyin' anybody, if she could conthrive it no other way."

"If it's th' ould cow you're cursin'," said Mick, "she's down below yonder."

"Och, tell me somethin' I dunno, you gomeral, not but what I'm nigh as big a one meself as can be, to go thrust her wid that little imp of mischief. Bad scran to it, I must give me stiff leg a rest, and she 'll be up here blatherin' after me before you can look round, you may bet your brogues she will."

"Gomeral yourself and save your penny," said Mick, whose temper was not at its best after his long day of hungry discontent. "And the divil a call you have to be onaisy about the crathur follyin' you anywheres. Stayin' where she is she's apt to be, until she gets the chanst of goin' out to say wid the turn of the tide, and that's like enough to happen her."

"And who at all was talkin' of the cow follyin'? It's ould Biddy Duggan down below that nivir has her tongue off of me, nagglin' at me for lettin' the poor crathur pick her bit along the beach, and it a strip of the finest grass in the townland, when it's above wather, just goin' to loss. A couple of pints differ extry it does be makin' in the milkin' of a day she's grazed there. But it's threatenin' dhrowndin' and disthruction over it th' ould banshee is this great while; and plased she 'll be, rale plased and sot up. Sure, that's what goes agin' me, to be so far gratifyin' her, and herself as mischevious, harm-hopin' an ould toad as iver I hated the sight of--Och, bejabers, didn't I tell you so? It's herself comin' gabble-gobblin' up."

As he spoke, a very small, meagre, raggged old woman emerged swiftly from the lane, accompanied by one younger and stouter and less nimble of foot, her temporary neighbour, Mrs. Gatheremup. Mrs. Duggan seemed to bear out Joe's character of her; for now, like Spenser's hag Occasion, "ever as she went her tongue did walk," and the path it took was not one of peace. "Maybe, after this happenin', some she could name might have the wit to believe what other people tould thim, who knew bitter than to be thinkin' to feed a misfortnit crathur of an ould cow on sand and sayweed as if she was a sayl or a saygull, and it a scandal to the place to behould her foostherin' along down there wid the waves' edges slitherin' up to her nose, and she sthrivin' to graze, and the slippery stones fit to break her neck." Such was the purport of Mrs. Duggan's remarks, which were punctuated by Joe McEvoy's peremptory requests that she would lave gabbin' and givin' impidence, and his appeals to the others to inform him whether they weren't all to be pitied for havin' to put up wid the ould screech-owl's foolish talk.

"Sure, that's the way they do be keepin' it up continial, Micky lad," Mrs. Fottrel called to him, shrilly, as if athwart gusts of high wind. "I'll pass yon me word the two of thim 'll stand at their doors of an evenin" and give bad langwidge to aich other across the breadth of the road till they have us all fairly moidhered wid the bawls of thim, and I on'y wonder the thatch doesn't take and slip down on their ould heads."

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