Chapter 2

Mr. William Fennessy, lately returned from America, at present publican in Enniscar and proprietor of a small farm on its outskirts, had taken a grey mare to the forge.

It was now November, and the mare had been out at grass for nearly three months, somewhat to the detriment of her figure, but very much to her general advantage. Even in the south-west of Ireland it is not usual to keep horses out quite so late in the year, but Mr. Fennessy, having begun his varied career as a travelling tinker, was not the man to be bound by convention. He had provided the mare with the society of a donkey and two sheep, and with the shelter of a filthy and ruinous cowshed. Taking into consideration the fact that he had only paid seven pounds ten shillings for her, he thought this accommodation was as much as she was entitled to.

She was now drooping and dozing in a dark corner of the forge, waiting her turn to be shod, while the broken spring of a car was being patched, as shaggy and as dirty a creature as had ever stood there.

“Where did you get that one?” inquired the owner of the car of Mr. Fennessy, in the course of much lengthy conversation.

“I got her from a cousin of my own that died down in the County Limerick,” said Mr. Fennessy in his most agreeable manner. “’Twas himself bred her, and she was near deshtroyed fallin’ back on a harra’ with him. It’s for postin’ I have her.”

“She’s shlack enough yet,” said the carman.

“Ah, wait awhile!” said Mr. Fennessy easily, “in a week’s time when I’ll have her clipped out, she’ll be as clean as amber.”

The conversation flowed on to other themes.

It was nearly dark when the carman took his departure, and the smith, a silent youth with sore eyes, caught hold of one of the grey mare’s fetlocks and told her to “lift!” He examined each hoof in succession by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle, raked his fire together, and then, turning to Mr. Fennessy, remarked:--

“Ye’d laugh if ye were here the day I put a slipper on this one, an’ she afther comin’ out o’ the thrain--last June it was. ’Twas one Connolly back from Craffroe side was taking her from the station; him that thrained her for Miss Fitzroy. She gave him the two heels in the face.” The glow from the fire illumined the smith’s sardonic grin of remembrance. “She had a sandcrack in the near fore that time, and there’s the sign of it yet.”

The Cinderella-like episode of the slipper had naturally not entered into Mr. Fennessy’s calculations, but he took the unforeseen without a change of countenance.

“Well, now,” he said deliberately, “I was sayin’ to meself on the road a while ago, if there was one this side o’ the counthry would know her it’d be yerself.”

The smith took the compliment with a blink of his sore eyes.

“Annyone’d be hard set to know her now,” he said.

There was a pause, during which a leap of sparks answered each thump of the hammer on the white hot iron, and Mr. Fennessy arranged his course of action.

“Well, Larry,” he said, “I’ll tell ye now what no one in this counthry knows but meself and Patsey Crimmeen. Sure I know it’s as good to tell a thing to the ground as to tell it to yerself!”

He lowered his voice.

“’Twas Mr. Gunning of Streamstown bought that one from Miss Fitzroy at the Dublin Show, and a hundhred pound he gave for her!”

The smith mentally docked this sum by seventy pounds, but said, “By dam!” in polite convention.

“’Twasn’t a week afther that I got her for twinty-five pounds!”

The smith made a further mental deduction equally justified by the facts; the long snore and wheeze of the bellows filled the silence, and the dirty walls flushed and glowed with the steady crescendo and diminuendo of the glow.

The ex-tinker picked up the bottle with the candle. “Look at that!” he said, lowering the light and displaying a long transverse scar beginning at the mare’s knee and ending in an enlarged fetlock.

“I seen that,” said the smith.

“And look at that!” continued Mr. Fennessy, putting back the shaggy hair on her shoulder. A wide and shiny patch of black skin showed where the hatter’s plate glass had flayed the shoulder. “She played the divil goin’ through the streets, and made flitthers of herself this way, in a shop window. Gunning give the word to shoot her. The dealer’s boy told Patsey Crimmeen. ’Twas Patsey was caring her at the show for Miss Fitzroy. Shtan’ will ye!”--this to the mare, whose eyes glinted white as she flung away her head from the light of the candle.

“Whatever fright she got she didn’t forget it,” said the smith.

“I was up in Dublin meself the same time,” pursued Mr. Fennessy. “Afther I seein’ Patsey I took a sthroll down to Brennan’s yard. The leg was in two halves, barrin’ the shkin, and the showldher swoll up as big as a sack o’ meal. I was three or four days goin’ down to look at her this way, and I seen she wasn’t as bad as what they thought. I come in one morning, and the boy says to me, ‘The boss has three horses comin’ in to-day, an’ I dunno where’ll we put this one.’ I goes to Brennan, and he sitting down to his breakfast, and the wife with him. ‘Sir,’ says I, ‘for the honour of God sell me that mare!’ We had hard strugglin’ then. In the latther end the wife says, ‘It’s as good for ye to part her, James,’ says she, ‘and Mr. Gunning’ll never know what way she went. This honest man’ll never say where he got her.’ ‘I will not, ma’am,’ says I. ‘I have a brother in the postin’ line in Belfast, and it’s for him I’m buyin’ her.’”

The process of making nail-holes in the shoe seemed to engross the taciturn young smith’s attention for the next minute or two.

“There was a man over from Craffroe in town yesterday,” he observed presently, “that said Mr. Gunning was lookin’ out for a cob, and he’d fancy one that would lep.”

He eyed his work sedulously as he spoke.

Something, it might have been the light of the candle, woke a flicker in Mr. Fennessy’s eye. He passed his hand gently down the mare’s quarter.

“Supposing now that the mane was off her, and something about six inches of a dock took off her tail, what sort of a cob d’ye think she’d make, Larry?”

The smith, with a sudden falsetto cackle of laughter, plunged the shoe into a tub of water, in which it gurgled and spluttered as if in appreciation of the jest.