Part 6
“It’s starved and lost we’ll be,” said Atty, hanging back, and looking distrustfully over the lonely black land, that swept out a great circle, rounded off far away among the dim-white November mists.
“If we are itself, I’d liefer get lost than to be shut up in the hijjis ould House all the days of our lives’ ends,” said Min.
“I wisht to goodness, then, you didn’t take and fryken th’ ould goat on them,” Atty said querulously. “That’s the raison why she’s so mad, and they’re puttin’ us out of it,” and he sat down under a clump of broom, looking as if he intended to stay there.
“I wisht I was drownded in the middle of a bog-hole,” Min said with sudden desperation, which caused Atty to clutch her frantically crying: “Och, Min, honey, never mind. What’s to become of us at all?”
“Maybe we might find th’ ould goat some time,” Min suggested with a reactionary gleam of hope. “And then they’d be apt to let us stop. ’Twas that they thought so bad of; worser a dale than Mrs O’Hagan’s hin. We’d have a great chance if we found her.”
“Let’s go look,” said Atty, jumping up. “Och, Min, I declare to goodness there she is just over yonder.”
“It’s the moral of herself bedad,” Min said joyfully, and they both hied off across the bog towards a boulder glimmering greyly among some rushy tussocks.
II
Before noon on the following day the two children had come considerably nearer the fulfilment of Atty’s prediction that they might be lost and starved. Lost, in truth, they were very thoroughly, for their quest of the Fottrells’ goat had lured them with many false hopes so far over the bog that they no longer knew in what direction Clochranbeg lay; and a fast of four-and-twenty hours feels unpleasantly like starvation to people of seven or eight. In the lonesome track through which they were straying they had met neither man nor beast, and after a night spent huddled in misery under a furzy bank, they had been since the return of light wandering on, growing hungrier, colder, and more terrified with the lapse of each endless hour. The Union van, loaded with constables, would have appeared to them a blessed ark of safety. But now, when mid-day was still distant, they had espied before them, not far off, the pale twinkling of the sea, and they made towards it, rejoicing at the sight of any familiar object.
On the edge of the cliff they were once more disappointed, because no houses came into view; still, there was an easy slope leading down to the beach, and it would be a relief to escape from the dreadful desert that stretched behind them. If they had but known, they were at that moment standing on the brink of a grimmer peril than famine, captivity, or any other of the harms that threatened them; for there at their feet lay spread Slughnatraigh.
The bit of the strand so-called does not outwardly show much to account for its very evil repute all about Meenaclochran. It is a little semi-oval of a bay, curved round by cliffs with swarded crests. Midway in their curve a spur of the cliff shelves down to the strand, jutting out seaward in a low rocky ridge, overgrown with a curious entanglement of seaweed, woodbine and brier bushes. The highest tides seldom reach quite to the base of these cliffs; and it is to the sands spread beneath them that Slughnatraigh owes its ill-omened name. Quicksands they are, of the most treacherous and tenacious quality. Woeful has been the fate of many a one who, setting foot unawares on their smooth grey face, has felt a cold mouth open and fasten upon him, enlarging itself, and gaping wider and deeper for him the more wildly he struggles against its grip, until at last, half sucked in, half sinking, he goes helplessly under, and the rest of his miserable tragedy, stifled away from light and air, is to be surmised only by the heaving and quivering, which subside slowly, as the death-trap gulps down its victim. More than once it has happened that those trailing bramble bushes have served as bait. On this bog-land they grow rarely enough to make blackberries seem a covetable prize; and roving children have sometimes been lured by the sight of them into terrible toils.
They attracted Min now, and she pointed them out to Atty, saying: “There might be an odd few berries stickin’ on them yet,” with which hope they began all the more eagerly to descend the rough track towards the beach. But when they had scrambled nearly half-way down, they came upon a much more important discovery. From behind a projecting crag gleamed into view the white-washed gable-end of a cabin. “Look there, Min,” said Atty, who saw it first. “It’s a house. If there’s any people in it, they’d be apt to give us a bit of bread or somethin’.” Min said: “Glory be--we’ll try would they,” and was hurrying on to make the experiment, when a sudden thought checked her.
“I declare to goodness,” she said, “I believe it’s the man-trappers’ house. They said it was just beyant the stones on the strand, and there’s the big stones, sure enough, and there’s itself. We’d a right to not go near it.”
Min’s conjecture was so far correct. The man-trappers did live almost on the verge of Slughnatraigh, in fact to its neighbourhood was partly due their long-continued ill-repute, as many an anxious parent endeavoured to scare the children from that real and ghastly danger of the place by setting up the man-trappers as a half-mythical bogey. All the rumours she had ever heard about them now occurred to Min. She remembered how a cross-looking old woman had been pointed out to her at Mass as the mother of the man-trappers, and how she had been assured that any one of the family would drown a person as soon as look at him. Here on the spot, these stories seemed more true and more terrific than ever before, and Min resolved firmly that, hungry or no, she and Atty must give the house as wide a berth as possible, without returning to the desolate bog. “Let’s try first is there e’er a blackberry yet,” she said, “and after that we can creep along down close by the edge of the say below there. Some more houses is sure to be in it prisently a wee bit further on.”
She turned towards the thorn-clad rocks, with Atty following her. But their path brought them at one point a fuller view of the cabin with its blue smoke-plume, and glint of red fire through the open door, outside which a pinkish pig and several speckled hens rooted and pecked round a large black pot, while a white goat browsed on the patch of thrift-sprinkled sward. And all this looked so home-like to Atty, who was just then less conscious of fear than of a chilly hunger, that he warily lagged behind Min, till he found an opportunity to slip aside, and make a dart for the scene which seemed to him much more attractive and hopeful than those dark bushes shivering in the bleak morning wind.
Mrs Mulrane was mixing meal and water for stirabout on the dresser, when a shrill sound of singing rose up suddenly close by: “What is it to goodness?” she wondered with a start, for nothing like it had been heard there since her sons grew up; and going to the door, she was aware of a very small boy in a bluish woollen bib, who sang the louder at her approach. It had struck Atty that a rendering of his most popular lay might prove a successful introduction, and accordingly:
“_I would I were a mountain pig_,”
he was chanting,
“_I would indeed bedad; I would I were a mountain pig A-aitin’ of some bread. I would I were a mountain pig A-drinkin’ of some milk-- I would I were a mountain pig A-gettin’ bits of food._”
The last line vibrated with a vehement shrillness, and Mrs Mulrane said: “Och, whist, whist. Where at all are you streelin’ about to at this time of day?” For she was never very early astir, and had but lately made up her fire.
“We’re goin’ home to wherever the town is,” said Atty, “And if I had e’er an ould crust of bread, I’d sing you a lot more of the ‘Mountain Pig’ before I began aitin’ it at all.”
With an abrupt dive backwards Mrs Mulrane vanished indoors and speedily reappeared. Her hands were filled with the remains of last night’s supper, two flat griddle-cakes, either of which would cover this page. “Here’s for you,” she said, interrupting a piercing _I would_. “Take them, and stop your mouth, and run off home wid them, before you have the crathur inside roused up.”
This crathur was in reality a most harmless person, but the vagueness of the term left room for alarming imaginations, and Atty, with an uncomfortable remembrance about the man-trappers, ran off as fast as he could to join Min, whom he soon saw clambering on the low rocks across a smooth stretch of sand. The rocky spit went dwindling seaward, and ended in a line of detached boulders with sandy spaces between, like a row of stepping-stones, only suited, however, to a giant’s striding; and the last boulder was almost reached by the white edge of the tide as it came seething in. Beyond the cold slate-coloured water a band of dull red lingered on the north-western horizon, a belated remnant drifted round from the morning glow.
Running at the top of his speed, with both hands full, Atty tripped up over a shrivelled black coil of seaweed, knotted to a stony weight, and he came down headlong on the sand. He fell soft, and at first his chief concern was to recover his two cakes, which had flown out of his grasp; but when he scrambled to his feet, it was only to feel that cold clammy mouth closing round his ankles, and to find himself sinking, swiftly, horribly, until all the solid world seemed to be crumbling away beneath him. Min, who had come hurrying to meet him, almost rushed into the same entanglement, but luckily stood still on the lowest boulder, a small, sea-weedy slab, scarcely showing above the sand, whence she reached him a hand before it was too late. “What ailed you at all?” she said reprovingly, as he struggled up beside her. “Can’t you walk where it’s firm-like?” But immediately afterwards, attempting to set foot on a firm-like place, she plunged down even more deeply than he had done, and floundered back again in much affright.
Their plight, in truth, was extremely grave, and the more so, the less they understood the real nature of their peril. On one side the rough breakers were rolling in loud and swift, and all round was spread the deadly snare of the quicksand. At any moment the children might be urged by the more visible danger to flee into the jaws of the more fatal one too far for retreat. Meanwhile, however, they only uttered dismayed little shrieks as they groped vainly with tentative half-steps in every direction for a footing they never could find.
It was just at this time that Stacey Colgan with her daughters, and the widow Joyce, and old six-pound-ten Gallaher, accompanied by several lads and lasses, reached the end of the shingle belt, which forms the beach most of the way from Clochranbeg to Slughnatraigh. They had gone out early in quest of salt leaves, and finding these scarce, had wandered on till they came to the precincts of the man-trappers. A possibility of lighting upon the missing strange childer was present to their minds, though nobody thought them likely to be astray upon the strand, and the seekers for them had scattered themselves over the bogs and along the roads. So the whole party were surprised and excited when Judy Colgan exclaimed that she saw a couple of people over yonder down by the water, and that according to her belief it was the strange childer themselves.
“True for her, themselves they are bedad,” Mrs Joyce declared. “I know them by Min’s red skirt. Besides, who else would it be stravadin’ about there? And they in the very worst of the soft places, sure it’s destroyed they’ll be. Woman dear, what’ll we do at all?”
No sooner was their identity established, than the nimblest of the gossoons and _girsheachs_ raced off homewards, partly for help, and partly from emulous eagerness to communicate with the least delay the doubly sensational news that the strange childer were after bein’ got below on the strand, and they about drowndin’ themselves dead in the middle of Slughnatraigh. The rest of the party advanced as close as they dared to the verge of the dangerous ground, and stood there in a group, clamorous as sea-fowl, and as little to the purpose. For a strong breeze beat back the sound of their voices, so that their injunctions to “stand studdy where ye are, and set hand nor fut off of the dry stone for your lives,” never reached Min and Atty, who in any case would not probably have profited much thereby. But more effectual aid was at hand. By-and-by these helpless onlookers saw that two young men were coming rapidly down along the rocky spit, and finally jumping from one detached boulder to the other, till only a narrow sand strip separated them from the children. “They be Pat and Art Mulrane,” said Mrs Colgan; and by the dropping of the nickname she unconsciously showed that in this desperate crisis she had fixed some hopes upon their friendly intervention.
The first action of the brothers was hardly encouraging. One of them shook his fist fiercely at the children, and his threatening shout rose above the dull drumming of the rollers.
“If them barbarous young miscreants of man-trappers take and do anythin’ agin the unfortunate little crathurs now, I hope they’ll get hung for it, I do so,” the Widow Joyce said half-whimpering. Biddy Colgan simply ran away screeching, because, as she afterwards explained, she’d as lief not be seein’ the two of them _massacreed_ or swallied up.
“Och be aisy,” Six-pound-ten said to the widow. “Sure it’s only dispersuadin’ them he’d be of skytin’ out into the soft holes. Ah, woman, have sinse.”
Pat Mulrane had in fact roared at the children, who seemed about to rush towards him: “Don’t you offer to stir an atom off that, you young thieves of the world, or it’s settin’ the dog here at yous I’ll be to ait yous alive.” He would have found it difficult to carry out this threat, as Garry, the black-and-tan collie, himself had been once nearly engulfed, and ever since had resolutely avoided setting a paw on doubtful places. However it effectually deterred Atty and Min, who remained rooted in dismay. A finishing-touch seemed added to their tribulations by the advent of these notorious bugbears, at whom they had now and then flung with due circumspection a censorious pebble or clod. As they cowered together, motionless and mute, Min could only make some vindictive grimaces with her face hidden on Atty’s sleeve, and Atty thought wildly of setting up a propitiatory song, but could not screw up courage to begin.
Meanwhile a brief and anxious colloquy was going on between the two man-trappers. The urgency of the situation allowed scant time for words, and small choice of deeds. In a few moments the swift rising of the tide would swamp the children on their little ledge of safety, and though that lay within a man’s jump of the Mulrane’s station, to spring upon it without dislodging its other occupants was, by reason of its diminutive size and slippery surface, an altogether impossible feat.
“Musha, good gracious, what at all quare antic is the fellow at now?” commented Mrs Colgan to her criticising companions on the other side of Slughnatraigh, as they saw Pat Mulrane suddenly plunge forward as if about to dive off the lowest shelf of the rock. “Is it fallin’ after his head he’d be, to the back of everythin’ else?”
“Begorra, it’s makin’ a foot-stick of himself he is,” Six-pound-ten averred, “to let the children across,” and so it was.
By wedging his toes tightly into a crevice of the big boulder, and gripping with both hands a hold of the slimy, tawny-podded wreaths on the small one, Pat, prone at full length, just spanned the interval between them, over which Art stepped thus on a footbridge, and returned with a frightened child swinging from either arm. This manœuvre was executed with the utmost despatch, yet barely in time, for Pat’s precarious clutch of the slithery seaweed failed just as the other three were safely landed, so that down he went face foremost into the smothering slough, whence his brother hauled him out, blinded, half-choked, hideous to behold in a mask of blue-black oozy mire, after a desperate wrestle with the clinging horror of Slughnatraigh.
All serious danger, nevertheless, was at an end once they were set high and dry upon the big boulder, where they could wait securely until the rescue was completed with the help of inanimate planks and ropes. The strange childer were before long transferred to the Mulranes’ house, and joined there by the Colgans with their party. Not for many a year had Mrs Mulrane entertained so much company, and more kept dropping in through the afternoon, as rumours reached the town, and brought neighbours to investigate upon the spot.
Deep concern had prevailed at Clochranbeg towards the close of the day before, when Min and Atty were found to have entirely and unaccountably disappeared. Not only were the children general favourites, but a feeling existed that the parish was in some measure responsible for them, and that a slur would be cast upon it if they were allowed, as Joe Fottrell said, “to go to loss.” Most people had a sense that such an event would be unlucky as well as lamentable. Search-parties had been roaming over the bogs all night, and some were still going to and fro among their holes and hillocks; but an opinion that they would not again be seen alive was steadily gaining ground.
Nobody wandered more widely and with a more distracted mind than Mrs O’Hagan, the strange childer’s landlady, who was reproaching herself bitterly for having “maybe scared them away wid blamin’ them for th’ ould kilt hin, and talkin’ about the Union.” She had gone so far afield that the news of their recovery did not find her till near sunset, and even then in the shape of reports at once disquieting and contradictory. Some said that the strange childer had been last seen right in the middle of Slughnatraigh. Some that old Mrs Mulrane had hunted them away from her door, and set the dog at them. Others, with much convincing persistency and detail, related that the man-trappers “were after drowndin’ both of them below on the strand, and they screechin’ the way you might hear them in Derry.”
Her relief was therefore intense when she found them happily established by the Mulranes’ fire, little the worse for their adventures, which several neighbours graphically recounted to her, laying especial stress upon the heroism displayed by Pat Mulrane, who had come, Six-pound-ten said, “widin an ames ace of losin’ his life over it.” Upon Pat, who still looked limp and woebegone as he sat in the chimney-corner, Mrs O’Hagan showered, vastly to his further discomfort, profuse praises and benedictions.
“Long sorry I’d be,” she said in peroration, “to be passin’ remarks agin any person in the parish, but I question is there e’er another boy in it that would take and make a foot-stick of himself above the bewitched ould houle out yonder, that’s neither land nor water, unless ’twas the Divil had the stirrin’ of them together accordin’ to some plan of his own, as is like enough, for the unnathural thrimblin’ and quakin’s in them yit. Sure now, if it wasn’t only for yourself, Pat Mulrane, it’s at the black bottom of that awful place them two little imps of innicent crathurs ’ud be lyin’ this minyit, supposin’ there is a bottom to it at all, instead of sittin’ here as grand as you plase, aitin’ bread and treckle, the bould little tormints, and half the parish heart-scalded runnin’ over the country after them the lenth of the night.”
“Och, they’re welcome, ma’am,” Pat muttered ambiguously.
“Take a cup of tay, ma’am; it’s dry you’re apt to be after all that fine talk you’re givin’ Pat,” his mother said with a sub-acid suavity, for while exulting on his behalf she retained a resentful memory of her last visit to Mrs O’Hagan, and of Dan’s rejected suit.
Mrs O’Hagan accepted the tea unsuspectingly, though protesting that she had only looked in to fetch home the children; yet in the end she went her way without them. The Mulranes were loth to relinquish them so soon, chiefly on account of Maggie Dowling, who from her imprisoning box-bed declared that “the little gossoon wid his quare song done her heart good,” and who seemed sadly cast down by the prospect of their departure. “You might lave them at all events,” Mrs Mulrane suggested, “till the crathur’s tired of the fantigue.” And Mrs O’Hagan consented, mindful of what poverty prevailed in her own and her neighbours’ houses, and not ignorant that the Mulranes were at this time some degrees better off than the rest. As for Min and Atty themselves, the friendliness of Garry, and the abundance of freshly-baked griddle cakes, very sufficiently reconciled them to their change of quarters.
In this way it came about that the strange childer took up their abode with the man-trappers, and one result of it was that the latter shook off the bad name which had been fastened upon them. From that day the youth of Clochranbeg transferred their animosity to unchancy Slughnatraigh, which they thenceforth regarded with increased dread and aversion, and at whose impassively sullen, grey face they pelted vanishing stones from an even more cautious distance than when the man-trappers had been their mark. Six-pound-ten’s oft-repeated narrative of the strange childer’s hair’s-breadth escape always wound up with, “Ay, bedad, ’twas the fine foot-stick he made of himself entirely that time;” and this helped to suggest the new nickname with which it somehow seemed necessary to replace the old. It became customary to speak of Pat Mulrane and his brother as “the foot-sticks,” a title which, in the circumstances, nobody could shout after them with hostile derision. Moreover, as Min and Atty often accompanied them to the strand or the town, they were gradually drawn out of the isolation into which they had shrunk, and began to hold again some intercourse with their kind.
These changes were all more or less soothing to Mrs Mulrane, and under their influence she showed a perceptible diminution in the eccentricity and moodiness of her demeanour. But her clearing sky showed its brightest patch one day when a friend of the M‘Evoys looked in on her charged with what were obviously overtures to the making up of a match between their Lizzie and her Pat. On that occasion she uttered dark and riddling speeches, which would not have misbeseemed an ancient Pythoness, or the heroine of an Æschylean drama, about people whose ignorance and pride “hindered them of taking what was offered them, when belike nothing ailed it all the while except bein’ a dale too good for them, or the likes of them, and who were very apt to find they had missed their chances, if ever they come lookin’ after it again.”
Nevertheless this lifting of her clouds was only partial and transitory. Their shadow dropped upon her once more before the dissatisfied go-between had well re-crossed the threshold, and she fell into a gloomy reverie, standing idle at her door, while the chant of the _Mountain Pig_ came faintly from the inner room, where it was beguiling that long spring afternoon for Maggie Dowling. If she had put her dejection into words they would have run somewhat as follows: “It’s poor Dan I do be thinkin’ bad of. Them other two boys might be right enough, but me heart’s scalded about him, for he didn’t get fairity wid it all, troth he did not. And it’s blamin’ me he is, I well know. There might be a letter at the office agin next Saturday, but it’s not to me he’ll write. Last time it was to Pat, and before that to Maggie and Art; niver a word he sent to me. It’s him I’m thinkin’ bad of, the poor child. But I might maybe get news of him on Saturday.”
OLD ISAAC’S BIGGEST HAUL