Is it that tramper?

CHRISTY wildly. Where'll I hide my poor body from that ghost of hell?

 

The door is pushed open, and Old Mahon appears on threshold. Christy darts in behind door.

 

WIDOW QUIN in great amusement. God save you, my poor man.

MAHON gruffly. Did you see a young lad passing this way in the early morning or the fall of night?

WIDOW QUIN. You're a queer kind to walk in not saluting at all.

MAHON. Did you see the young lad?

WIDOW QUIN stiffly. What kind was he?

MAHON. An ugly young streeler with a murderous gob on him and a little switch in his hand. I met a tramper seen him coming this way at the fall of night.

WIDOW QUIN. There's harvest hundreds do be passing these days for the Sligo boat. For what is it you're wanting him, my poor man?

MAHON. I want to destroy him for breaking the head on me with the clout of a loy. He takes off a big hat, and shows his head in a mass of bandages and plaster, with some pride. It was he did that, and amn't I a great wonder to think I've traced him ten days with that rent in my crown?

WIDOW QUIN taking his head in both hands and examining it with extreme delight. That was a great blow. And who hit you? A robber maybe?

MAHON. It was my own son hit me, and he the divil a robber or anything else but a dirty, stuttering lout.

WIDOW QUIN letting go his skull and wiping her hands in her apron. You'd best be wary of a mortified scalp, I think they call it, lepping around with that wound in the splendour of the sun. It was a bad blow surely, and you should have vexed him fearful to make him strike that gash in his da.

MAHON. Is it me?

WIDOW QUIN amusing herself. Aye. And isn't it a great shame when the old and hardened do torment the young?

MAHON raging. Torment him is it? And I after holding out with the patience of a martyred saint, till there's nothing but destruction on me and I'm driven out in my old age with none to aid me?

WIDOW QUIN greatly amused. It's a sacred wonder the way that wickedness will spoil a man.

MAHON. My wickedness, is it? Amn't I after saying it is himself has me destroyed, and he a lier on walls, a talker of folly, a man you'd see stretched the half of the day in the brown ferns with his belly to the sun.

WIDOW QUIN. Not working at all?

MAHON. The divil a work, or if he did itself, you'd see him raising up a haystack like the stalk of a rush or driving our last cow till he broke her leg at the hip, and when he wasn't at that he'd be fooling over little birds he had – finches and felts – or making mugs at his own self in the bit of a glass we had hung on the wall.

WIDOW QUIN looking at Christy. What way was he so foolish? It was running wild after the girls maybe?

MAHON with a shout of derision. Running wild, is it? If he seen a red petticoat coming swinging over the hill, he'd be off to hide in the sticks, and you'd see him shooting out his sheep's eyes between the little twigs and leaves, and his two ears rising like a hare looking out through a gap.