Girls indeed!

WIDOW QUIN. It was drink maybe?

MAHON. And he a poor fellow would get drunk on the smell of a pint! He'd a queer rotten stomach, I'm telling you, and when I gave him three pulls from my pipe a while since, he was taken with contortions till I had to send him in the ass cart to the females nurse.

WIDOW QUIN clasping her hands. Well, I never till this day heard tell of a man the like of that.

MAHON. I'd take a mighty oath you didn't surely, and wasn't he the laughing joke of every female woman where four baronies meet, the way the girls would stop their weeding if they seen him coming the road to let a roar at him, and call him the looney of Mahon's.

WIDOW QUIN. I'd give the world and all to see the like of him. What kind was he?

MAHON. A small low fellow.

WIDOW QUIN. And dark?

MAHON. Dark and dirty.

WIDOW QUIN considering. I'm thinking I seen him.

MAHON eagerly. An ugly young blackguard?

WIDOW QUIN. A hideous, fearful villain, and the spit of you.

MAHON. What way is he fled?

WIDOW QUIN. Gone over the hills to catch a coasting steamer to the north or south.

MAHON. Could I pull up on him now?

WIDOW QUIN. If you'll cross the sands below where the tide is out, you'll be in it as soon as himself, for he had to go round, ten miles by the top of the bay. She points from the door. Strike down by the head beyond and then follow on the roadway to the north and east.

Mahon goes abruptly.

 

WIDOW QUIN shouting after him. Let you give him a good vengeance when you come up with him, but don't put yourself in the power of the law, for it'd be a poor thing to see a judge in his black cap reading out his sentence on a civil warrior the like of you. She swings the door to and looks at Christy, who is cowering in terror, for a moment, then she bursts into a laugh. Well, you're the walking playboy of the western world, and that's the poor man you had divided to his breeches belt.

CHRISTY looking out; then, to her. What'll Pegeen say when she hears that story? What'll she be saying to me now?

WIDOW QUIN. She'll knock the head of you, I'm thinking, and drive you from the door. God help her to be taking you for a wonder, and you a little schemer making up a story you destroyed your da.

CHRISTY turning to the door, nearly speechless with rage, half to himself. To be letting on he was dead, and coming back to his life, and following me like an old weazel tracing a rat, and coming in here laying desolation between my own self and the fine women of Ireland, and he a kind of carcase that you'd fling upon the sea. ...

WIDOW QUIN more soberly. There's talking for a man's one only son.

CHRISTY breaking out. His one son, is it? May I meet him with one tooth and it aching, and one eye to be seeing seven and seventy divils in the twists of the road, and one old timber leg on him to limp into the scalding grave. Looking out.