Part 6

One summer morning, when they had been a couple of months in the place, Min and Atty wandered down towards the beach with a number of other children, and near the end of a sandy boreen halted in a convenient hollow, where Atty was called upon for his song. Seated under a gold-flecked furze bush, he was chanting to a well-satisfied audience, when a young fisherman came along up from the shore, and paused to listen. He had a dark melancholy face, which did not look at all amused, though he presently remarked: “That’s a comical lilt you have, sonny, entirely.” His voice sounded gruff, and, as it were, rusty, but in no way menacing, yet several of the children immediately in warning tones bade Atty “whist,” while the eldest girl pulled him up by the hand, and rushed off with him out of sight among the banks and bushes, all the others stampeding after her. Little Tim Nolan, looking back as they scampered, and seeing that the young man had turned away, threw a small pebble slightly in his direction, as if to symbolise their sentiments.

“Who was yon thin?” said Min. “Has he anythin’ to say to the pólis?”

“Sure not at all,” she was informed. “Pat Mulrane he is, one of the man-trappers, that’s livin’ down below on the strand round the corner there, along wid th’ ould mother of them. Quare and cruel bad they are. One time they took and drownded the ould grandfather they had, in a big black hole in the middle of Slughnatraigh, and they’d be apt to do the same on anybody they got scramblin’ about the rocks near their house. You’d a right to keep out of it.”

The warning impressed Min and Atty all the more because it came from contemporaries of their own, and thenceforward to their list of perils to be avoided were added the man-trappers, and the man-trappers’ home.

Before very long, Atty’s mind began to be harassed by yet another anxiety, and this was the conduct of Min. Ever since Min could remember she had walked literally in a prescribed track, from which she dared not deviate, controlled by a will not to be, even in imagination, gainsaid. And now that she found herself in a state of unprecedented freedom, her long-repressed energies tended to run riot. Within the limits imposed by her abiding fear of getting locked up, on the one hand, and lost, on the other, she waxed rather wild and venturesome. Foolhardy she appeared to Atty, whose spirits, less elastic, had not rebounded as vigorously as hers, and whose further-seeing mind foreboded evil from her exploits. Often did he watch her proceedings with scared and scandalised eyes, and often did she turn a deaf ear to a low whisper admonishing her: “They’ll put us out of it, Min, if you do be going’ on that-a way.” Many a time, as he gave by request a recital of his _Mountain Pig_, his thoughts were all the while full of apprehensions about the pranks which he surmised her to be playing, and the calamitous consequences which they might entail. As things turned out, he might have seemed entitled to say: “Wasn’t I after tellin’ you?” Yet it may be doubted whether Min’s misdeeds had in reality much to do with the event. Her habit of hunting the neighbours’ poultry, and of “rising rows” among their children, did, it is true, cause some annoyance, but would hardly have produced such an effect unaided by other circumstances.

These other circumstances, however, arose a year or so after the arrival of Min and Atty. A spell of exceptionally hard times set in at Meenaclochran. Disastrous weather on land and sea, wreck of crops, failure of fishing, took heavy toll from lives that had no superfluities to renounce. The cheapest of yellow meal began to be reckoned a luxury; nay, at last there was a demand outrunning the supply even for the savourless “salt leaves,” gathered off the rocks to be boiled into the sorriest pretence of a dinner. Everybody was pinched, and nobody could tell how long the trouble might continue, since the wisest person knew hardly more than little Jim Daly, who drummed on his soon-empty saucer in vain desire for a re-fill, or old Bridey Ahern, who said hopefully: “Plase goodness there might be a pitaty in it to-morra,” to console herself over her dismal sea-weedy repast.

And when matters were at the worst, nothing would suit Miss Mann but she must needs go meddle with Mrs O’Hagan’s hens and the Fottrells’ goat. She had incited a number of the children to join with her in building a very elaborate sand-house under a bent-matted bank on the north strand, which was all well and good, keeping them quite harmlessly employed. But her proceedings ceased to wear this blameless aspect one unlucky afternoon when, in the absence of her older comrades at school, she took it into her head that the new structure would make a grand shed for live stock. Whereupon she had captured Mrs O’Hagan’s four best hens, and the Fottrells’ grey goat, and conveying them severally to the sand-house, had stuffed into it the whole reluctant party. Grave results ensued, for in struggling to get free Nannie broke through the crumbling roof, which dropped in heavy lumps upon the hens, killing one of them outright, and giving the others a shock which they “weren’t the better of to their last day,” while the terrified goat rushed away, and was lost on the bog for the best part of a week, during which the little Fottrells had to forego their drop of milk, a very serious privation.

Certainly this piece of mischief happened most inopportunely, at a time when, as Mrs Fottrell next morning observed, “It would be hard enough to find feedin’ for an extry chucken, let alone a couple of growin’ childer. And they destroyin’ all before them,” she added severely. She was talking in the kitchen of Mrs O’Hagan, the strange childer’s especial patroness, having called upon her early to report the continued disappearance of Nannie the goat.

“’Deed yes, ma’am,” Mrs O’Hagan replied, “I’m thinkin’ this while back we maybe had a right to let them two go into the House. ’Twould be better for the crathurs after all than runnin’ wild here, and comin’ short as like as not. They’d be kep’ under rules there, anyway, but it’s too ould I am meself for trapesin’ after them to hinder them of doin’ mischief on other people, that aren’t well able to afford to be at the loss of anythin’ at all.”

“Bedad they are not, ma’am,” Mrs Fottrell said very promptly. “Clochranbeg does be a poor place these times. Most whiles there’d be no need for grudgin’ the likes of them their bit of food among the whole of us. But the Union van’s to be at Dunskeagh to-morra, and Himself’s goin’ over to Ballylough this evenin’, and could lave word wid them to send it on here, and pick up the strange childer on the way back.”

“I wouldn’t say but it might be the best plan,” Mrs O’Hagan said doubtfully.

“Then that’s what I’ll do,” Mrs Fottrell said with decision. “Bad luck to it, I wonder where they’re after hurooshin’ the misfortunate goat to--she’s a terrible loss.”

Now this conversation was overheard by Min and Atty, hidden behind a turf creel in the corner, whither they had guiltily fled upon Mrs Fottrell’s entrance; and horror-stricken eavesdroppers they were. In fact Min seemed to Atty so nearly on the point of betraying them by breaking forth into loud lamentations, that he dragged her out unseen through the back door; and then they both ran wildly until they reached the border of the widest bog.

“Don’t you be stoppin’,” Min said, tugging Atty on in her turn. “It’s away we must get the furthest ever we can contrive, before they come after us wid their dirty ould van.”

“Where are we goin’ to?” said Atty.

“Och, how should I know? anywheres at all,” said Min.

“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.