A heavy fall of rain came with the dawn, and the Clyde was a dreary smudge of grey when the boat made fast alongside Greenock Quay and discharged its passengers. Again the derricks began to creak complainingly on their pivots; a mob of excited cattle streamed up the narrow gangways, followed by swearing drovers, who prodded the dewlaps and hindquarters of the animals with their short, heavy blackthorn sticks.

A tall, thin man, somewhat over middle age, with bushy beard, small penetrating eyes and wrinkles between the eyebrows, met the squad as they disembarked. He bade good-morning to Micky’s Jim just as if he had seen him the night before, and in a loud, hurried voice gave him several orders as to what he had to do during the summer season at the digging. The tall, thin man was the potato-merchant.

“How many have ye with ye from Ireland?” he asked Micky’s Jim.

Although knowing the number of men it contained, Jim, with an air of importance, began to count the members of the squad, carefully enumerating each person by name.

“Get your squad to work as soon as you can,” said the merchant, his Adam’s apple bobbing in and out with every movement of his throat. He gave Jim no time to finish the count. “I see you’re three or four short of last year—four, isn’t it? There’s some people waitin’ for a start over there, so you’d better take a few of them with you.”

Opposite the squad a dozen or more men and women stood, looking on eagerly, all of them shivering with the cold and the water dripping from their rags. These Jim approached with a very self-conscious swagger and entered into conversation with the women, who began to speak volubly.

“What’s wrong with them?” asked Dermod Flynn, and Maire a Glan, to whom he addressed the question, drew a snuff-box from her pocket and took a pinch.

“They’re lookin’ for a job, as the man said,” she answered and her teeth chattered as she spoke.

“When do we start our work?” asked Norah Ryan.

“Work!” laughed Judy Farrel, and her laugh ended in a fit of coughing. “Work, indeed!” she stammered on regaining breath. “Ye’ll soon have plenty of that and no fear!”

“Come now,” Micky’s Jim shouted as he came back to his own squad followed by two men and two women who detached themselves from the crowd that was looking for work. “We must go down to the Isle of Bute to-day and get some potatoes dug in a hurry. Take yer bundles in yer hands and make a start for the station.”

“It’s Gourock Ellen that’s in it,” said Maire a Glan, when the strange women came forward. “Gourock Ellen and Annie, as the man said.”

Gourock Ellen was a tall, angular woman, who might at one period of her life have been very handsome, but who now, owing to the results of a hard and loose life, bore all the indelible marks of dissolute and careless living. Her face was hard, pock-marked, and stamped with a look of impudent defiance; she smiled with ill-concealed contempt at Maire a Glan and looked with mock curiosity at the warty hand which the old woman held out to her.

“There’s a lot of new faces in the squad,” she said, glancing in turn at Norah Ryan and Dermod Flynn. “Not bad lookin’, the two of them, and they’ll sleep in the yin bed yet, I’ll go bail! And you, have you the fiddle with you?”

“Aye, sure, and I have,” said Willie the Duck, to whom she addressed this question. “I don’t go far without it.”

“You don’t,” answered the woman, and her tones implied that she would have added, “you fool!” if she thought it worth while.

Her companion, who hardly spoke a word, was somewhat older, swarthy of appearance and very ragged. Her toes peeped out through the torn uppers of her hobnailed boots, and when she lifted her dress to wring the water from the hem it could be seen that she wore no stockings and that her dark, thin legs were threaded with varicose veins above the calves.

“D’ye see them?” Micky’s Jim whispered in Dermod’s ear. “They cannot make a livin’ on the streets and they have to come and work with us.”

“I don’t like the look of them,” Dermod whispered, rubbing his hand over the sore on his face.

“By God! that was a great dunt that O’Donnel gave ye,” said Jim. “They’re great women, them, without a doubt,” he added. “It’s a long while since Gourock Ellen broke her pitcher.”

“How? What do you mean?”

“Ye’re green, Dermod, green as a cabbage,” said Jim, chuckling. “Them women—but I’ll tell ye all about it some other time. Willie the Duck is a great friend of them same women. He knows what they are, as well as anyone, don’t ye, Willie?”

“Aye, sure,” said Willie, who did not know what Jim was speaking about, but wished to be agreeable to everybody.

II

A short run on a fast train from Upper Greenock to Wemyss Bay was followed by an hour’s journey on a boat crowded with passengers bound for Rothesay. It was now the last day of June, and those who had rented coast houses for the following month were flocking down from Glasgow and other Clydeside industrial centres. In the midst of the crowd of gaily dressed trippers all the members of the squad felt sensitive and shy and stood huddled awkwardly together on deck; all but Micky’s Jim and the strange men and women, who paraded up and down the deck, careless of the eyes that were fixed upon them. Old Maire a Glan was praying, her rosary hidden under her shawl; Dermod Flynn was looking over the rail into the water, his main interest in turning away being to keep the naked knee that peeped through his torn trousers hidden from the sight of the elegantly dressed trippers. Norah envied the young girls who chattered noisily to and fro, envied them their fine hats and brave dresses, their elegant shoes and the wonderful sparkling things that decorated their necks and wrists. What a splendid vision for the girl’s eyes! the hot sun overhead in a sky of blue, the water glancing brightly as the boat cut through it; the fair women, the well-dressed men, the band playing on deck, the glitter, the charm and the happiness! The girl could hardly realise that such beauty existed, though once she had seen a picture of a scene something like this in one of the books which Fergus used to read at home. Poor girl! the water was still running down her stockings, her clothes were ragged and dirty, and the boy, her youthful lover, was hiding his naked knee by turning to the rail!

Opposite the crowd in which Norah stood, a group of five persons—father, mother and their children, a son and two daughters—were sitting on camp-stools. The man, bubble-bellied and short, had taken off his hat, and in the sunlight beads of sweat glittered on his bald head like crystals in a white limestone facing. His wife, a plump, good-looking woman, who seemed full of a haughty self-esteem, gazed critically through a lorgnette on the unkempt workers and sniffed contemptuously as if something had displeased her when her examinations came to an end. The three little things regarded them wonderingly for a moment and afterwards began to ply first the father and then the mother with questions about the strange folk who were aboard the boat. But the parents, finding that the children were speaking too loudly, bade them be silent, and the little ones, getting no answer to their questions, began to puzzle over this and wonder who and what were the queer, ragged people sitting opposite.

The girls, taking into account the contemptuous stare which their mother fixed on the members of the squad, came to the conclusion that the beings who were dressed so differently from themselves were really other species of men and women altogether and were far inferior to those who wore starched collars and gold ornaments.

The boy, an undersized little fellow with sharp, twinkling eyes, looked at his father when putting his questions, but the old man pulled a paper—The Christian Guide—from his pocket and, burying himself in it, took no notice of the youngster’s queries.

The boy solved the question for himself in the curious incomplete way which is peculiar to a child.

“I don’t know who they are,” he said, “but I’d like to play with them—that old lady who’s moving something under her shawl and speakin’ to herself, with the nice young lady, with the man with the hump and the fiddle; with every one of them.”

Gourock Ellen was speaking to Micky’s Jim.

“Have ye ever slept under a bridge with the wind chillin’ ye to the bone?” she asked.

“No. Why?”

“That’s where I slept last night,” said Ellen fiercely. “Isn’t that a pretty dress that that woman has, Jim?”

“And Annie?” Jim asked, putting a match to the eternal pipe.

“She slept along wi’ me,” Ellen replied. “Blood is warm even when it runs thin.”

“If ye had the price of that lady’s dress, ye’d not have to sleep out for a week of Sundays,” said Jim, pointing to the woman with the lorgnette. “See her brats too! Look how they’re glowerin’ at Norah Ryan!”

“The children are very pretty,” said the woman, and a slight touch of regret softened her harsh voice. Perhaps for the moment she longed for the children which might have been hers if all had gone well. “Norah Ryan is a very soncy wench, isn’t she, Jim?” she went on. “What is the bald man readin’?”

“Christian Guide,” said Jim, who spent a whole year at school and who could read a little.

“I ken him well,” said Ellen, assuming a knowing look and winking slightly. “It was years ago, he was young—and ye ken yerself.”

“Phew!” Jim whistled, taking the pipe from his mouth and lowering the left eyelid. “He was one of them sort?... Christian Guide, indeed!... A decent man, now, I suppose, and would hardly pass a word with ye!”

“I’m not as good lookin’ as I was.”

“If ye told old baldhead’s wife what ye told me what would she say?”

“Oh! I wadna dae that, Jim. He always paid on the nail.”

“Christian Guide,” sniggered Jim, hurrying to the rail and spitting into the water.

“There are some great dresses on those people,” said Maire a Glan, nipping Dermod Flynn on the thigh with her finger and thumb. “See that woman sittin’ there with the bald-headed man. Her dress is a good one. All the money that ye earned for two whole years in Tyrone would hardly put flounces on it; wouldn’t flounce it, as the man said.”

“Maybe not,” said Dermod, turning round slightly, but still standing in such a way that his bare knee was concealed from everybody on board.

“It’s a great dress, a grand dress and a dress for a queen,” Maire a Glan went on. “Look at the difference between it and the dress that Gourock Ellen is wearin’!”

“Just so,” said Dermod, peeping at the exposed kneecap. “Could ye give me a needle and thread this night, Maire a Glan?” he asked.

“I could, indeed, Dermod,” said the old woman. “That wife of the bald-headed man is a fine soncy-lookin’ stump of a woman.”

“Is she better-lookin’ than Gourock Ellen?” asked Dermod with a laugh.

“Ye are droll, Dermod,” said Maire a Glan, nipping the boy’s thigh again. “D’ye know where Gourock Ellen slept last night? Under a cold bridge with the winds of heaven whistlin’ through the eye of it.”

“Could she not have gone into some house?”

“House, child? Ye are not in Ireland here!”

“When a poor man comes to our house at night, he always gets a bed till the mornin’,” said Norah Ryan, who was listening to the conversation. “And a bit and sup as well!”

“It’s only God and the poor who help the poor,” said the old woman. “And here’s the rain comin’ again, as the man said. It will be a bad day this to plough on our knees through the wet fields, bad luck be with them!”

III

A farmer with a bulbous nose and red whiskers met the squad on Rothesay pier. He wore a black jacket which, being too narrow round the shoulders, had split open half way down the back, a corduroy waistcoat, very tight trousers, patched at the knees and caked brown with clotted earth. This man was seated on the sideboard of a large waggon, removing the dirt from his clothes with a heavy, double-bladed clasp-knife.

“Good-day,” said Micky’s Jim, coming off the boat and stepping up to the man on the waggon.

“Good-day,” answered the man without lifting his head or looking at the speaker.

“Will ye take the waggon nearer the boat, or will we carry up the bundles to here?” asked Jim, blowing a puff of white smoke into the air.

“Carry them up, of course,” said the farmer, still busy with his clasp-knife.

Jim set his squad to work, and soon the waggon was loaded with bundles of clothes, frying-pans, tea-caddies, tins, bowls, and other articles necessary for the workers during the coming months. In addition to the stores taken from Ireland by the potato-diggers the merchant supplied them with blankets, an open stove, and a pot for boiling potatoes. It was now raining heavily; the drops splashed loudly on the streets, ran down the faces and soaked through the clothes of the workers. The rain struck heavily against the waggon; a hot steam rose from the withers of the cart-horse; the pier was almost deserted and everything looked lonesome and gloomy.

So far the farmer had taken very little notice of anybody; but now, having observed Norah Ryan, he shouted: “Ye have a fine leg, lassie!” and afterwards, while the cart was being loaded, he kept repeating this phrase and chuckling deep down in his throat. Whenever he made the remark he looked at the girl, and Norah felt uncomfortable and blushed every time he spoke.

Dermod Flynn, who had taken a sudden dislike to the man with the bulbous nose, now felt sorry for Norah and angry with the man. At last, unable to restrain his passion any longer, he stepped up to the side of the waggon and looked straight in the face of the farmer, who was packing the blankets in one corner of the vehicle, and shouted: “Here, Red Nose, don’t try and make fun of yer betters!” The farmer straightened himself up, rested his thumb on his jaw and pulled a long black finger through his beard.

“All right,” he said at last, and did not speak another word to anybody else that day.

Dermod, who had looked for an outburst, felt frightened when the farmer became silent.

“Jim, what’s wrong with that man?” he asked his ganger when the cart started on its journey home with the farmer sitting in front, waving his whip vigorously, but refraining from hitting the horse.

“He’s mad,” said Jim in a whisper.

“Mad?”

“As a March hare, as an Epiphany cock, as a —— He’s very mad, and was in the madhouse last year when we were digging on the farm. It takes very little to set him off. Maybe he’s goin’ mad now; one never knows.”

“It was very good of you to stand up for me,” said Norah to Dermod about an hour later, when the party came in sight of the farmhouse. “Ye have the kind heart, and that farmer isn’t a nice man. I don’t like the looks of him!”

“He’s mad——”

“Mother of God!”

“—— as an Epiphany cock! He was in the madhouse last year.”

“Maybe he’ll do ye some harm one day!”

“Will he?” asked Dermod, squaring his shoulders and instinctively tightening his fists. Somehow he felt wonderfully elated since he had spoken to the farmer on the waggon.