Andy’s voice beside me grated on me unpleasantly:
“Musha! but it’s the fine sight it is intirely; it only wants wan thing.”
“What does it want?” I asked, rather shortly.
“Begor, a bit of bog to put your arrum around while ye’re lukin’ at it,” and he grinned at me knowingly.
He was incorrigible. I jumped down from the rock and scrambled into the boreen. My friend Sutherland had gone on his way to Murdock’s, so calling to Andy to wait till I returned, I followed him.
I hurried up the boreen and caught up with him, for his progress was slow along the rough lane-way. In reality I felt that it would be far less awkward having him with me; but I pretended that my only care was for his sprained ankle. Some emotions make hypocrites of us all!
With Dick on my arm limping along we passed up the boreen, leaving Joyce’s house on our left. I looked out anxiously in case I should see Joyce — or his daughter; but there was no sign of any one about. In a few minutes Dick, pausing for a moment, pointed out to me the shifting bog.
“You see,” he said, “those two poles? The line between them marks the mearing of the two lands. We have worked along the bog down from there.” He pointed as he spoke to some considerable distance up the Hill to the north where the bog began to be dangerous, and where it curved around the base of a grassy mound, or shoulder of the mountain.
“Is it a dangerous bog?” I queried.
“Rather! It is just as bad a bit of soft bog as ever I saw. I wouldn’t like to see anyone or anything that I cared for try to cross it!”
“Why not?”
“Because at any moment they might sink through it; and then, good-bye — no human strength or skill could ever save them”
“Is it a quagmire, then, or like a quicksand?”
“Like either, or both. Nay, it is more treacherous than either. You may call it, if you are poetically inclined, a ‘carpet of death!’ What you see is simply a film or skin of vegetation of a very low kind, mixed with the mould of decayed vegetable fibre and grit and rubbish of all kinds, which have somehow got mixed into it, floating on a sea of ooze and slime — of something half liquid, half solid, and of an unknown depth. It will bear up a certain weight, for there is a degree of cohesion in it; but it is not all of equal cohesive power, and if one were to step on the wrong spot —” He was silent.
“What then?”
“Only a matter of specific gravity! A body suddenly immersed would, when the air of the lungs had escaped and the rigor mortis had set in, probably sink a considerable distance; then it would rise after nine days, when decomposition began to generate gases, and make an effort to reach the top. Not succeeding in this, it would ultimately waste away, and the bones would become incorporated with the existing vegetation somewhere about the roots, or would lie among the slime at the bottom.”
“Well,” said I, “for real cold-blooded horror, commend me to your men of science.”
This passage brought us to the door of Murdock’s house — a plain, strongly-built cottage, standing on a knoll of rock that cropped up from the plateau round it. It was surrounded with a garden hedged in by a belt of pollard ash and stunted alders.
Murdock had evidently been peering surreptitiously through the window of his sitting-room, for, as we passed in by the gate, he came out to the porch. His salutation was not an encouraging one:
“You’re somethin’ late this mornin’, Mr. Sutherland. I hope ye didn’t throuble to delay in ordher to bring up this sthrange gintleman. Ye know how particular I am about any wan knowin’ aught of me affairs.”
Dick flushed up to the roots of his hair, and, much to my surprise, burst out quite in a passionate way:
“Look you here, Mr. Murdock, I’m not going to take any cheek from you, so don’t you give any. Of course I don’t expect a fellow of your stamp to understand a gentleman’s feelings — damn it! how can you have a gentleman’s understanding when you haven’t even a man’s? You ought to know right well what I said I would do, I shall do I despise you and your miserable secrets and your miserable trickery too much to take to myself anything in which they have a part; but when I bring with me a friend, but for whom I shouldn’t have been here at all — for I couldn’t have walked — I expect that neither he nor I shall be insulted. For two pins I’d not set foot on your dirty ground again!”
Here Murdock interrupted him:
“Aisy now! Ye’re undher agreement to me; an’ I hould ye to it.”
“So you can, you miserable scoundrel, because you know I shall keep my word; but remember that I expect proper treatment; and remember, too, that if I want an assistant I am to have one.
Again Murdock interrupted, but this time much more soothingly:
“Aisy! aisy! Haven’t I done every livin’ thing ye wanted, and helped ye meself every time? Sure arn’t I yer assistant?”
“Yes, because you — you wanted to get something, and couldn’t do without me. And mind this: you can’t do without me yet. But be so good as to remember that I choose my own assistant; and I shall not choose you unless I like. You can keep me here and pay me for staying as we agreed; but don’t you think that I could fool you if I would?”
“Ye wouldn’t do that, I know — an’ me thrusted ye!”
“You trusted me! you miserable wretch — Yes! you trusted me by a deed, signed, sealed, and delivered. I don’t owe you anything for that.”
“Mr. Sutherland, sir, ye’re too sharp wid me. Yer frind is very welkim. Do what you like — go where you choose — bring whom you will — only get on wid the worrk and kape it saycret.”
“Aye!” sneered Dick, “you are ready to climb down because you want something done, and you know that this is the last day for work on this side of the hill. Well, let me tell you this — for you’ll do anything for greed — that you and I together, doing all we can, shall not be able to cover all the ground. I haven’t said a word to my friend — and I don’t know how he will take any request from you after your impudence; but he is my friend, and a clever man, and if you ask him nicely, perhaps he will be good enough to stay and lend us a hand.”
The man made me a low bow and asked me in suitable terms if I would kindly stop part of the day and help in the work. Needless to say I acquiesced. Murdock eyed me keenly, as though to make up his mind whether or no I recollected him — he evidently remembered me — but I affected ignorance, and he seemed satisfied. I was glad to notice that the blow of Joyce’s riding-switch still remained across his face as a livid scar. He went away to get the appliances ready for work, in obedience to a direction from Sutherland.
“One has to cut that hound’s corns rather roughly,” said the latter, with a nice confusion of metaphors, as soon as Murdock had disappeared.
Dick then told me that his work was to make magnetic experiments to ascertain, if possible, if there was any iron hidden in the ground.
“The idea,” he said, “is Murdock’s own, and I have neither lot nor part in it. My work is simply to carry out his ideas, with what mechanical skill I can command, and to invent or arrange such appliances as he may want. Where his theories are hopelessly wrong, I point this out to him, but he goes on or stops just as he chooses. You can imagine that a fellow of his low character is too suspicious to ever take a hint from anyone. We have been working for three weeks past and have been all over the solid ground, and are just finishing the bog.”
“How did you first come across him?” I asked.
“Very nearly a month ago he called on me in Dublin, having been sent