Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/117

 Turlogh. "I am not outside that. I will be making a truce with you until he has been buried as he desired. Thereafter I ask no accommodation at your hands."

"Saw any one ever such another land of holy men and lunatics?" communed the English captain with the blackness.

"Nay," one of his party urged, "it is not holiness but empty superstition, and to be a lunatic argues previous sound wit, which these savages never yet possessed. Say rather an island of idolatrous idiots."

The captain spoke again: "If you are Turlogh Mahowne, as you declare yourself, go forward then to Rosscarbery, if you can find it by the smoke over its ashes, and bury your Papist carrion wherever the ground is not baked too stiff for digging, and when you have made an end of it, then will we have more talk."

The day dawned, and showed to Turlogh and his caravan bodies of armed men on either side, moving along at a distance, in even progress with the funeral train. There were leaders in the saddle, encased in metal to the thighs; and the footmen, breeched in buff leather and with iron caps, bore long pikes on their shoulders. In numbers they were to the men of Dunbeekin as three to one; and in another four hours, upon the meeting of the high roads outside Rosscarbery, two score more joined them.

"They are fine men," said Goron, walking at his master's bridle. "I have never seen them in the open country before. They are better than we are. They will make but one bite of us, as a white trout with a May-fly."

"The May-fly!" answered Turlogh, musingly. "Two years does it be spending underground, preparing its wings. And then—the portion of one day up above in the air and the sunlight, and it ends in the beak of a bird or the jaws of a strong fish. Your speech is always wise, Goron, son of Tiarnan. It is I who