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"Good-evening, Hudden; good-evening, Dudden. Ah! you thought you had played me a fine trick, but you never did me a better turn in all your lives. When I found poor Daisy dead, I thought to myself, 'Well, her hide may fetch something; and it did. Hides are worth their weight in gold in the market just now." Hudden nudged Dudden, and Dudden winked at Hudden. "Good-evening, Donald O'Neary."
"Well, I'll be on deck in a moment, my boy," rejoined Thompson, who was now quite himself again, and was busy putting on his shoes, the only articles which had been removed when he turned in. "Go you up, and see that they keep her clean, full and bye and those casks well secured. Dudden Sands awkward place too but I've not been forty years a-boxing about this coast for nothing."
'You never saw such a demand for hides in your life, says he, 'as there is in the town this present time. "No sooner had he said that than Hudden and Dudden went home and killed their own oxen and set off for the town to sell the hides. But when they got there they could get no more for them than the common price of hides, and they came home again vowing vengeance on Donald.
"'He's calling for help, says Donald; 'wait now till I go in and help him. "'Stay where you are, says Dudden; 'haven't you cattle enough already? It's my turn to have some of them now. And in he jumped, and Hudden and Dudden was both drowned.
How's the wind?" said the master, throwing his feet outside the standing bed-place, as he sat up. "North West, veering to Nor'-Nor'-West in the squalls. We have lost good ten miles since yesterday evening, and are close to Dudden Sands," replied Newton. "I think we must bear up, for the gale shows no signs of breaking."
"Ah, never mind," said Dudden; "it's only a step now to the Brown Lake." "I'll have her now! I'll have her now!" bawled the farmer, from inside the sack. "By my faith, and you shall though," said Hudden, and he laid his stick across the sack. "I'll have her! I'll have her!" bawled the farmer, louder than ever.
"So she filled his hat with silver, and he left her the bird and went on his way home. "It wasn't long after he got home till he met Hudden and Dudden. 'Aha! says he to them, 'you thought it was the bad turn you was doing me, but you couldn't have done me a better. Look what I got for the hide of my ox, that you killed on me. And he showed them the hatful of silver.
"Good-evening, kind friends." The next day there wasn't a cow or a calf that belonged to Hudden or Dudden but her hide was going to the fair in Hudden's biggest cart drawn by Dudden's strongest pair of horses. When they came to the fair, each one took a hide over his arm, and there they were walking through the fair, bawling out at the top of their voices: "Hides to sell! hides to sell!"
You would think there was little here to make Hudden and Dudden jealous, but so it is, the more one has the more one wants, and Donald's neighbours lay awake of nights scheming how they might get hold of his little strip of grass-land. Daisy, poor thing, they never thought of; she was just a bag of bones.
"True for you, Dudden, and let me thank you kindly; the turn was good, if the will was ill. You'll have heard, like me, that the Brown Lake leads to the Land of Promise. I always put it down as lies, but it is just as true as my word. Look at the cattle." Hudden stared, and Dudden gaped; but they couldn't get over the cattle; fine fat cattle they were too.
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