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But Fionn was thinking of other things. "If there was any way of warning the Fianna not to come here," Fionn murmured. "There is no way, my darling," said Caevo'g, and she smiled a smile that would have killed Fionn, only that he shut his eyes in time. After a moment he murmured again: "Cona'n, my dear love, give the warning whistle so that the Fianna will keep out of this place."
Fionn would have heard much of them, and it is likely that he practised on a nettle at taking the head off Goll, and that he hunted a sheep from cover in the implacable manner he intended later on for Cona'n the Swearer. But it is of Uail mac Baiscne he would have heard most. With what a dilation of spirit the ladies would have told tales of him, Fionn's father.
Fionn looked up at the sky and found that it was still there. He stared to one side and saw the trees of Kyle Conor waving in the distance. He bent his ear to the wind and heard the shouting of hunters, the yapping of dogs, and the clear whistles, which told how the hunt was going. "Well!" said Fionn to himself. "By my hand!" quoth Cona'n to his own soul.
But Goll's brother, bald Cona'n the Swearer, turned a savage eye on Cairell. "By my weapons," said he, "there were never less than an hundred-and-one men with Goll, and the least of them could have put you down easily enough." "Ah?" cried Cairell. "And are you one of the hundred-and-one, old scaldhead?"
A little whoof, like the sound that would be made by a baby and it asleep, came from Cona'n. "Fionn," said he, "there isn't a whistle in me. We are done for," said he. "You are done for, indeed," said Cuillen, and she smiled a hairy and twisty and fangy smile that almost finished Cona'n.
And the two men stared into the hillside as though what they were looking at was too wonderful to be looked away from. "Who are they?" said Fionn. "What are they?" Cona'n gasped. And they stared again. For there was a great hole like a doorway in the side of the mound, and in that doorway the daughters of Conaran sat spinning.
"In love he is," Cona'n grumbled. "A cordial for women, a disease for men, a state of wretchedness." "Wretched in truth," the Chief murmured. "Love makes us poor We have not eyes enough to see all that is to be seen, nor hands enough to seize the tenth of all we want.
"And I," cried another. "And I." "I see a man," said the eagle-eyed watcher. And again they stared, until their straining eyes grew dim with tears and winks, and they saw trees that stood up and sat down, and fields that wobbled and spun round and round in a giddily swirling world. "There is a man," Cona'n roared. "A man there is," cried another.
"One indeed, my thick-witted, thin-livered Cairell, and I undertake to prove on your hide that what my brother said was true and that what your brother said was false." "You undertake that," growled Cairell, and on the word he loosed a furious buffet at Con'an, which Cona'n returned with a fist so big that every part of Cairell's face was hit with the one blow.
Now and again, in a lull of the discussion, a champion would look and remark on the hurrying vessel; and it may have been during one of these moments that the adventure happened to Fionn and the Fianna. "I wonder where that ship comes from?" said Cona'n idly. But no person could surmise anything about it beyond that it was a vessel well equipped for war.
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