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But James, in his high attic, looks upon the mountains and the sky, and shakes off from him with a superb gesture the memory of her taunts. It was outside the town of Ballinscreen, on the country side of the bridge over the Maeve, that Mr. Ramsay-Stewart was shot at in the League days, and that the shot struck a decent boy, Larry Byrne, a widow's only son, and killed him stone dead.
Ramsay-Stewart wanted and was prepared to encourage when he got him. His land was clean and well-tilled, and he had a fine stock of cattle as well as horses, and hay, and straw, and machines that had cost a handful of money, for he was quick to take up new-fangled notions.
Ramsay-Stewart for the Murphys' farm and he'd get it, and he thought this would be a fine lever to work with. But he never made such a mistake, for little Fanny turned on him like the veriest spitfire. 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Black Shawn, she cried, with her eyes flashing, 'to keep persecuting a girl that's as good as wife to another man.
Ramsay-Stewart as he came home from the county club-house in Ballinscreen, and shot at him, killing poor Larry Byrne. It was only the length of the bridge from the police barracks, and as it was but nine o'clock at night, Ballinscreen people were up and about. So there wasn't much time for Black Shawn to see what mischief the blunderbuss had done.
'I've shot Ramsay-Stewart below at the bridge, and the police are after me. Just then the moon rolled from behind a cloud, and Murty Meehan saw his prisoner, saw that he was young, and would be handsome if his face were not so distorted by emotion.
And yet the man was safe, if he had had his wits about him, for he was the last man for Mr. Ramsay-Stewart to suspect or allow suspicion to fall upon. Well, he raced on blindly, and all of a sudden, as he turned a corner, a man flung up his arms in front of him, and then caught him by both wrists.
He nearly broke his heart over the man when he was in jail, waiting to go to the gallows, and wouldn't open his lips to clear himself. Murty had been in every 'movement' from the '48 onwards. But like all the other old Fenians, he thought worse of the League than Mr. Ramsay-Stewart himself.
Oh, sure it was a bad day for the tenants when they went; and more betoken, they had laid up trouble for the man that was to succeed them. The people never gave Mr. Ramsay-Stewart a chance when he came. They disliked him, and he was an upstart and a gombeen man and a usurper, and such foolishness, in the mouths of every one of them.
And so Murty grew with the years into a pleasant, kindly old bachelor, very full of whimsies and dreams, and a prophet to the young fellows. Now Mr. Ramsay-Stewart, though he kept himself and his tenants in hot water for a couple of years, wasn't a bad kind of gentleman, and now that things have settled down is well-esteemed and liked in the country.
It was so overgrown with weeds and thistles, and so strewn with big boulders, that it was more like a boreen than decent fields. Well, it vexed Mr. Ramsay-Stewart, who was accustomed to the tidy Scotch fields, amazingly, and he got on his high horse that the widow should pay or go. She couldn't or wouldn't pay, and she wouldn't go.
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