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Updated: May 27, 2025
Our next call was at Willie Withero's stone-pile. There, when I remembered the nights that I passed in my new world of starched linen, too good to shoulder a bundle of his old hammers, I was filled with remorse. I uncovered my head and in an undertone muttered, "God forgive me." "Great oul bhoy was Willie," he said. "Aye."
The owner was a follower of Wesley and his conversation at the well was in sharp contrast to the philosophy at the stone-pile. The young journeyman and his wife were profoundly impressed with the place. The stone cottage was vine-clad. There were beautiful trees and a garden. The June flowers were in bloom and a cow grazed in the pasture near by.
I slept at Jamie Wallace's that night, and next morning took the "dandther" with Withero up the Dublin road, past "The Mount of Temptation" to the old stone-pile that was no longer a pile, but a hole in the side of the road. It was a sentimental journey that gave Willie a chance to say some things I knew he wanted to say. "D'ye mind the pirta sack throusers Anna made ye onct?"
Scundoo stopped her. "We be poor people and have little," she whimpered. "So be not hard upon us, O Scundoo." The people ceased from the quivering stone-pile they had builded, and looked on. "Nay, it was never my way, good Hooniah," Scundoo made answer, reaching for the blankets. "In token that I am not hard, these only shall I take." "Am I not wise, my children?" he demanded.
I don't propose to judge or misjudge any man by his belief or absence of belief. All that I have got to say is, that the Mormon religion is a practical religion. They don't give starving women a tract, or tramps jobs on the stone-pile. The women get bread, and the tramps work for pay.
They left the stone-pile carelessly, as if they had never been interested in it, rounded the yellow tower, and disappeared into the second turn of the canyon, where the dead city, interrupted by the jutting promontory, began again. Old Biltmer had been somewhat embarrassed by the turn the game had taken. He had not heard their conversation, but the pantomime against the rocks was clear enough.
That night at the first sound of the farm-yard bell I took to my heels through the fields, through the yard and down the Belfast road to Withero's stone-pile. Willie was just quitting for the day. I was almost breathless, but I blurted out what then seemed to me the most important happening in my life. Willie took his eye-protectors off and looked at me.
And, as its farther edge braided the cottonwoods in the wind-break and uprooted the stunted apple-trees, its near edge came close to the stone-pile with a mighty sucking breath. The little girl, seeing that escape was impossible, for the rain was beating her down, flung herself in the lee of the pile and clutched at the grass. "Sassy!" she shouted again; "Sassy!" But the cyclone drowned her cry.
No no mine frien'! To come here, alone! Ha ha! Stupid Anglo-Saxon ox!" "Don't waste your breath, Louis," I quietly remarked. "Your names have no more terror for me now than at Laval! However big a knave you are, Louis, you're not a fool. Why don't you make something out of this? I can reward you. Hold me, if you like! Scalp me and skin me and put me under a stone-pile for revenge!
I was duly arrested upon a warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate, duly clad in a prison costume, duly set to work upon a stone-pile, duly locked up over night in a steel-barred cell full of vermin in a building housing some five hundred wretches, black and white, thirty of them serving life-terms under circumstances which never permitted them a breath of fresh air nor a glimpse of the sunshine or the sky.
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