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"I bes skipper, father dear, an' takes skipper's shares and pays skipper's shares," replied Nolan. "But for me there'd not bin one bottle o' wine come to us from the wrack an' the poor folks aboard her would never have got ashore in their boats for want of a light on the land-wash.
It was evident to the men on the land-wash that the unfortunate ship had escaped the outer menaces and won within a hundred yards of the shore before striking. She was burning oil now, in vast quantities, to judge by the red glare that cut and stained the fog to seaward. "What sort of channel?" came the question. "Full o' rocks, sir; but it bes safe enough wid caution," cried the skipper.
A dog barked Pat Kavanagh's black crackie and the whisper of the tide fumbling at edges of ice came up from the land-wash below the fish-house and drying-stages. He saw the spars of his little schooner etched black against the slate-gray of the eastern sky. He stood at the edge of the broken slope, looking and listening.
The boat rowed in and was kept from staving in her keel on the land-wash by Nolan and his men. The officer sprang from the bows to the icy shingle, slipped and recovered himself with an oath. He was a huge fellow. In one hand he carried an iron dispatch box, and in the other a heavy pistol. "This the lot of you?" he asked, glancing sharply at Black Dennis Nolan.
The beach was narrow, and a glance disclosed the fact that at every full tide it was entirely submerged; but a "drook" or a narrow cleft, thickly grown with hardy bushes, led up from the land-wash to the barrens above. They lowered the sail and nosed their way into the cove. The streaming skirmishers of the fog were over them by this time.
The dawn was lifting by now, clear, glass-gray and narrow at the rim of the sea to the eastward and southward. The air was still. The lapping of the tide along the icy land-wash and the dull whispering of it among the seaward rocks were the only sounds. The skipper stood motionless beside his own door for a few minutes.
By the skipper's first important stroke of business his reign promised to be prosperous, even though tyrannical. At word that Father McQueen was sighted all work was stopped. The dories among the outer rocks were pulled to the land-wash. The men left their tarring and caulking under the drying-stages. Women issued from the cabins with shawls thrown hastily about their heads and shoulders.
I have known him help to carry to shore some light spars which the captain of a vessel in the harbour desired him to convey to the land-wash, in order that a boat's crew might be saved the trouble of taking them.
I suppose we should bury him; but there is no place here to dig a grave." "Come aboard, sir! Come aboard wid ye!" exclaimed Wick, in a trembling voice. "It bain't no affair of our'n, sir an' there bes the divil's own luck in finding a dead man unexpected." Mr. Darling crossed the land-wash without another word, waded knee-deep into the tide, and climbed aboard the boat.
"Denny, ye poor fool," returned Mother Nolan, "ye bes simple as a squid t'rowed up on the land-wash. What do ye know o' fairies an' the like? Wasn't I born on a Easter Sunday, wid the power to see the good people, an' the little people, an' all the tricksy tribes? The body o' a fairy-child bes human, lad. 'Tis but the heart o' her bes unhuman an' the beauty o' her an' there bain't no soul in her.
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