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Mrs. Moloney put the Crib into one of the small square windows and drew it out. Then she went back to the dresser for the candles to light it up with. It looked nothing wanting them. Not common candles she was going to use, but what had been blessed at Candlemas, and that she had kept put by very carefully.
To the foremen Thorpe assigned their tasks, calling them to him one by one, as a general calls his aids. "Moloney," said he to the big Irishman, "take your crew and break that jam. Then scatter your men down to within a mile of the pond at Dam Two, and see that the river runs clear.
'What does it show? 'Flannigan, three hundherd an' eighty-five; Hansen, forty-eight; Schwartz, twinty; O'Malley, sivinteen; Casey, ten; O'Day, eight; Larsen, five; O'Rourke, three; Mulcahy, two; Schmitt, two; Moloney, two; Riordon, two; O'Malley, two; Willie Boye, wan. 'Gintlemin, says Willie Boye, arisin' with a stern look in his eyes, 'th' rascal has bethrayed me.
Moloney opened the window and put the crucifix and candlesticks in a corner on the dirty floor. "It might kill him to wake him now," murmured Molly. "Yes, that is just the difficulty." The young man was speaking more to himself than to her. "Difficulty!" thought Molly with scorn. "Fiddlesticks!" The silence was unbroken for some moments. The fresh autumn air blew into the room.
"Can't you open the window, Mrs. Moloney?" "It's the only place to make into an altar, father?" "Oh, never mind that yet; I will manage." Molly stepped forward; whatever he was going to do, it should not be done without a protest. "The doctor's orders are that he is not to be disturbed." The priest did not seem aware of the exceedingly unpleasant expression on Molly's countenance.
Most men are, if they have any good in them; and God help them if they get a woman that doesn't understand that, and can't make allowances when they don't grow up! Mrs. Moloney was as quick as Michael was slow. So, while he'd be thinking about it, she had a stool over at the dresser and was up on it, feeling for the Crib on the top shelf. It was there, safe enough, and it wrapped in a newspaper.
At first slowly, then more rapidly, the very forefront of the center melted inward and forward and downward until it caught the fierce rush of the freshet and shot out from under the jam. Far up-stream, bristling and formidable, the tons of logs, grinding savagely together, swept forward. The six men and Bryan Moloney who, it will be remembered, were on top worked until the last moment.
With the need for help no longer an attraction, Moloney had almost ceased to interest her; he would remain only as part of the darker background of her mind, as a dim figure among many in the dim coloured atmosphere of revolt and bitterness in which her thoughts on human life would move when she had no labour for her hands.
"I'll wait until he wakes," he said to her, "but is there anywhere else I could go? It's not good to crowd up this room." "That's intended to remove me," thought Molly, "but it won't succeed." Mrs. Moloney moved into the little back room, and pulled forward a chair. When the priest was seated she shut the door behind her and whispered to him
It was a narrow thing for most of them, and a miracle for some. Jimmy Powers, Archie Harris, Long Pine Jim, Big Nolan, and Mike Moloney, the brother of Bryan, were in worse case. They were, as has been said, engaged in "flattening" part of the jam about eight or ten rods below the face of it.
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