Billy Byrne

“ Then, one by one, they entered their huts, and silence reigned within the village.
Billy crept closer. He eyed each hut with longing, wondering gaze. Which could it be? How could he determine? One seemed little more promising than the others. He had noted those to which Indians had retired. There were three into which he had seen none go. These, then, should be the first to undergo his scrutiny.
The night was dark. The moon had not yet risen. Only a few dying fires cast a wavering and uncertain light upon the scene. Through the shadows Billy Byrne crept closer and closer. ”

“ Beside him, a head taller, savagely strong, stood Billy Byrne, his broad shoulders squared, his great chest expanding as he inhaled.
"It's great, ain't it?" he said, at last. "I never knew the country was like this, an' I don't know that I ever would have known it if it hadn't been for those poet guys you're always spouting.
"I always had an idea they was sissy fellows," he went on; "but a guy can't be a sissy an' think the thoughts they musta thought to write stuff that sends the blood chasin' through a feller like he'd had a drink on an empty stomach. ”

“ Theriere too wondered why Byrne, of all the other men upon the Halfmoon the last that he should have expected to risk a thing for the sake of Miss Harding, should be the foremost in pursuit of her captors.
“I wonder how far behind Sanders and Wison are,” he remarked to Byrne after they had been on the trail for the better part of an hour. “Hadn't we better wait for them to catch up with us? Four can do a whole lot more than two.”
“Not wen Billy Byrne's one of de two,” replied the mucker, and continued doggedly along the trail. ”

“ Billy found the one he wished and presently he was free. He still stood looking at the deputy sheriff.
“I ought to croak you,” he murmured. “I'll never make my get-away if I don't; but SHE won't let me—God bless her.”
Suddenly a thought came to Billy Byrne. If he could have a start he might escape. It wouldn't hurt the man any to stay here for a few hours, or even for a day. Billy removed the deputy's coat and tore it into strips. With these he bound the man to a tree. Then he fastened a gag in his mouth. ”

“ Byrne had but to ask a favor to have it granted, and now, when he called upon Pesita to furnish him with a suitable force for the rescue of Bridge the brigand enthusiastically acceded to his demands.
“I will come,” he exclaimed, “and all my men shall ride with me. We will take Cuivaca by storm. We may even capture Villa himself.”
“Wait a minute, bo,” interrupted Billy Byrne. “Don't get excited. I'm lookin' to get my pal outen' Cuivaca. After that I don't care who you capture; but I'm goin' to get Bridgie out first. I ken do it with twenty-five men—if it ain't too late. ”

“ It'll help you remember that you ain't nothin' but a dirty damn landlubber, an' when your betters come around you'll—”
But what Billy would have done in the presence of his betters remained stillborn in the mate's imagination in the face of what Billy really did do to his better as that worthy swung a sudden, vicious blow at the mucker's face.
Billy Byrne had not been scrapping with third- and fourth-rate heavies, and sparring with real, live ones for nothing. The mate's fist whistled through empty air ”

“ This was the sight which Doctor Byrne and Kate Cumberland saw from the veranda of the ranch-house as they turned and looked back before going in.
"A funeral procession," suggested the doctor.
"No," she answered positively. "If Black Bart were dead, Dan wouldn't allow any hands save his own to touch the body. No, Black Bart is alive! Yet, it's impossible."
The word "impossible," however, was gradually dropping from the vocabulary of Randall Byrne. True, the wolf-dog had seemed dead past recovery and across the eyes of Byrne came a vision of the dead rising from their graves. ”

“ She came out through the door with a quick, trembling step, a very little woman to be the mother of two such powerful men and the wife of a giant—a little woman of fifty, with the face of a russet apple, with fine lacework about the corners of her eyes, hair a delicate gray, like rich silk, and a girl's mouth and eyes. She had Grant in her arms in an instant, as though he were no more than a boy. Slowly she looked at him. "My son! Willie John!" ”

“ He lowered the heavy horny-head beast to the ground and looked at his sister in amazement.
She was almost his own age, and the prettiest female in the family, with her long black hair and her large black eyes and firm young breasts. He, himself, had killed the murder-beast whose fur encircled her shapely hips.
"I would be with you in this danger," she answered, pleadingly. "None of the other males dared to go with you. Our father's pride would be complete if a female of the Great Cliffs were as brave as Kuru."
"But you must go back. I do not know what these gods will do. They may kill me." ”

“ Shakes the Barley'; slip-jigs would make a cripple agile as a hare.... And you go asleep with no mate to wake you in a blow, but the sound of an old piper crooning to you as a cummer croons. And the birds will wake you with their douce singing.... Aye, Fiddlers' Green...."
And they were silent for a minute in the soft Ulster sunshine.
"Would you have any use for a lad like myself aboard your ship, Raghery man?"
"Och, sure, what would you do with the sea, wee fellow?"
"I ken it well already, Raghery man. And I'm no clumsy in a boat. I can sail a sloop with any man. ”

“ And she might have waited, Shane Campbell; she might so. Four years lost on the coast of Borneo to come and find your childer scattered, and your wife putting shame on you. That's a hard thing."
"You're a young man, Simon Fraser. You're as young as I am, forty-two. There's a quarter-century ahead of you. Put the past by and begin again. There'd be love at many a young woman for you. And a house, and new bairns."
"I'm a back-thinking man, Alan's kinsman, a long back-thinking man. And I'd always be putting the new beside the old and the new would not seem good to me. ”

“ Instantly, Barry began to work at expanding and depressing the lungs of the huge animal as he might have worked to bring a man back to life.
"Watch him!" whispered the doctor to Kate Cumberland. "He is closer to that dog—that wolf, it looks like—than he has ever been to any human being!"
She would not answer, but she turned her head quickly away from the man and his beast.
"Are you afraid to watch?" challenged Byrne, for his anger at Barry's blunt refusals still made his blood hot. "When your father lay at death's door was he half so anxious as he is now? ”

“ No fighting, you! Move!" He was also waving a gun in the air.
When one man struck out wildly at another who was in his way, the Major reached up and hit him over the head with his weapon—under the sudden brilliance of the newsman's flash bulb. The man slumped, and a number of B deck men heaved at him, pulling him through.
Henry wondered if Uncle Andy was playing it safe, staying in his seat. Couldn't be a fire. No smoke. Something much different, more dangerous, he sensed. He recalled the ringing in his and Martia's ears. ”

“ She'd have been the strange, pitiful old cummer to me, who minded her the strapping woman, and I'd have been a queer bearded man to her, who minded me only as a wee fellow, the terror of the glen. People change every day, and there's a lot of change in forty years.
"And, besides, it would have been gey hard on me, wee lad. The grape and spade would be clumsy to my hands, there being no life to them after the swinging spars. And my fingers, used to splicing rope, would not have the touch for milking a cow. ”

“ For five times seven years you've sailed the seven seas. But for racing ye have na' the gift. Alan Donn had it. And 'twas Alan Donn had the gift for the golf, and the gift for the horses. Just the gift. You must not blame yourself, Shane na fairrge, there's few Alan Donns."
And thinking to himself in the lamp-lit room, Shane found what the old man meant. Beneath the bronzed face, the roaring manner of Alan Donn, there was a secret of alchemy. Rhythm, and concentration like white fire. To the most acute tick of the stars he could get a boat over the line with the gun. ”

“ Reynardine!" A cry of terror broke from him.
An immense panic seized him, and his hands checked the horse as it rose to the jump—a savage jerk on curb and snaffle. The gray was already in the air. Its hind legs came down uncertain. Its great bulk fell backward. Fear flooded him like cold water. In an instant he knew his neck would be broken like a dry twig. Christ! There it went! Snap!
VII
"Dark childeen, what is wrong with you? What is wrong? There was a wing in my heart until I saw you coming."
"Nurse Ellen, there 's a man dead at the abbey. I saw him die, with my two eyes." ”

“ The feeling that was uppermost in him as he sat outside the thatched cottage in the moonlight while the wake was within was not grief at his wife's death; not a shattered mind that his life so carefully laid out not twelve months before was disoriented; not any self-pity; not any grievance against God such as little men might have. But a strange dumb wonder.... There she lay within, in her habit of a Dominican lay sister, her hands waxy, her face waxy, her eyelids closed. And six guttering candles were about her, and woman droned their prayers with a droning as of bees. ”

“ For all that mixed but mainly respectable company rose up, and, opening timidly, rendered with an ever-increasing confidence and volume that profane and ridiculous hymn. Stephen Byrne stood superbly on a footstool and conducted with a poker, his black eyes flashing, his whole figure vital with excitement and mirth. And all those people were under his spell. Even the psychologist forbore for a moment to analyse the workings either of his own or any man's mind, and concentrated genuinely on the correct pointing of his words, chuckling insanely at each half-verse. ”

“ It was in the first glance of those eyes that Byrne recognized the restlessness of which Kate had spoken; and he felt almost as if it were an inner fire which had burned and still was wasting the body of Joseph Cumberland. To the attentions of the doctor the old man submitted with patient self-control, and Byrne found a pulse feeble, rapid, but steady. There was no temperature. In fact, the heat of the body was a trifle sub-normal, considering that the heart was beating so rapidly. ”

“ It carried, as Byrne gazed, a connotation of swifter, fiercer thinking, than if the gaunt old man had stalked the floor and poured forth a tirade of words.
The girl came to meet the doctor. She said: "Will you use a narcotic?"
"Why?" asked Byrne. "He seems more quiet than usual."
"Look more closely," she whispered.
And when he obeyed, he saw that the whole body of Joe Cumberland quivered like an aspen, continually. So the finger of the duellist trembles on the trigger of his gun before he receives the signal to fire—a suspense more terrible than the actual face of death. ”

“ Henry remembered that this was the scar-faced man who had sat behind him and Uncle Andy. On his hardened face was an expression of deep concern, and his forehead glistened with sweat.
"It's a—a man," he stammered.
"A man! Well what the—"
"A monster!" cried a woman, her hair disheveled, her dress and shoes gone and her petticoat half ripped off. "Oh God help us!"
"Mother!" shrieked Martia, suddenly. She broke away from Henry and ran toward the crowd at the staircase.
Henry ran after her and caught her by the wrist. "You'll get yourself killed trying to get up there!" he yelled at her. ”

“ Those thin-cut nostrils expanded, the lips compressed, and Byrne dared not look into the flare of the eyes.
"Who done this?" asked Barry, and still the shiver of cold metal rang in his voice. "Who's done this?"
"Steady, lad," said Joe Cumberland faintly. "They ain't no call for fightin'. Steady, Dan, boy. An' don't leave me!"
Byrne caught a signal from Kate and followed her obediently from the room.
"Let them be alone," she said.
"Impossible!" protested the doctor. "Your father is lapsed into a most dangerous condition. ”

“ Yet the illusion held with Randall Byrne in spite of all his scepticism.
He was certain that he had made not the slightest sound in opening the door, but presently the head of the watcher turned slowly, and Byrne was looking into those same yellow, terrible eyes. At the same instant the sick man moaned faintly. The doctor closed the door as softly as he had opened it and turned a drawn face upon Kate Cumberland.
"I don't understand; it isn't possible!" he whispered.
"No one understands," said the girl, and smiled mirthlessly. "Don't try to, Doctor Byrne. Go to bed, and sleep. If you can. ”

“ You are an armed man. Demand the macho from him, with a pistol to his head, señor—it is not his, I tell you—and ride after your man who is so precious to you. And then you shall both be safe, for no two travellers have been ever known to disappear together in these days. As to the beast, I, its owner, I confide it to your honour.”
They were staring hard at each other, and Byrne nearly burst into a laugh at the ingenuity and transparency of the little man’s plot to regain possession of his mule. ”

“ It meant something ... the purple hills ... the purple heather.... The Moyle purple in the setting sun.... [Pg 281]
"I'll go back," he decided. Scots superstition welled up in him. "A man seeing death sees more than death. Sees life. The Keepers of the Door maybe anoint his eyes, and if he looks back for an instant, God knows what he sees ... I'll go."
"Can I give you a lift back to Ballycastle, Simon Fraser? Or a lift anywhere you want. It's the least I can do and you coming this long way to tell me news."
"I'm very thankful to you, Shane Campbell, very thankful indeed. ”