“But the lad was stamping mad.
“ ‘If I could blot you from the light of life without doing any hurt to myself, I’d smash you this mortal minute,’ said he.
“ ‘For the love of heaven,’ said I, ‘tell me what I did to yourself, for I never did see you before this day, and I wish I didn’t see you now.’
“The bullet-headed man was standing by all the time, and he chewing tobacco.
“ ‘Have it out with him, Cuchulain,’ said he. ‘Kill him,’ said he, ‘and send him out among the spooks.’
“But the other man calmed down a bit, and he came over to me wagging the girl’s skirts.
“ ‘Listen!’ said he, ‘I’m the seraph Cuchulain.’
“ ‘Very good,’ said I.
“ ‘I’m your Guardian Angel,’ said he.
“ ‘Very good,’ said I.
“ ‘I’m your Higher Self,’ said he, ‘and every rotten business you do down here does be vibrating against me up there. You never did anything in your life that wasn’t rotten. You’re a miser and a thief, and you got me thrown out of heaven because of the way you loved money. You seduced me when I wasn’t looking. You made a thief of me in a place where it’s no fun to be a robber, and here I am wandering the dirty world on the head of your unrighteous ways. Repent, you beast,’ said he, and he landed me a clout on the side of the head that rolled me from one end of the barn to the other.
“ ‘Give him another one,’ said the bullet-headed man, and he chewing strongly on his plug.
“ ‘What have you got to do with it?’ said I to him. ‘You’re not my Guardian Angel, God help me!’
“ ‘How dare you,’ said the bullet-headed man. ‘How dare you set this honest party stealing the last threepenny bit of a poor man?’ and with that he made a clout at me.
“ ‘What threepenny bit are you talking about?’ said I.
“ ‘My own threepenny bit,’ said he. ‘The only one I had. The one I dropped outside the gates of hell.’
“Well, that beat me! ‘I don’t care what you say any longer,’ said I, ‘you can talk till you’re blue and I won’t care what you say,’ and down I sat on the kennel and shed my blood.
“ ‘You must repent of your own free will,’ said Cuchulain, marching to the door.
“ ‘And you’d better hurry up, too,’ said the other fellow, ‘or I’ll hammer the head off you.’
“The queer thing is that I believed every word the man said. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I did know that he was talking about something that was real although it was beyond me. And there was the way he said it too, for he spoke like a bishop, with fine, shouting words that I can’t remember now, and the months gone past. I took him at his word anyhow, and on the minute I began to feel a different creature, for, mind you, a man can no more go against his Guardian Angel than he can climb a tree backwards.
“As they were going out of the barn Cuchulain turned to me:
“ ‘I’ll help you to repent,’ said he, ‘for I want to get back again, and this is the way I’ll help you. I’ll give you money, and I’ll give you piles of it.’
“The two of them went off then, and I didn’t venture out of the barn for half-an-hour.
“I went into the barn next day, and what do you think I saw?”
“The floor was covered with gold pieces,” said Patsy.
Billy nodded:
“That’s what I saw. I gathered them up and hid them under the kennel. There wasn’t room for the lot of them, so I rolled the rest in a bit of a sack and covered them up with cabbages.
“The next day I went in and the floor was covered with gold pieces, and I swept them up and hid them under the cabbages too. The day after that and the next day and the day after that again it was the same story. I didn’t know where to put the money. I had to leave it lying on the floor, and I hadn’t as much as a dog to guard it from the robbers.”
“You had not,” said Patsy, “and that’s the truth.”
“I locked the barn; then I called up all the men; I paid them their wages, for what did I want with them any longer and I rolling in gold? I told them to get out of my sight, and I saw every man of them off the land. Then I told my wife’s brother that I didn’t want him in my house any longer, and I saw him off the land. Then I argued my son out of the house, and I told my wife that she could go with him if she wanted to, and then I went back to the barn.
“But, as I told you a minute ago, I was a changed man. The gold was mounting up on me, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I could have rolled in it if I wanted to, and I did roll in it, but there was no fun in that.
“This was the trouble with me—I couldn’t count it; it had gone beyond me; there were piles of it; there were stacks of it; it was four feet deep all over the floor, and I could no more move it than I could move a house.
“I never wanted that much money, for no man could want it: I only wanted what I could manage with my hands; and the fear of robbers was on me to that pitch that I could neither sit nor stand nor sleep.
“Every time I opened the door the place was fuller than it was the last time, and, at last, I got to hate the barn. I just couldn’t stand the look of the place, and the light squinting at me from thousands and thousands of gold corners.
“It beat me at last. One day I
