The friend of the fairies stopped at the edge of the footbridge to listen. Although the storm had almost passed, a spiteful flare of lightning lept up now an’ agin out of the western hills, an’ afther it came the dull rumble of distant thunder; the water splashed spiteful against the bank, and Darby saw that seven good feet of the bridge had been torn out of its centre, laving uncovered that much of the black, deep flood.
He stood sthraining his eyes an’ ears in wondheration, for now the woice of Cormac sounded from the other side of the sthrame, and seemed to be floating toward him through the field over the path Darby himself had just thravelled. At first he was mightily bewildhered at what might bring Cormac on the other side of the brook, till all at once the murdhering scheme of the banshee burst in his mind like a gunpowdher explosion.
Her plan was as plain as day—she meant to dhrown the stonecutter. She had led the poor, daysthracted man straight from his own door down to and over the new stone bridge, an’ was now dayludherin’ him on the other side of the sthrame, back agin up the path that led to the broken footbridge.
In the glare of a sudden blinding flash from the middle of the sky Darby saw a sight he’ll never forget till the day he dies. Cormac, the stonecutter, was running toward the deathtrap, his bare head trun back, an’ his two arrums stretched out in front of him. A little above an’ just out of raich of them, plain an’ clear as Darby ever saw his wife Bridget, was the misty white figure of a woman. Her long, waving hair sthrealed back from her face, an’ her face was the face of the dead.
At the sight of her Darby thried to call out a warning, but the words fell back into his throat. Thin again came the stifling darkness. He thried to run away, but his knees failed him, so he turned around to face the danger.
As he did so he could hear the splash of the man’s feet in the soft mud. In less than a minute Cormac would be sthruggling in the wather. At the thought Darby, bracing himself body and sowl, let a warning howl out of him.
“Hould where you are!” he shouted; “she wants to drownd ye—the bridge is broke in the middle!” but he could tell, from the rushing footsteps an’ from the hoarse swelling curses which came nearer an’ nearer every second, that the dayludhered man, crazed with grief, was deaf an’ blind to everything but the figure that floated before his eyes.
At that hopeless instant Bridget’s parting words popped into Darby’s head.
“When one goes on an errant of marcy a score of God’s white angels, with swoords in their hands, march before an’ beside an’ afther him, keeping his path free from danger.”
How it all come to pass he could never rightly tell, for he was like a man in a dhrame, but he recollects well standing on the broken ind of the bridge, Bridget’s words ringing in his ears, the glistening black gulf benathe his feet, an’ he swinging his arrums for a jump. Just one thought of herself and the childher, as he gathered himself for a spring, an’ then he cleared the gap like a bird.
As his two feet touched the other side of the gap a turrific screech—not a screech, ayther, but an angry, frightened shriek—almost split his ears. He felt a rush of cowld, dead air agin his face, and caught a whiff of newly turned clay in his nosthrils; something white stopped quick before him, an’ then, with a second shriek, it shot high in the darkness an’ disappeared. Darby had frightened the wits out of the banshee.
The instant afther the two men were clinched an’ rowling over an’ over aich other down the muddy bank, their legs splashing as far as the knees in the dangerous wather, an’ McCarthy raining wake blows on the knowledgeable man’s head an’ breast.
Darby felt himself goin’ into the river. Bits of the bank caved undher him, splashing into the current, an’ the lad’s heart began clunking up an’ down like a churn-dash.
“Lave off, lave off!” he cried, as soon as he could ketch his breath. “Do you take me for the banshee?” says he, giving a dusperate lurch an’ rowling himself on top of the other.
“Who are you, then? If you’re not a ghost you’re the divil, at any rate,” gasped the stonecutter.
“Bad luck to ye!” cried Darby, clasping both arrums of the haunted man. “I’m no ghost, let lone the divil—I’m only your friend, Darby O’Gill.”
Lying there, breathing hard, they stared into the faces of aich other a little space till the poor stonecutter began to cry.
“Oh, is that you, Darby O’Gill? Where is the banshee? Oh, haven’t I the bad fortune,” he says, sthriving to raise himself.
“Rise up,” says Darby, lifting the man to his feet an’ steadying him there. The stonecutter stared about like one stunned be a blow.
“I don’t know where the banshee flew, but do you go back to Eileen as soon as you can,” says the friend of the fairies. “Not that way, man alive,” he says, as Cormac started to climb the footbridge, “it’s broke in the middle; go down an’ cross the stone bridge. I’ll be afther you in a minute,” he says.
Without a word, meek now and biddable as a child, Cormac turned, an’ Darby saw him hurry away into the blackness.
The raysons Darby raymained behind were two: first an’ foremost, he was a bit vexed at the way his clothes were muddied an’ dhraggled, an’ himself had been pounded an’ hammered; an’ second, he wanted to think. He had a quare cowld feeling in his mind that something was wrong—a kind of a foreboding, as one might say.
As he stood thinking a rayalisation
