He chuckled aloud at the recollections which the subject suggested.
“He soured on me, right from the start, didn’t hee?” the young man went on. “I’ve laughed a hundred times since, at the way he chiseled me out of my place in the boat--that is to say, _some_ of the time I’ve laughed--but--but then lots of other times I couldn’t see any fun in it at all. Do you know,” he continued, almost dolefully, “I’ve been hunting all over the place for you.”
“I’ve nothing to do wid the minerals on our lands,” Kate answered. “’T is a thrushtee attinds to all that.”
“Pshaw! I didn’t want to talk minerals to _you_.”
“Well--since you put it so straight--why--why, of course--I wanted to ask you more about our people, about the O’Mahonys. You seemed to be pretty well up on the thing. You see, my father died seven or eight years ago, so that I was too young to talk to him much about where he came from, and all that. And my mother, her people were from a different part of Ireland, and so, you see--”
“Ah, there’s not much to tell now,” said Kate, in a saddened tone. “They were a great family once, and now are nothing at all, wid poor me as the last of the lot.”
“I don’t call that ‘nothing at all,’ by a jugful,” protested Bernard, with conviction.
Kate permitted herself a brief cousinly smile.
“All the same, they end with me, and afther me comes in the O’Dalys.”
Lines of thought raised themselves on the young man’s forehead and ran down to the sunburnt nose.
“Are you--don’t mind my asking--are you going to marry one of that name?”
She shrugged her shoulders, to express repugnance at the very thought.
“I’ll marry no one; laste of all an O’Daly,” she said, firmly. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she decided upon a further explanation. “I’m goin’ to take me vows at the convint within the month,” she added.
The girl’s face lightened at the sound of this exclamation, bringing back as it did a flood of welcome memories.
“I know you by that word for a true O’Mahony,--‘an American O’Mahoney,” she said, with eager pleasure beaming in her deep-gray eyes. She turned to her retainer: “You remimber that same word, John Pat. Who was it used always to be saying ‘I-gad?’”
John Pat searched the landscape with a vacuous glance.