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Words: 50923 in 34 pages
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r man a stranger might get glimpse of, afraid to let any one else see in his eyes the secrets of that sly, spying soul of his.
Now that Farrel had only one eye, McNab feared him less, although when the concentrated light of the Schoolmaster's spirit poured from it in a single beam, he fidgeted, showed craven and was glad to escape.
No one had the knack that Dan Farrel had of showing McNab to the Wirree for what he was. The Schoolmaster could string McNab up before the eyes of the men in the bar on the thread of one of his whimsical humours and show him dangling, all his crooked limbs writhing, his twisted face simmering with wrath. He could pin McNab with a few, lightly-flung words and make a butt of him, where he stood before his rows of short-necked, black and muddied bottles. He would have him quivering with wrath, impotent against that bitter, blithe wit and the laughter it raised. He laughed too--McNab. He was wise, as cunning as a dingo. Though his eyes were baleful, and his hands shook as he poured the raw spirits from his bottle into a mug beside him, he laughed.
"It's a mad game y're on with McNab," Salt Watson, one of the oldest of the Wirreeford men, said to the Schoolmaster one evening on his way home. "Give it up, Dan! It's good enough to make the boys laugh, but you've only to look at Thad's face when he smiles to know what he is promising himself of it all."
The Schoolmaster had watched McNab's face when he smiled. He had learnt all he wanted to. He knew what Salt meant.
For awhile he dropped out of the circle round Thad's bar. When he made one of it, his laughter was less frequent, and he missed McNab when his lightly-flung arrows of wit whistled in the assembly. His spirits had suffered a depression. Some of the men thought the trouble with his eyes was on his mind. He avoided encounters with McNab, though none of them had any idea he was afraid of Thad. His one eye was more than a match for Thad's two any day, they knew.
There was no open quarrel between them. The Schoolmaster's duelling with McNab had never been more than a laughing matter, a pricking, rapier fashion, in the intervals of card-playing and drinks. It had an air of good-fellowship. His humour had a quality of amiability, though nobody was deceived by it, least of all Thad himself. There was always contempt and an underlying bitterness in it.
"What's the matter with Davey?" Farrel asked his daughter a few days later. "I've asked him to come up here and have tea with us, but he won't come. He'll barely speak to me when we meet, gets out of my way if he sees me coming."
Deirdre was kneeling by the hearth waiting for the kettle to boil. Their table was spread with cups and saucers and a little pile of toast smoked beside the teapot. She said nothing, only bent her head lower to avoid his glance.
"Have you got anything to do with it?" he asked.
The firelight played on her face. For a moment she thought she would tell him of the meeting under the trees and the promises she and Davey had made to each other when they said good-bye. But there was so much to tell, and he would be hurt that she had not told him about it long ago. They never had any secrets. She had shared all her thoughts with Dan. At first, that she and Davey were sweethearts, had just been something to smile about and gossip over with herself.
The Schoolmaster had wondered while they were away why she was always restless and wanting to get back to the hills. And now there was shame and grief in her heart--a smarting sense of anger and disappointment that had come of seeing Davey dancing with Jess, and of hearing what people were saying about them. It was all fixed up between Ross's Jess and Davey Cameron, someone had told her, and remarked what a fine couple they would make, and how satisfied their parents were about it--even Donald Cameron, who was not an easy man to please. She could not explain all that.
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