His voice had risen, and he moved closer to Hal, his fists clenched, His friends murmured in approval, closing in behind him.
Poor devil, thought Hal; he's had a couple down at the pub in Doonhaven, and it's got him on the raw, instead of laying him out quiet and peaceful.
"All right, Jim," he said, "curse old Griffiths if you want to, but he's had no hand in the business, I promise you. He knew no more about it than I did, and that's a fact."
Someone whistled in derision, and another man laughed.
"Ah, laugh away," said Jim Donovan.
"Mr. Brodrick is like the rest of the gentlemen, smooth-faced and easy-spoken. It's him that is laughing at us all the time. So you didn't know the mines were to be closed, Mr. Brodrick? And when your father sold them to the London company, that was news to you too, I'll be bound? We know a bit more than that, I can tell you. We know you were go-between all the while, through from Mr. Griffiths to your father and the London company. Why, didn't you have the letters running through your hands day after day, from Slane and London and Bronsea, besides those that you get at home? I may be the son of a poor man, Mr.
Brodrick, who has only a few pigs and cows grazing on a piece of ground as big as my hand, when in days gone by we owned all the land hereabouts that your father holds now, but by all the blessed saints in heaven I'm not such a fool as I look."
He turned round on one foot, to survey the effect of his speech upon his companions.
"That's right, Jim," said one of the men, "you have the heart of a lion, I'm always telling you."
Hal shrugged his shoulders. He was suddenly bored by them, and their deliberate misunderstanding of the position.
It was useless to argue with a fellow like Jim Donovan anyway. He was tired now after his long tramp on Hungry Hill, and wanted Jinny, and his supper, and his bed before facing his father the following day.
"Goodnight," he said shortly, and turned away, making for the cinder track that led down to the high road. But Jim Donovan and his friends followed close at his heels.
"Not so fast, Mr. Brodrick," said Jim.
"Maybe the lads and I haven't finished talking with you yet. There's many an account to settle between our families, going back over the years. Wasn't it my own first cousin that was murdered by your father and your mother, travelling home in their carriage after a banquet, the horses whipped on to him by the coachman, and my poor cousin's brains spattering the road, and them driving on with never a care for him? It was common knowledge they were glad to see him dead, for the scandal your uncle brought upon his sister."
Hal looked over his shoulder at the angry man.
"For the Lord's sake, Jim," he said, "go home and get to bed and sleep off your temper. Take him off, some of you fellows, or carry him there, if he can't walk. I'm in no mood to start a quarrel about my uncle or my father or anyone else."
The men stared at him without answer, and Hal moved off down the cinder track. He had walked scarcely half a dozen yards before a stone struck the side of his head. It was a sharp, jagged stone, breaking the skin. Hal turned round to face his assailant, and another stone caught him above the eye.
"You damned fool," he shouted. "What the hell do you think you're doing? If you want to fight, come on, and I'll fight you fair."
He ran up the path towards Jim, his temper thoroughly roused, the blood pouring down his head from the jagged stone. He was met by an avalanche of stones that brought him to his knees, and the moment he was down the men rushed upon him, shouting, excited, one seizing his arm and twisting it behind his back so that he could not hit out at them, one or two of the others throwing themselves upon his body.
"Drag him down to the road and let him lie there, like your cousin," said one, and "Burn him in the fire," shouted Jim, "let him feed the flames."
Someone tied a handkerchief round his eyes, hard and tight, and the blood from the wound in his head began to trickle into his eyes, warm and sickly, and he could see nothing.
The men were shouting and laughing, and now some of them were seizing his arms, and the rest his legs, and bearing him away up the binder track to the fire by the dressing-sheds.
"You bloody idiots," said Hal, weak and faint from the mauling they had given him. "Do you want the whole country down upon you, and twenty years apiece at the Mundy Assizes?"
Someone hit him on the mouth-Jim Donovan no doubt-and then he was thrown face downwards in a heap of rubble, choking, suffocating, while his hands were bound behind him.
"Ah, leave him there to rot," said one of the men, "and come away home, Jim. We've had sport enough for one evening, haven't we?"
The sight of Hal lying in the rubble, dazed and half-conscious, made the men uneasy. Jim had led them into this, and now it was best to get away, and maybe put several miles between them and Doonhaven.
The sound of their voices grew fainter, and lying there in the rubble, Hal could hear the crunch of their boots as they climbed the heap of slack above him and made away across the hill. The blood went on trickling into his eyes behind the bandage, and even found its way to his mouth. He felt faint, and deadly sick.
The bonfire died away beside him, and he could tell by the stillness and the silence that darkness was falling fast.
"Jinny will be worried," he thought. "She'll go round to the Rectory and get hold of Uncle Tom."
What an idiot he had been ever to talk to Jim Donovan and his friends. He should have turned back across the hill as soon as he saw them. A fat lot of use it had been showing sympathy with the silly bastards. Hal rolled over on to his side, and worked loose the piece of rope that bound his wrists together. Then he tore off the handkerchief they had placed across his eyes. He found, to his dismay, that he could not see at all. One eye was closed up entirely, from the cut above it, and the other was gummed with the clotted blood. He would have to find water to bathe his eye before he could make his way home, five miles or more in the gathering darkness. He struggled to his feet, and peered about him, trying to gain a sense of direction. There was water hard by, surely, close to the dressing-sheds, where the tin used to be washed, but with his closed eyes, and the murky evening light, he could not remember whether the sheds had been to the right or to the left of the heap of rubble where the men had thrown him. He moved forward slowly, his arms outstretched, and as he took step by step, faltering, as helpless as a blind man, he thought of his father arriving tomorrow morning in the steamer at Slane.
He would come down to Doonhaven and find his son in bed probably, with his eyes bandaged, and his body black and blue. And he would not believe the story of a fight on Hungry Hill, for twenty-five years of living across the water would have made him forgetful of the strange ways and crazy happenings of his own country, where men drank with one another one moment and fought the next, all because of something that happened before they were born. His father would be shown up to the bedroom by a shy and nervous Jinny, and he would see Hal lying against the pillows with two black eyes, and say to himself "A drunken brawl, of course; the girl is trying to hush it up." The thought of this, so typical and inevitable, made Hal laugh helplessly to himself, and he thought how impossible it was going to be to explain to his father what had happened. It would be simpler to let the matter rest, and for his father to continue thinking him useless, tipsy, and incompetent, staggering home in his cups on a Saturday night, as half the men in Doonhaven had done since the beginning of time.
Hal touched something with his hands, a rough, hard surface, like a brick wall, and he stumbled over a piece of planking at his feet.