Towards evening the worn-out Cadets got back to their Crossleys on the pass road which ran along the north shore of the lake; and after leaving a party with a searchlight mounted on a tender to stop any stray gunmen escaping during the night on bicycles by the road to the east, Dominic started for Murrisk in a Crossley with his brother’s body.
Many an evening the two brothers had driven home together over the same road after a happy day’s grouse-shooting, never dreaming that their last journey together would be to bring Cormac’s body to the home of their ancestors.
The mac Nessa met the party in the great hall of Murrisk, and his ancestors looking down from the walls must surely have thought that they were back again in their own times of everlasting war and sudden death.
In the early ‘eighties there lived in the Cloonalla district a small farmer named Peter Walsh, who was what is generally called in the west a bad farmer, which is simply the Irish way of saying that he was lazy and good-for-nothing, and for several years Walsh had been in the clutches of the Cloonalla gombeen man, the local big shopkeeper.
The ways of the gombeen man are quite simple and usually most successful, the success largely depending on a run of bad potato crops, as generally after two successive failures the majority of the farmers in a poor mountainous district have no money at all. They are thus forced to go to the gombeen wallah, who advances them so much money, according to the size of their farm and their capacity for drink, as a mortgage on the farm at a high rate of interest. But instead of paying them money he gives credit for goods, and there is a verbal agreement that he will not foreclose as long as the farmer deals solely with him and makes no bones about the prices he is charged. Formerly this was the terrible millstone which used to hang for life round the necks of many western peasants.
However, Walsh’s millstone troubled him not one bit, and he “staggered” along for several years until there came a sequence of three bad and indifferent crops, which finished him completely. Seeing that Walsh was not going to make any effort, the gombeen man closed on the farm, and Peter, the wife, and their one child, Bridget, aged three years, left Ireland for America, illogically cursing the British Government for their own sins and those of the gombeen devil.