“Sit tight,” said O’Neill between his teeth.
The brake jammed hard on as he spoke; they had been running down-hill slowly, with the power shut off. The ass backed indignantly; and the great motor swerved to one side, where there was a little more room in the cutting, bumped heavily over dry channels worn by the winter rains, and rammed her bonnet gently into the rock wall. The occupants of the tonneau found themselves in a heap on the floor. The car throbbed to silence, and the old woman in the ass-cart said, “God help us!” loudly.
“Well, indeed, He did,” said O’Neill, under his breath. “Are you all right, all of you?”
“We’re mixed, but undamaged,” Jim answered. “What about you, O’Neill?”
Con had swung himself out before the car finally stopped, and was examining the battered bonnet dismally, finally appealing for help to push her away from the wall.
He walked over to the old woman, who still sat motionless on the floor of the ass-cart, her withered face pitifully afraid.
“Did you not hear the horn?” O’Neill asked.
“I did, sir—but I didn’t rightly know what it was, an’ I half asleep.” She rocked herself to and fro, wretchedly. “Oh, wirra, the great mothor! Is it desthroyed entirely, sir?”
“It is not—but it’s the mercy of Heaven we’re not all killed, and you and the little ass, too. When you hear that horn, mother, get to one side of a road quickly: and don’t be afraid to call out, if it happens to be a narrow road.”
“I . . . I . . .” She looked at him helplessly, her voice breaking.
“Don’t worry—you’re all right,” he said gently. “Is it tired you are?”
“I been sittin’ up with my son these two nights,” she said, finding words. “Mortal ill he was, an’ the woman he married no more use than a yalla-haired doll. An’ when they’re sick they do be wantin’ their mothers again, like as if they’d gone back to be little boys.” Just for a moment he caught a gleam of triumph in her dulled eyes.
“He is, sir, God be praised, and I’m gettin’ home to me man; there’s no knowin’ what he’ll have done to himself, not used to bein’ alone and all.”
Something passed from O’Neill’s palm into the trembling, work-worn old hand.
“That’s to bring you luck for your son,” he said, forestalling her protests. “Let you get home, mother, and have a meal. Wait a moment.”