“‘Twas the poor dead, drownded woman, an’ their own cowardly souls, kilt ’em!”

“Aye, Denny, so it was, nary a doubt; but they shot ye some desperate black looks, Denny.”

“Well, Cormy, don’t ye be worryin’.  Fifty t’ousand squid like Dick Lynch couldn’t frighten me.  The comather, ye say?  Saints o’ God! but I’ll be puttin’ it on themselves wid a club!  Bewitched?  What the divil do they know o’ witches?  Fishes bes all they understands!  Black looks they give me, did they?  I’ll be batin’ ’em so black they’ll all look like rotted herrings, by the Holy Peter hisself!  Aye, Cormy, don’t ye worry, now.”

At that he opened the door quietly and stepped inside with a strange air of reverence and eagerness.  The boy followed softly and closed the door behind him.  The fire roared and crackled in the round stove, but the room was empty of human life.  Wet garments of fine linen hung on a line behind the stove.  The inner door opened and old Mother Nolan hobbled into the kitchen with a wrinkled finger to her lips.

“Whist wid ye!” she cautioned.  “She be sleepin’ like a babe, the poor darlint, in Father McQueen’s own bed, wid everything snug an’ warm as ye’d find in any marchant’s grand house in St. John’s.”

She took her accustomed seat beside the stove and lit her pipe.

“Saints alive! but can’t ye set down!” she exclaimed.  “I wants to talk wid ye, b’ys.  Tell me this—­where bes t’e rest o’ the poor folk from the wrack?”

“She bes the only livin’ soul we found, Granny,” replied the skipper.  “She was lashed in the foremast—­an’ t’other spars was all over the side.  We found a poor dead body in one o’ the cabins—­drownded to death—­an’ not so much as another corpse.  Aye, Granny, ’twas a desperate cruel wrack altogether.”

The old woman shot a keen glance at him; but he returned it without a blink.

“Didn’t ye find no more gold an’ diamonds, then?” she asked.

“We found some gold.  I give it all to the men.”

“An’ what was the cargo?”

“Sure, Granny, we didn’t break into her cargo yet.  There was a rumpus—­aye, ye may well call it a rumpus!  Did ye say as she bes sleepin’, Granny?”

The old woman nodded her head, her black eyes fixed on the red draught of the stove with a far-away, fateful, veiled glint in them which her grandsons knew well.  She had ceased to puff at her pipe for the moment, and in the failing light from the window they could see a thin reek of smoke trailing straight up from the bowl.

“Aye, sleepin’,” she mumbled, at last.  “Saints presarve us, Denny!  There bes fairy blood in her—­aye, fairy blood.  Sure, can’t ye see it in her eyes?  I’s afeard there bain’t no luck in it, Denny.  Worse nor wracked diamonds, worse nor wracked gold they be—­these humans wid fairy blood in ’em!  And don’t I know?  Sure, wasn’t me own grandmother own cousin to the darter o’ a fairy-woman?  Sure she was, back in old Tyoon.  An’ there was no luck in the house wid her; an’ she was a beauty, too, like the darlint body yonder.”