Maurice Walsh - Nine Strings to your Bow

“Wells displayed some gaudy salmon flies, and I purchased a small present for you.”

Con suppressed an anguished yelp. “Good Lord! not second-hand flies out of a junk shop? You don’t buy even the finest fly for a real angler like me. You let me choose, and then you pay.”

“Doubtless you can change them for your own choice,” said Glover carelessly. “Here they are.”

He presented Con with an untidy paper twist. Con opened it, and shook half a score of resplendent salmon flies. He bent over them, and his eyes opened wide.

“Begobs! I withdraw my uncalled for recriminations.” He fingered through them. “Not a moth-eaten one among them. What did Charley soak you for these, friend Daniel?”

“They please your fastidiousness?”

“These are valuable flies, but I’ll catch you no fish on them this season. They are all of the big early-spring type—February and March, but I am not looking a gift horse in the mouth.” He fingered them again and suddenly stiffened. “Hello! Hello! what have we here?” He picked up one richly hackled and brightly tinselled fly, and then two more. He was excited. “A Popham, a Jack Scott, and a Silver Doctor, but not the standard dressing. You have got something here, Daniel.”

“Be explicit?”

“Do I need to be? These are home-dressed flies and beautifully tied, and not once in the water. The man who dressed these flies would recognize them beyond any possible shadow of doubt whatever. Is that explicit enough?”

“Moderately. If you go fishing with young Falkner he might choose you a suitable one.”

“Not to use in June, but I get you, Mr. Glover.” He restored the flies one by one to the paper twist, and put it carefully in his pocket. His hand was shaking a little. “We have started going places, Daniel, and Gawd help Charley Wells!”

I

CON MADDEN was wakened at five o’clock in the morning by the crowing of a cock greeting the sun. Con was farm-bred, and, for a little, thought he was back in his own bed in the house where he was born, and that it would be time to get up for school in a few more minutes. He looked at his watch and swore.

When he got down to breakfast he found the dining room empty and the table laid for two. So Peter was still abed. Ah, well! he needed a clean rest between clean sheets with no dreams to trouble him.

The dining room was a good-sized square room with a high mantel over the big devon fireplace. The mahogany sideboard, table, chairs, and wall-clevee of blue delft were solidly antique.

A comfortably plump woman of more than mature years came in carrying a dish-covered tray under an ample bosom. This was Mrs. Johan Bartley, the cook-housekeeper, and Con had made her acquaintance on the previous night. Now he was not in the least hungry. He never was, for breakfast.

“Good morning, sir!” Mrs. Bartley greeted him.

“Good morning to you, ma’am. Hope I’m not too early for you?”

“Misther Peter was lazy this morning and had his breakfast not more than an hour ago. He couldn’t wait. Denis was up at five and will be in any minute for his. But you’re in grand time, sir.”

“I forgot I was back on a farm,” Con said. “So Peter is in harness already. It is good to have him back?”

“It is God’s own blessing, sir.” Mrs. Bartley spoke positively. “Lookat, sir! If an angel from heaven told me that Misther Peter had done what they said he did, I wouldn’t believe one single word of it. He did no wrong, and that is what we all say in this place.”

“The whole world will say it shortly, loyal woman.”

Mrs. Bartley looked at him with lively interest. “Glory be to God, sir! and more power to your arm.”

Hobnails sounded from the tiled back-passage, and Denis Buckley came clumping into the dining room. Con had not met him the previous night. He was a big lumbering man and unsmiling—not stern so much as dour, almost uncouth. He was not so tall as Con, but thicker and wider. His thatch of hair was a reddish grizzle, and his straight cut stub of a moustache was definitely red against a red-weathered heavy face. One might wonder how such a man was the father of a golden woman like Muriel Gordon.

“Denis, this is Mr. Madden, Peter’s friend,” Mrs. Bartley said.

“He told me,” he said in a surly bass, and forthwith sat down to breakfast. Buckley ate steadily and made no effort to be courteous to a visitor. Con considered an opening that might interest a glum farm foreman.

“A promising season, Mr. Buckley?”

Mr. Buckley chewed steadily and swallowed. “ ’Tis not then,” he said and refilled his mouth.

“Of course not!” Con laughed. “May was too harsh, with not enough wet and wind in it, and if we don’t get some more rain we’ll have to resow the neeps, while the hay crop is doomed—short and with no bottom. My dad was a farmer too.”

“A poor way of living,” said Buckley.

“Sure as you’re born,” Con said. “Every season is a bad season, and no season is a good season until it is two years behind. I hear you are leaving soon, Mr. Buckley.”

“I am.”

“Not a good time to be leaving.”

“The crops are all in.”

“I mean your leaving looks like forsaking Peter Falkner? He might need your moral support?”

“I am going in a month.”

“You might not be going in a month,” Con said smoothly.

“There is nothing to stop me.”

“I might.”

Buckley lifted his red eyes and fixed them on Con. “Young man, I had nothing to do with Mark Aitken’s death.”

“Had Peter Falkner? If you or he hadn’t, someone had,” Con said. “Are you afraid that you know?”

Denis Buckley laid his fork down, shoved his plate away, and lumbered out of the room.

Con Madden drank the last of his tea, lit the first cigarette of the day, inhaled luxuriously, and strolled out into the hall. On the left wall near the door two big curved hooks were screwed into the wall. That’s where the fatal weapon rested, for anyone to see and lift, was Con’s thought. Doubtless the police were still holding the gun.

Con saw through an open baize door the tiled back passage. He lounged, and Mrs. Bartley’s voice came from her kitchen. “You’ll find Misther Peter in the bawn, sir.”

“On my way,” Con called.

Con lazed across and through to the bawn, with the long line of lime-washed steadings at the back. There was no one about. The cattle were at pasture, and the men in the fields after the breakfast hour. Not even a dog barked.

He found Peter sitting on the crotch of an old apple tree, recharging his sound and polished briar pipe. He was wearing uncreased flannel trousers and open-necked shirt, and his forearms carried no tan, and his face was too lean and too white. But the grim, line was vanished from his mouth this morning, and his blue eyes smiled at Con.

“Sitting under his own vine and fig tree,” Con remarked. “Are we the only idlers on a fine farm morning?”

“I was waiting till you had breakfast.”

“My first in years.”

Peter looked at Con’s waistcoat.

“Go to blazes!” Con said. “That’s only beer.”

“There’s some about when you want it. Shall we scout round and see the boys sowing swedes?”

“I want to do some talking first.”

Peter laughed. “Talk away then. This is a slack week. In ten days we cut the crop meadows and you’ll talk as you work.”

“I might not be here in ten days’ time,” Con said, and gestured a hand widely. “How do you find things?”

“Ship shape. Denis is sound but conservative.”

“Is that why he is leaving you?”

Peter frowned. “I don’t think so. His sort like to die in harness.”