the pool at the bottom and came round to the tangle. It was awkward to get at it, because of the slope of the mound, which ran straight into the water here, but with a good deal of trouble he pulled the whole weedy mess up on to the side. The trout was only a very little fish, not the big one at all. Woollen took it carefully in his wet hand and worked the hook out. He went up to the bank overhanging the slack water so that he could put the fish into a quiet place out of the run of the current. Much more of the bank had caved in than he had supposed, looking from the other side. He knelt and held the little fish in the hollow of his hand under the water; it stayed there for a moment before shooting away into the waving green bed, out of sight.
When he had disentangled his cast and line he began to examine the altered bank, so that he should know the new lie of the pool another day. Huge slices of spongy black earth had been undercut and lay at the bottom with their long grass streaming. One slice had not quite parted; it hung with a deep wide crack between it and the still solid land. Woollen pushed it with his foot and it went over, quite slowly, with a watery sough. The water was shallow under it, and the black earth lay half awash. Woollen was still looking vacantly at it when there was a slight rumble – tremor rather than sound – under his feet and a great stone slab fell flatlings into the thin water and mud, scattering them far out across the pool. Immediately after there was an indescribable rushing noise as a hundred thousand gold coins gushed on to the slab piling up like wheat, cascading, flowing, flowing. All at once the gush stopped: one last coin rolled down, slid down the side of the pile and rang on the stone.
Woollen had not moved. His breath suspended, his hand to his mouth; his throat was stiff, could not swallow, and his heart was doing strange things even before his reason had grasped the reality of what was before him.
Two things stabbed into his mind: one the word ‘escape’ and a thousand implications behind it, the other the dreadfulness of the coins on the far side dribbling down to irrecoverable loss in the deep water. With a violent, epileptic jerk he leapt to rescue them. There was no need: they lay in a few inches of water on the side of a turf that had gone in before. The surprising chill of the water checked him, and he stood there gasping, with his sense coming back. Bending, he peered under the dark bank: the earth had fallen away from a stone chest buried deep in the mound; three sides of it and its lid still stood there, canted outwards by long subsidence to such a degree that no single coin remained. The fourth side and a long sliver of flawed stone from the bottom of the chest had fallen under the immense weight of the gold. His mind digested this while he drew breath, and at once he was back with one foot on the bank and the other on the stone slab, saying, ‘Easy now, old Woollen. Steady does it,’ and picking up gold with both hands. He worked with immense speed at first, but as his natural phlegm began to reassert itself even in the smallest degree he arranged them in neat piles, counting as he did so.
His first wild flurry of spirits, painful in its intensity, calmed, to be succeeded by an all-embracing happiness. This vast hoard was his. He had not the first glimmering of a doubt there. Plans formed and reformed with lightning rapidity in his head; he lost count of the hundreds. He came up on to the bank among the piles to count again, and he suddenly found himself trembling with weariness.
The sun came out, and the gold sent back its light, not a coin but what was brilliant; no tarnish, no obscuring dust. Woollen sat among the heaps, passing the gold through his hands. It was not Armada gold, as he had expected; there were a few Roman aurei, some Greek staters, among them coins of a beauty that struck him even then, and a mass of thick, unintelligible rounds that he supposed to be Oriental. There was no silver, no bronze. Gold; all gold.
He knew that he could not possibly carry a tenth part of it, and while he was weighing in his mind the ways of dealing with it he was possessed with the idea that he might already have been seen – some lurker in an illicit still, some chance wandering youth in the mountainside. He did not ever suppose that there might be other things in the valley watching him, measuring his breath, weighing his shadows: silent things like a round bank of fern or a crag at a vantage point, incessantly recording, communicating with each other, collating, storing up.
There were stills in the neighbourhood, he knew very well. The gleam of the hoard – how it flashed and shone; it would catch a man’s eye five miles away. With a chill on his soul he covered some with his coat, strewed the broken tangle over more, tore up bushes to cover the rest. He stared searchingly at the mountains, down the two ridges; there was no movement, only a kestrel hanging in the wind. The valley behind him was empty.
‘I must not dig. They would see the marks …’ His mind’s voice trailed off in an anguish of frustration. Illumination came: he sprang down into the water again and tore lumps from the fallen earth. Then leaning under the still overhanging bank to the great chest he levelled its floor with clods, piled it high with gold, built up a wall of stones and turf to serve for the fallen sides, and crammed the chest again. The slab, lest it should draw notice, he moved with a strength that he had never known before, and plunged it into the deep swirling middle water.
Some gold remained, enough to buy half the County Mayo. He dug among the bushes, in spite of his fear; he dug with his hands and slashed the roots with his knife. There was little trace when he had done. By now his mind was running fast and clear. ‘I will go over to Ballyatha,’ he said, ‘and I will sell four or five at Power’s there. Then I will buy some decent clothes and have dinner at the Connaught. To-morrow I will send some to the big London dealers, and when I have the money …’ There were so many possible variations that his mind stumbled in a happy indecision.
He was ready. A dozen very thick coins weighed down the pockets of his coat. The sun was well down the sky but if he hurried he could reach Ballyatha in time. It was clearly essential that he should not be cheated of one day’s happiness; it was less clear how getting to Ballyatha affected the safety of everything, but he was entirely certain that it did. The way was over the pass between Slieve Donagh and Ardearg, right up the valley and over the curtain of rock that closed its upper end. A chasm, not six feet wide – a man could touch each side with outstretched arms – and twenty yards long formed the pass, and below it on the far side was the town.
There was no path: he toiled upwards with his eyes fixed on the skyline. When he had gone a quarter of a mile he spun round, ran in long bounds downhill to the water, to the chest, grasped handfuls of gold, stuffed his pockets, his trout-bag, hurled the fish away. Then, breathing in great uneven gasps, he turned his face to the pass again and forced his labouring body up and up, on for ever, always uphill and the short grass slippery like glass.
He must get there in time, everything depended on it. The weight was more than he could bear and the pass was infinitely high above. The sun hurried down. Woollen, the unfortunate man in all his days, pressed on and on, and still the everlasting hill stretched above and beyond him. A despairing glance over his shoulder at the sun as it dipped made him stumble and fall. The wind chilled his soaking body. On and on: not to look up: on, on, on. He did look up, and the pass in the dusk was before him.
But in the pass he met the keeper of the hoard.
THE NIGHT WAS OLD, black, and full of driving cold rain; the moon and the stars had already passed over the sky. But anyhow they had been hidden since midnight by the low, racing, torn cloud and the flying wetness of small rain and sea-foam and the whipped-off top of standing water. Dawn was still far away: from the dark east the mounting wind blew in gusts; it bore more rain flatlings from the sea.
Bent double, with the breath caught from his mouth, a man struggled against the force of the living wind. He walked on the top of a sea-wall that guarded the reclamation of a great marsh. At this point the wall ran straight into the teeth of the wind for a long way; there was no shelter. He had to walk carefully, for the mud had not frozen yet, and it
