"What was it like?--what was it like"? replied Shon. "Sure, I couldn't
see what it was like for the stars that were hittin' me in the eyes.
There wasn't any world at all. I was ridin' on a streak of lightnin',
and nivir a rubber for the wheels; and my fingers makin' stripes of
blood on the snow; and now the stars that were hittin' me were white,
and thin they were red, and sometimes blue--"

"The Stars and Stripes," inconsiderately remarked Jo Gordineer.

"And there wasn't any beginning to things, nor any end of them; and
whin I struck the snow and cut down the core of it like a cat through a
glass, I was willin' to say with the Prophet of Ireland--"

"Are you going to pass the liniment, Pretty Pierre?" It was Jo Gordineer
said that.

What the Prophet of Israel did say--Israel and Ireland were identical to
Shon--was never told.

Shon's bubbling sarcasm was full-stopped by the beneficent savour that,
rising now from the hands of the four, silenced all irrelevant speech.
It was a function of importance. It was not simply necessary to say
How! or Here's reformation! or I look towards you! As if by a common
instinct, the Honourable, Jo Gordineer, and Pretty Pierre, turned
towards Shon and lifted their glasses. Jo Gordineer was going to say:
"Here's a safe foot in the stirrups to you," but he changed his mind and
drank in silence.

Shon's eye had been blazing with fun, but it took on, all at once, a
misty twinkle. None of them had quite bargained for this. The feeling
had come like a wave of soft lightning, and had passed through them. Did
it come from the Irishman himself? Was it his own nature acting through
those who called him "partner"?

Pretty Pierre got up and kicked savagely at the wood in the big
fireplace. He ostentatiously and needlessly put another log of
Norfolk-pine upon the fire.

The Honourable gaily suggested a song.

"Sing us 'Avec les Braves Sauvages,' Pierre," said Jo Gordineer.

But Pierre waved his fingers towards Shon: "Shon, his song--he did not
finish--on the glacier. It is good we hear all. 'Hein?'"

And so Shon sang:

"Oh it's down the long side of Farcalladen Rise."

The sleeper on the pine branches stirred nervously, as if the song were
coming through a dream to him. At the third verse he started up, and an
eager, sun-burned face peered from the half-darkness at the singer. The
Honourable was sitting in the shadow, with his back to the new actor in
the scene.

"For