No More Learning

PAUDEEN.

You that have been gaoled this eight months know little of this
countryside. It isn't a limping stroller like yourself the Boys would
let come among them. But I know. I went to the drill a few nights and
I skinning kids for the mountainy men. In a quarry beyond the drill
is--they have their plans made--it's the square house of the Brownes is
to be made an attack on and plundered. Do you know, now, who is the
leader they are waiting for?

JOHNNY.

How would I know that?

PAUDEEN [_singing_].

Oh, Johnny Gibbons, my five hundred healths to you.
It is long you are away from us over the sea!

JOHNNY [_standing up excitedly_].

Sure that man could not be Johnny Gibbons that is outlawed!

PAUDEEN.
I asked news of him from the old lad, and I bringing in the drink along
with him. 'Don't be asking questions,' says he; 'take the treat he
gives you,' says he. 'If a lad that has a high heart has a mind to
rouse the neighbours,' says he, 'and to stretch out his hand to all
that pass the road, it is in France he learned it,' says he, 'the place
he is but lately come from, and where the wine does be standing open in
tubs. Take your treat when you get it,' says he, 'and make no delay or
all might be discovered and put an end to. '

JOHNNY.

He came over the sea from France! It is Johnny Gibbons, surely, but it
seems to me they were calling him by some other name.

PAUDEEN.

A man on his keeping might go by a hundred names. Would he be telling
it out to us that he never saw before, and we with that clutch of
chattering women along with us? Here he is coming now. Wait till you
see is he the lad I think him to be.

MARTIN [_coming in_].

I will make my banner, I will paint the unicorn on it. Give me that
bit of canvas, there is paint over here. We will get no help from
the settled men--we will call to the lawbreakers, the tinkers, the
sievemakers, the sheepstealers.