At this Abner was really angry. He didn’t like the idea of any one, friend or no, rummaging in his pockets at night. They stopped in the road quarrelling, and Abner took off his coat, preparing to settle the matter with blows before parting company. The Irishman seemed surprised that he took it so roughly; pointed out that when he had the chance of stealing Abner’s money he hadn’t taken it, said that he didn’t want a penny of it. Little by little, with soft and humorous words he cooled Abner’s anger. At the next inn they split the sovereign over two quarts of beer, and by the time he had finished drinking Abner was ready to go shares with the change, an offer that Mick was too generous to accept. ‘What for would I want money?’ he said, ‘as long as I’d have the price of a naggin in my pockut?’ A man must be a fool, he added, if he couldn’t travel in a fat country the likes of England without money. In Ireland, it was true, one had to use one’s wits, for every one else was doing the same thing. He searched in his pockets and laid out a yellow piece of paper among the beer-spills on the inn table. An Irishman’s passport, he called it. Actually it was an eviction order, which seemed to Abner an unusual type of letter of credit. Not a bit of it, said Mick. In Ireland all you had to do was to carry this along with you and tell a tale about the little children was starving on you, and you could kick a shillun out of every priest you come across. In the old days there was many a toff that’d give you half a crown to be rid of you. They had another drink, and Mick became rhapsodical on the subject of money. What good had money ever done him? Money . . . in his day he’d had the money would buy the two sides of Grafton Street. He recalled his great double on Winkfield’s Pride and Manifesto for the Lincoln and National. Three hundred pounds in his pocket . . . but it went away like wather. Porther would have supplied a better simile. When once he began to talk about horses there was no stopping him. The lust of the born gambler shone in his small blue eyes. ‘Take away racing and I’m gone,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing that keeps the life in me!’ He went on talking until he saw that Abner was nearly asleep over the table, then he plucked at his arm. ‘Come along,’ he said, ‘let’s be getting a move on before we’re threw out.’ That night, in a condition of sublime charity toward the world and each other, they could find no barn to sleep in and rolled themselves up on a bank of dry bracken under the misty moon. Counting his money next morning Abner found that most of it had gone. He knew better than to grumble about it, but suggested to Mick that they had better go easy. ‘Go aisy, is it? Not at all!’ said the Irishman.