In the spring, Paddy was nine, and had to go out in the world to fight poverty alone. His father had confided to him that they were in great debt to the gombeen man. Paddy could help them get out. There was to be a hiring fair in Strabane. Paddy swung along the road to Strabane pretending he was a man--he was to be hired out just like one. But when he arrived at the hiring field he shrank back. All the farm hands, big and little, stood herded together in between the cattle pens. A man? A beast. One overseer for a big estate came up to dicker for the boy, and said he would give him fifteen dollars for six months' work. Paddy was just about to muster up courage to put the price up a bit, when a friend of the overseer came up with the prearranged remark: "A fine boy! Well worth twelve dollars the six months!" "What do you want to know for?" asked the gombeen man, when at the end of Paddy's back-breaking six months, Paddy and his father brought him the fifteen dollars and asked how much they still owed. The gombeen man refuses accounts to everyone but the priest, magistrate, doctor and teacher. "What do you want to know how much you owe for? Unless you want to pay me all off?" When Paddy was seventeen he made a still bigger fight against debt. With the sons of other "tied" men, he went to work in the Scottish harvests. His family was not as badly off as those of some of the boys. Some had run so far behind that the gombeen man had served writs on them, obtained judgment against their holdings, and could evict them at pleasure. When Paddy married and settled down in Dungloe he found the reason for the unpayableness of the debt. One day he and his father shopped at the gombeen store together. They bought the same amount of meal. The father paid cash--seventeen shillings. Forty-four days later, Paddy brought his money. But the gombeen man presented him with a bill for twenty-one shillings and three pence. It did no good to say how much the father had paid for the same amount of meal. The gombeen man insisted that Paddy's father had given eighteen shillings, and Paddy was being charged just three shillings and three pence interest. Or only 144 per cent per annum! "Why do we buy from him? Why don't we get together and do our own buying?" asked the insurgent Paddy. After much reflection he had decided on the tactics of his campaign against poverty and the recruiting for his army commenced that night as the neighbors visited about his turf fire. There was doubt on the faces of those tied to the gombeen man. But Paddy continued: "Let's try it out in a small way, say with fertilizer. That stuff he's selling us isn't as good as kelp, and he won't tell us what it's made of."