Free At Swim-two-birds by Flann O’Brien Page A

article in order to clean it in her spare time in bed (she was an industrious girl) or in order to play a joke. It is stated that the former explanation is the more likely of the two as there is no intercourse of a social character between the men and the scullery-maids. A number of minor clues have been found and an arrest is expected in the near future. Conclusion of excerpt.
    I’m not what you call fussy when it comes to women but damn it all I draw the line when it comes to carrying off a bunch of black niggers – human beings, you must remember – and a couple of thousand steers, by God. So when the moon had raised her lamp o’er the prairie grasses, out flies the bunch of us, Slug, Shorty and myself on a buckboard making like hell for Irishtown with our ears back and the butts of our six-guns streaming out behind us in the wind. (You were out to get your own ?) We were out to get our own. I tell you we were travelling in great style. Shorty drew out and gave the horses an unmerciful skelp across the where-you-know and away with us like the wind and us roaring and cursing out of us like men that were lit with whisky, our steel-studded holsters swaying at our hips and the sheep-fur on our leg-chaps lying down like corn before a spring-wind. Be damned to the lot of us, I roared, flaying the nags and bashing the buckboard across the prairie, passing out lorries and trams and sending poor so-and-so’s on bicycles scuttling down side-lanes with nothing showing but the whites of their eyes. (By God you were travelling all right.) Certainly, going like the hammers of hell. I smell cattle, says Slug and sure enough there was the ranch of Red Kiersay the length of a turkey trot ahead of us sitting on the moonlit prairie as peaceful as you please.
    Relevant excerpt from the Press
: The Circle N is reputed to be the most venerable of Dublin’s older ranches. The main building is a gothic structure of red sandstone timbered in the Elizabethan style and supported by Corinthian pillars at the posterior. Added as a lean-to at the south gable is the wooden bunk-house, one of the most up to date of its kind in the country. It contains three holster-racks, ten gas fires and a spacious dormitory fitted with an ingeniousapparatus worked by compressed air by which all verminous beds can be fumigated instantaneously by the mere pressing of a button, the operation occupying only the space of forty seconds. the old Dublin custom of utilizing imported negroid labour for operating the fine electrically equipped cooking-galley is still observed in this time-hallowed house. On the land adjacent, grazing is available for 10,000 steers and 2,000 horses, thanks to the public spirit of Mr William Tracy, the indefatigable novelist, who had 8,912 dangerous houses demolished in the environs of Irishtown and Sandymount to make the enterprise possible. Visitors can readily reach the ranch by taking the Number 3 tram. The exquisitely laid out gardens of the ranch are open for inspection on Thursdays and Fridays, the nominal admision fee of one and sixpence being devoted to the cause of the Jubilee Nurses’ Fund. Conclusion of excerpt.
    Down we got offa the buckboard to our hands and knees and up with us towards the doss-house on our bellies, our silver-mounted gun-butts jiggling at our hips, our eyes narrowed into slits and our jaws set and stern like be damned. (By God you weren’t a party to meet on a dark night.) don’t make a sound, says I
viva voce
to the boys, or it’s kiss my hand to taking these lousers by surprise. On we slithered with as much sound out of us as an eel in a barrel of tripes, right up to the bunkhouse on the flat of our three bellies. (don’t tell me you were seen ?) Go to hell but a lad pulls a gun on us from behind and tells us to get on our feet and no delay or monkey-work. Be damned but wasn’t it Red Kiersay himself, the so-and-so, standing there with an iron in each hand and a