The eagle-eyed man lifted a face, thin and sharp as though it had been carven on the wind, and he stared forward with an immobile intentness.
“What do you see?” said Fionn.
“Nothing,” the man replied.
“I will look myself,” said Fionn, and his great brow bent forward and gloomed afar.
The watcher stood beside, staring with his tense face and unwinking, lidless eye.
“What can you see, O Fionn?” said the watcher.
“I can see nothing,” said Fionn, and he projected again his grim, gaunt forehead. For it seemed as if the watcher stared with his whole face, aye, and with his hands; but Fionn brooded weightedly on distance with his puckered and crannied brow.
They looked again.
“What can you see?” said Fionn.
“I see nothing,” said the watcher.
“I do not know if I see or if I surmise, but something moves,” said Fionn. “There is a trample,” he said.
The watcher became then an eye, a rigidity, an intense out-thrusting and ransacking of thin-spun distance. At last he spoke.
“There is a dust,” he said.
And at that the champions gazed also, straining hungrily afar, until their eyes became filled with a blue darkness and they could no longer see even the things that were close to them.
“I,” cried Cona’n triumphantly, “I see a dust.”
“And I,” cried another.
“And I.”
“I see a man,” said the eagle-eyed watcher.
And again they stared, until their straining eyes grew dim with tears and winks, and they saw trees that stood up and sat down, and fields that wobbled and spun round and round in a giddily swirling world.
“There is a man,” Cona’n roared.
“A man there is,” cried another.
“And he is carrying a man on his back,” said the watcher.
“It is Cael of the Iron carrying the Carl on his back,” he groaned.
“The great pork!” a man gritted.
“The no-good!” sobbed another.
“The lean-hearted.”
“Thick-thighed.”
“Ramshackle.”
“Muddle-headed.”
“Hog!” screamed a champion.
And he beat his fists angrily against a tree.
But the eagle-eyed watcher watched until his eyes narrowed and became pin-points, and he ceased to be a man and became an optic.
“Wait,” he breathed, “wait until I screw into one other inch of sight.”
And they waited, looking no longer on that scarcely perceptible speck in the distance, but straining upon the eye of the watcher as though they would penetrate it and look through it.
“It is the Carl,” he said, “carrying something on his back, and behind him again there is a dust.”
“Are you sure?” said Fionn in a voice that rumbled and vibrated like thunder.
“It is the Carl,” said the watcher, “and the dust behind him is Cael of the Iron trying to catch him up.”
Then the Fianna gave a roar of exultation, and each man seized his neighbour and kissed him on both cheeks; and they gripped hands about Fionn, and they danced round and round in a great circle, roaring with laughter and relief, in the ecstasy which only comes where grisly fear has been and whence that bony jowl has taken itself away.
