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."

The recruits fell in. They scraped up enough money to buy a twenty-ton load
of rich manure from a neighboring co-operative society. The little deal