was four old grey-haired women playing cards, but Winny herself was
not among them. Hanrahan sat down on a heap of turf beside the door,
for he was tired out and out, and had no wish for talking or for
card-playing, and his bones and his joints aching the way they were.
He could hear the four women talking as they played, and calling out
their hands. And it seemed to him that they were saying, like the
strange man in the barn long ago: 'Spades and Diamonds, Courage and
Power. Clubs and Hearts, Knowledge and Pleasure.' And he went on
saying those words over and over to himself; and whether or not he
was in his dreams, the pain that was in his shoulder never left him.
And after a while the four women in the cabin began to quarrel, and
each one to say the other had not played fair, and their voices grew
from loud to louder, and their screams and their curses, till at last
the whole air was filled with the noise of them around and above the
house, and Hanrahan, hearing it between sleep and waking, said: 'That
is the sound of the fighting between the friends and the ill-wishers
of a man that is near his death. And I wonder,' he said, 'who is the
man in this lonely place that is near his death.'

It seemed as if he had been asleep a long time, and he opened his
eyes, and the face he saw over him was the old wrinkled face of Winny
of the Cross Road. She was looking hard at him, as if to make sure he
was not dead, and she wiped away the blood that had grown dry on his
face with a wet cloth, and after a while she partly helped him and
partly lifted him into the cabin, and laid him down on what served
her for a bed. She gave him a couple of potatoes from a pot on the
fire, and, what served him better, a mug of spring water. He slept a
little now and again, and sometimes he heard her singing to herself
as she moved about the house, and so the night wore away. When the
sky began to brighten with the dawn he felt for the bag; where his