An Irish Country Doctor by Patrick Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

stretched straight ahead to the horizon. He wondered how many times his dad had driven him over this road after collecting him from or delivering him back to Campbell College. The road's tarmac surface followed the undulations of the hills on either side. This was drumhn country, the rounded mounds left behind by the last ice age. He knew that off to his right was one of the great neolithic hill forts, built thousands of years ago by the original Celtic inhabitants of this corner of Ireland. Dundonald, Irish for "Donal's fort," was a complex of earthen ramparts and burial mounds. And if O'Reilly didn't slow down--the car was rocketing over the contours like an out-of-control roller coaster--there might be a sudden need for two more graves.
    Barry took a deep breath and hoped that the queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach would pass. At least, he tried to comfort himself, they'd soon come to the end of The Straight, and O'Reilly would have to slow down.
    And he did, slightly. The car rocked as it headed into the next curve.
    "Exhilarating," remarked O'Reilly. "Bloody marvellous. I love that bit of road."
    "Poop, poop," Barry muttered under his breath, as he had a sudden vision of Mr. Toad of Toad Hall roaring through the English countryside, in a stolen car.
    "Not far now," said O'Reilly, turning into a lane. "Over the Ballybucklebo Hills and home." He glanced at his watch. "Ten minutes to the second half."
    He drove steadily, under elms with leaf-laden boughs that blocked the sun and gave the lane the sombre dignity of an old church, past drystone walls that bordered the lane and set the boundaries of little fields where sheep and cattle grazed and yellow flowered whin bushes stood bold against green grass. The car crested a rise. Below, Barry saw Ballybucklebo, where the edges of the village straggled up the hillside and the railway line--he would take the train to Belfast as soon as he was free--and the houses and terraces of the centre of the village clustered round the maypole. He noted the single traffic light and the road past it that O'Reilly said led to the seashore. Above the dunes and silver scutch grass, a flock of white birds wheeled and dipped, then flew out over the whitecapped waters of the lough.
    A single freighter butted through the chop, making its way to the port of Belfast, and past its bow he could make out the gantries of the Harland and Wolff shipyard. They stood proud against the backcloth of industrial haze that hung over the city and stained the sky as it drifted to the Knockagh Memorial obelisk, a granite finger on the crest of Cave Hill.
    He wound down his window and breathed the clean country air. 
    From overhead he heard a skylark, and from a field nearby the rattle of a corncrake; the classical music and the rock and roll of the bird world, he thought. The car passed the first outlying cottage.
    "Nearly home," said O'Reilly.
    "Home?" For you all right, Doctor O'Reilly, Barry thought, and yet will it be for me?
    O'Reilly stole a sideways glance at his passenger. "Aye," he said quietly, "it is. Just around this bend and past the light." He turned the corner onto Ballybucklebo's main street and braked behind a red tractor waiting for the light to change. Barry thought there was something familiar about the tractor's driver. He'd seen that angular form and shock of ginger hair somewhere.
    The light turned to green, and presumably to encourage the driver ahead, O'Reilly blew his horn. The tractor driver turned in his seat. Barry recognized the cyclist who had given directions at Six Road Ends and who, at the mention of Doctor O'Reilly, had fled. Now the bucktoothed youth stared through the car's windscreen, shuddered, turned back--and stalled the tractor's engine. The light flashed back to red.
    "Bugger it," said O'Reilly. "Get a move on."
    The tractor's starter made a nurgley-nurgley-nurgley sound, but the engine didn't catch.
    Green went the light.
    Nurgley-nurgley-phut went the