When Bernard O’Mahony found himself outside the convent gateway, he
paused to consider matters.
The warm spring sunlight so broadly enveloped the square in which he
stood, the shining white cottages and gray old walls behind him and the
harbor and pale-blue placid bay beyond, in its grateful radiance, that
it was not in nature to think gloomy thoughts. And nothing in the young
man’s own nature tended that way, either.
Yet as he stopped short, looked about him, and even took off his hat
to the better ponder the situation, he saw that it was even more
complicated than he had thought. His plan of campaign had rested upon
two bold strategic actions. He had deemed them extremely smart, at the
time of their invention. Both had been put into execution, and, lo, the
state of affairs was worse than ever!
The problem had been to thwart and overturn O’Daly and to prevent
Kate from entering the convent. These two objects were so intimately
connected and dependent one upon the other, that it had been impossible
to separate them in procedure. He had caused O’Daly to be immured
in secrecy in the underground cell, the while he went off to secure
episcopal interference in the convent’s plans. His journey had been
crowned with entire success. It had involved a trip to Cashel, it
is true, but he had obtained an order forbidding the ladies of the
Hostage’s Tears to add to their numbers. Returning in triumph with this
invincible weapon, he discovered now that O’Daly’s disappearance had
been placarded all over Ireland as a murder, that his two allies were in
custody as suspected assassins, and that--most puzzling and disturbing
feature of it all--Kate herself had vanished.
He did not attach a moment’s credence to the drowning theory. Daughters
of the Coast of White Foam did not get drowned. Nor was it likely that
other harm had befallen a girl so capable, so selfreliant, so thoroughly
at home in all the districts roundabout. Obviously she was in hiding
somewhere in the neighborhood. The question was where to look for her.
Or, would it be better to take up the other branch of the problem first?
His perplexed gaze, roaming vaguely over the broad space, was all at
once arrested by a gleam of flashing light in motion. Concentrating his
attention, he saw that it came from the polished barrel of a rifle borne
on the arm of a constable at the corner of the square. He put on his
hat and walked briskly over to this corner. The constable had gone,
and Bernard followed him up the narrow, winding little street to the
barracks.
As he walked, he noted knots of villagers clustered about the cottage
doors, evidently discussing some topic of popular concern. In the
roadway before the barracks were drawn up two outside cars. A policeman
in uniform occupied the driver’s seat on each, and a half-dozen others
lounged about in the sunshine by the gate-posts, their rifles slung over
their backs and their round, visorless caps cocked aggressively over
their ears. These gentry bent upon him a general scowl as he walked past
them and into the barracks.
A dapper, dark-faced, exquisitely dressed young gentleman, wearing
slate-tinted gloves and with a flower in his button-hole, stood in the
hall-way--two burly constables assisting him meanwhile to get into a
light, silk-lined top-coat.
“Come, you fool! Hold the sleeve lower down, can’t you!” this young
gentleman cried, testily, as Bernard entered. The two constables divided
the epithet between them humbly, and perfected their task.
“I want to see the officer in charge here,” said Bernard, prepared by
this for discourtesy.
The young gentleman glanced him over, and on the instant altered his
demeanor.
“I am Major Snaffle, the resident magistrate,” he said, with great
politeness. “I’ve only a minute to spare--I’m driving over to Bantry
with some prisoners--but if you’ll come this way--” and without further
words, he led the other into a room off the hall, the door of which the
two constables rushed to obsequiously open.
“I dare say those are the prisoners I have come to talk about,” remarked
Bernard, when the door had closed behind them. He noted that this was
the first comfortably furnished room he had seen in Ireland, as he took
the seat indicated by the major’s gesture.
Major Snaffle lifted his brows slightly at this, and fastened his bright
brown eyes in a keen, searching glance upon Bernard’s face.
“Hm-m!” he said. “You are an American, I perceive.”
“Yes--my name’s O’Mahony. I come from Michigan.”
At sound of this Milesian cognomen, the glance of the stipendiary grew
keener still, if possible, and the corners of his carefully trimmed
little mustache were drawn sharply down. There was less politeness in
the manner and tone of his next inquiry.
“Well--what is your business? What do you want to say about them?”
“First of all,” said Bernard, “let’s be sure we’re talking about the
same people. You’ve got two men under arrest here--Jerry Higgins of this
place, and a cousin of his from--from Boston, I think it is.”
The major nodded, and kept his sharp gaze on the other’s countenance
unabated.
“What of that?” he asked, now almost brusquety.
“Well, I only drove in this morning--I’m in the mining business,
myself--but I understand they’ve been arrested for the m---- that is, on
account of the disappearance of old Mr. O’Daly.”
The resident magistrate did not assent by so much as a word. “Well?
What’s that to you?” he queried, coldly.
“It’s this much to me,” Bernard retorted, not with entire good-temper,
“that O’Daly isn’t dead at all.”
Major Snaffle’s eyebrows went up still further, with a little jerk. He
hesitated for a moment, then said: “I hope you know the importance of
what you are saying. We don’y like to be fooled with.”
“The fooling has been done by these who started the story that he was
murdered,” remarked Bernard.
“One must always be prepared for that--at some stage of a case--among
these Irish,” said the resident magistrate. “I’ve only been in Ireland
two years, but I know their lying tricks as well as if I’d been born
among them. Service in India helps one to understand all the inferior
races.”
“I haven’t been here even two months,” said the young man from Houghton
County, “but so far as I can figure it out, the Irishmen who do the
bulk of the lying wear uniforms and monkey-caps like paper-collar boxes
perched over one ear. The police, I mean.”
“We won’t discuss _that_,” put in the major, peremptorily. “Do you know
where O’Daly is?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” answered Bernard.
“Where?”
“You wouldn’t know if I told you, but I’ll take you to the place--that
is, if you’ll let me talk to your prisoners first.”
Major Snaffle turned the proposition over in his mind. “Take me to the
place,” he commented at last; “that means that you’ve got him hidden
somewhere, I assume.”
Bernard looked into the shrewd, twinkling eyes with a new respect.
“That’s about the size of,” he assented.
“Hra-m! Yes. That makes a new offense of it, with _you_ as an accessory,
I take it--or ought I to say principal?”
Bernard was not at all dismayed by this shift in the situation.
“Call it what you like,” he answered. “See here, major,” he went on,
in a burst of confidence, “this whole thing’s got nothing to do with
politics or the potato crop or anything else that need concern you. It’s
purely a private family matter. In a day or two, it’ll be in such shape
that I can tell you all about it. For that matter, I could now, only
it’s such a deuce of a long story.”
The major thought again.
“All right,” he said. “You can see the prisoners in my presence, and
then I’ll give you a chance to produce O’Daly. I ought to warn you,
though, that it may be all used against you, later on.”
“I’m not afraid of that,” replied Bernard.
A minute later, he was following the resident magistrate up a winding
flight of narrow stone stairs, none too clean. A constable, with a bunch
of keys jingling in his hand, preceded them, and, at the top, threw open
a heavy, iron-cased door. The solitary window of the room they entered
had been so blocked with thick bars of metal that very little light came
through. Bernard, with some difficulty, made out two figures lying in
one corner on a heap of straw and old cast-off clothing.
“Get up! Here’s some one to see you!” called out the major, in the
same tone he had used to the constables while they were helping on the
overcoat.
Bernard, as he heard it, felt himself newly informed as to the spirit
in which India was governed. Perhaps it was necessary there; but it made
him grind his teeth to think of its use in Ireland.
The two figures scrambled to their feet, and Bernard shook hands with
both.
“Egor, sir, you’re a sight for sore eyes!” exclaimed Jerry, effusively,
wringing the visitor’s fingers in his fat clasp. “Are ye come to take us
out?”
“Yes, that’ll be easy enough,” said Bernard. “You got my telegram all
right?”
Major Snaffle took his tablets from a pocket, and made a minute on them
unobserved.
“I did--I did,” said Jerry, buoyantly. Then with a changed expression
he added, whispering: “An’ that same played the divil intirely. ’T was
for that they arrested us.”
“Don’t whisper!” interposed the resident magistrate, curtly.
“Egor! I’ll say nothing at all,” said Jerry, who seemed now for the
first time to consider the presence of the official.
“Yes--don’t be afraid,” Bernard urged, reassuringly. “It’s all right
now. Tell me, is O’Daly in the place we know of?”
“He is, thin! Egor, unless he’d wings on him, and dug his way up through
the sayling, like a blessed bat.”
“Did he make much fuss?”
“He did not--lastewise we didn’t stop to hear, He came down wid us aisy
as you plaze, an’ I unlocked the dure. ’T is a foine room,’ says I.
‘’T is that,’ says he. ‘Here’s whishky,’ says I. ‘I’d be lookin’ for
that wherever you were,’ says he, ‘even to the bowels of the earth.’
‘An’ why not?’ says I. ‘What is it the priest read to us, that it makes
a man’s face to shine wid oil?’ ‘A grand scholar ye are, Jerry,’ says
he--”
“Cut it short, Jerry!” interposed Bernard. “The main thing is you left
him there all right?”
“Well, thin, we did, sir, an’ no mistake.”
“My plan is, major,”--Bernard turned to the resident magistrate--“to
take my friend here, Jerry Higgins, with us, to the place I’ve been
speaking of. We’ll leave the other man here, as the editors say in my
country, as a ‘guarantee of good faith.’ The only point is that we three
must go alone. It wouldn’t do to take any constables with us. In fact,
there’s a secret about it, and I wouldn’t feel justified in giving it
away even to you, if it didn’t seem necessary. We simply confide it to
you.”
“You can’t confide anything to me,” said the resident magistrate.
“Understand clearly that I shall hold myself free to use everything I
see and learn, if the interests of justice seem to demand it.”
“Yes, but that isn’t going to happen,” responded Bernard. “The interests
of justice are all the other way, as you’ll see, later on. What I mean
is, if the case isn’t taken into court at all--as it won’t be--we can
trust you not to speak about this place.”
“Oh--in my private capacity--that is a different matter.”
“And you won’t be afraid to go alone with us?--it isn’t far from here,
but, mind, it is downright lonesome.”
Major Snaffle covered the two men--the burly, stout Irishman and the
lithe, erect, close-knit young American--with a comprehensive glance.
The points of his mustache trembled momentarily upward in the beginning
of a smile. “No--not the least bit afraid,” the dapper little gentleman
replied.
The constables at the outer door stood with their big red hands to their
caps, and saw with amazement the major, Bernard and Jerry pass them and
the cars, and go down the street abreast. The villagers, gathered about
the shop and cottage doors, watched the progress of the trio with even
greater surprise. It seemed now, though, that nothing was too marvelous
to happen in Muirisc. Some of them knew that the man with the flower in
his coat was the stipendary magistrate from Bantry, and, by some obscure
connection, this came to be interpreted throughout the village as
meaning that the bodies of both O’Daly and Miss Kate had been found. The
stories which were born of this understanding flatly contradicted one
another at every point as they flew about, but they made a good enough
basis for the old women of the hamlet to start keening upon afresh.
The three men, pausing now and again to make sure they were not
followed, went at a sharp pace around through the churchyard to the door
of Jerry’s abode, and entered it. The key and the lantern were found
hanging upon their accustomed pegs. Jerry lighted the candle, pushed
back the bed, and led the descent of the narrow, musty stairs through
the darkness. The major came last of all.
“I’ve only been down here once myself,” Bernard explained to him, over
his shoulder, as they made their stumbling way downward. “It seems the
place was discovered by accident, in the old Fenian days. I suppose the
convent used it in old times--they say there was a skeleton of a monk
found in it.”
“Whisht, now!” whispered Jerry, as, having passed through the long, low
corridor leading from the staircase, he came to a halt at the doorway.
“Maybe we’ll surproise him.”
He unlocked the door and flung it open. No sound of life came from
within.
“Come along out ‘o that, Cormac!” called Jerry, into the mildewed
blackness.
There was no answer.
Bernard almost pushed Jerry forward into the chamber, and, taking the
lantern from him, held it aloft as he moved about. He peered under the
table; he opened the great muniment chest; he pulled back the curtains
to scrutinize the bed. There was no sign of O’Daly anywhere.
“Saints be wid us!” gasped Jerry, crossing himself, “the divil’s flown
away wid his own!”
Bernard, from staring in astonishment into his confederate’s fat face,
let his glance wander to the major. That official had stepped over the
threshold of the chamber, and stood at one side of the open door. He
held a revolver in his gloved, right hand.
“Gentlemen,” he said, in a perfectly calm voice, “my father served in
Ireland in Fenian times, and an American-Irishman caught him in a trap,
gagged him with gun-rags, and generally made a fool of him. Such things
do not happen twice in any intelligent family. You will therefore walk
through this door, arm in arm, handing me the lantern as you pass, and
you will then go up the stairs six paces ahead of me. If either of you
attempts to do anything else, I will shoot him down like a dog.”